Archive for July, 2010
Riding and Surviving Technological Waves – An Interview with Tex Texin
Tex Texin is an internationalization expert and consultant who provides business and software globalization services. He is a popular speaker at conferences around the world and is recognized as an industry thought leader as well as a noteworthy contributor to standards and open source products. Tex is the author behind the popular http://www.I18nGuy.com. He can be reached at his consulting company http://www.XenCraft.com.
I first met Tex Texin in a shuttle bus on the way to The World Expo in Shanghai. To be honest, I was at first a little intimidated by Tex—through no fault of his own. It wasn’t because of how he looked, per se, because he’s someone who’s quick to smile, eager to join into discussions, and who gives the all-around impression of a pretty genial guy.
Regardless of first impressions, Tex was quick to put me at ease one night as we sat down for an interview in an empty restaurant next to the so-called “German Bar” at our hotel. Our peers were in the German Bar having, erm, very important late-night business meetings (during which there wasn’t a mite bit of alcohol nor alcohol-induced shenanigans, I can assure you), when Tex and I sat down to talk shop.
ReviewIT: Revolutionizing the Translation and Transcreation Review Process at CSOFT
At CSOFT, we are well acquainted with two of biggest pain points in the translation process: local regional review and the final approval of translated documents. In a perfect world, third-party reviewers would be dedicated senior staff with strong technical skills who sit around waiting for translated material to judiciously proofread and validate. Ideally, these localization experts would have the appropriate domain knowledge and linguistic skills to suggest the right terminology and a style that best suits their local market.
The reality is, though, that the third-party review and validation process in our industry is broken. As facilitators, there are two scenarios that we regularly come across.
The Power of Language—Defining CSOFT
The theme of CSOFT’s 2010 Worldwide Summit was “The Power of Language”—something that, more than an amoebic catchphrase meant to imbue the event with meaning, really does have an application at our office and in the localization industry as a whole. But not in the way that you might think.
As a localization service provider, language is naturally something with which we are intimately involved. (Can I get a “Duh” here, please?) In the case of our Summit, however, the focus was not on translation, transcreation, nor on multilingual terminology management. These topics, though apropos, are entirely too symptomatic in their approach improving best practices in the localization industry.
More germane to our internal processes at CSOFT is the idea that language, as a powerful phenomenon, has an immeasurably huge effect on company culture, production behavior, and how we work together. Specifically, as we work in an industry with a heavy emphasis on project management, the ways in which we define our roles, communicate, delegate, and interact with both clients and internal staff alike can make or break the quality of a localization project.
To drive this message home in an ancillary manner, our sneaky President and CEO, Shunee Yee, hosted an art exhibit during CSOFT’s annual Friday Night Party, in which she portrayed through her own private collection of art the lasting effect that language has had on Chinese culture, art, and society as a whole.
Health and Wealth in the Office—Corporate Wellness at CSOFT
So we just got back from CSOFT’s annual Worldwide Operations Summit. A little bit of background for those who aren’t familiar with it: the Worldwide Ops is a yearly event in which CSOFT invites its extended team members from around the world—including translators, project managers, localization engineers, clients, and localization industry experts, etc.—to our China office for a week of seminars, training, presentations and team-building.
It’s a pretty cool event, one that we had originally hoped to blog about live. But when you’ve got an entire office full of coworkers and friends that you only get to see once a year, and when you’re in Shanghai at the World Expo, and when there’s booze, and when there’s both Germans and Brits in the same room as a television playing England VS Germany at the World Cup… well, you tend to forget about your computers (and work responsibilities) and… I hope my boss isn’t reading this.
So anyway, we’re back now. Our German team is happy that they won (though they didn’t so much as crack a smile), our British members are comforting themselves with tea and crumpets (or so I hear), and now it’s time to blog.
Terminology Management – Your Own Terms
Scroll down to check out the new, powerful approach to terminology management.
More information:
TermWiki is the localization industry’s first completely multilingual, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system that supports all popular internet browsers, including Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and others. From anywhere in the world, you can at last orchestrate complete uniformity of voice in every step of your global product development chain, breeding a new level of linguistic consistency across source documents and their translations.