It’s day two of Translation Review Week, where we plan to devote the next few days to talking about translation review and its documented correlation with migraines and road rage in the localization industry.  Get ready to talk geek, folks, ‘cause today’s entry is a good one.

Now, for those of you who just stopped by, the first entry in Translation Review Week dealt with knowing what you want. That is, it’s important to understand the types of documents you’re dealing with before translation and—more importantly—the purpose behind translating them. This information should in turn be used to inform your own requirements for translation review and overall linguistic QA. Based on what you understand of your own business and its translation objectives, you then need to interface with your language service provider and make sure that their review practices can assimilate your needs.

So yesterday, the emphasis was on identifying what you want. Today we’re going to talk about getting what you want by defining it for others. To wit, we’re going to talk about the kind of guidelines you should consider when defining the scope of, preparing for, and implementing your translation review process.

In keeping with our “tell your LSP to shut up and listen” philosophy (in business-ese, that’s “fostering a listening culture with your localization vendor”—but a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose), the following suggestions are best practices that we’ve gleaned from our experience as a leading language service provider, and by no means should they be taken as truisms that trump your internal processes and needs. They can, however, be used to complement the translation review requirements that you’ve already identified for yourself, regardless of whether you employ in-house, independent, or vendor-driven methods of review.

Welcome to Translation Review Week, where we plan to spend each day (except for Wacky Word Wednesday, of course!) dissecting and analyzing review practices in the localization industry, paying special attention to why translation review makes people want to cross their eyes and scream, and what we as a community—both translation buyers and providers alike—can do to fix it.

To begin, it’s important to note that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to translation QA. There are, however, a good many pitfalls that limit the success of the review process.

To limit your exposure to these pitfalls, it’s important for translation buyers to first identify why you’re performing reviews and, based on that information, determine what types of reviews you want, and then how and by whom they should be performed. In order to clearly understand the focus of in-house and/or third-party translation review, however, it’s necessary to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Issue Three of Your Own Terms, the biweekly comic about Sir Terminus: Crusader of Logic, Manly Valor, and Multilingual Terminology Management.

Click here to check out the last issue.

More information:

Open discussion channels between translators and reviewers are essential to the overall quality of your organization’s in-country and/or outsourced review cycle. Not only that, but a mechanism that promotes remote collaboration is essential to closing the gap between the different functional groups and employees around the world who are involved in the development of your glossary at the source.

TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, comes with embedded, term-specific discussion panels to help keep terminology- and translation-related disputes organized and relevant to the topic at hand. All authorized users can freely discuss their opinions and address term-specific concerns in a structured, completely traceable platform.

• Click here for more detailed information on TermWiki.
• Test drive TermWiki yourself at TermWiki.com.
• Find the right terminology management system for your organization.

If you want to stay up-to-date with Terminus’ misadventures in the office place, make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed!

Welcome to the first edition of Wacky Word Wednesdays, a weekly celebration of some of the most wacky and interesting words from around the world. If you love language, translation, or localization, then this is the place for you.

Today’s wacky word is: Schadenfreude.

The definition from Dictionary.com:

scha·den·freu·de [shahd-n-froi-duh] -noun satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune.

It comes from a combination of the German words for harm/damage (Schaden) and joy (Freude), and is often used as a loanword in English. Technically, schadenfreude should be capitalized like all German nouns, but when used in English it’s usually written in the lower case. As is the rule with most (but not all) loanwords in English, it should be italicized.

For your reference, here are two examples of schadenfreude used in a sentence:

• In a long-awaited moment of schadenfreude, Julie smiled as her ex-boyfriend slammed face-first into the sliding glass door.

• Jimmy could not help but feel a degree of schadenfreude when the jerk who nabbed his taxi got his foot ran over—twice.

The recent news of Steven Slater’s F-bomb-filled tirade, which ended with him quitting his job at JetBlue by hopping down the emergency slide with a beer in each fist, got me to thinking… what has happened to customer service in the US? Mr. Slater has become the poster boy for flight attendant rights. There’s talk of books, reality shows, speaking engagements, and personal appearances—all as a reward for acting like a chowderhead and breaking no small number of federal safety laws.

Granted, there is something to be said for the daily pangs of the underpaid, under-appreciated working class in America. It’s not easy out there, especially while we’re still crawling in the shadow of a global recession. But being nasty to each other isn’t going to improve the quality of anyone’s life, nor is it going to patch up the wounds of an already bleeding economy. Now, more than ever, companies should pay more attention to customer service to attract what money’s still being spent.

Guest blog entry by Elena McCoy, Executive Director of Communications at CSOFT

I would rather eat glass than see another “Back to School” ad. Why? Because at this very moment, I have no idea what “Back to School” will mean for my six-year-old.

While all the other parents are maniacally racing through Target fulfilling their school supplies list and fighting over the last pair of light-up Sketchers shoes for their own first grader, I sit on the sidelines with shocking envy that I am not able to partake in this dreaded annual ritual.

Why, you may ask? It seems that not all zip codes are created equal. That is, just because you live in a certain school’s area, it does not guarantee your child will attend that school.

It’s the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, folks, and that means it’s time for the Qixi (chee shee) festival here in China. “Qixi” literally means “The Seventh Evening” (some say “Night of Sevens,” but I don’t agree with that translation), a holiday a little bit like the Chinese version of Valentine’s Day in the west. Because it’s a Chinese holiday, though, it’s a lot more sweet and sour than its straight-out sweet American counterpart.

There are many different stories behind the origins of this holiday. Most explanations are pretty much the same, with the exception of a few minor details. In typical businessblog-like fashion, I’ll give you the story in a nutshell (brought to you in only 10 bullet points!).

Issue Two of Your Own Terms, the biweekly comic about Sir Terminus: Crusader of Logic, Manly Valor, and Multilingual Terminology Management.

To check out the last issue, click here. To check out the next issue… wait two weeks.

More information:

TermWiki is the localization industry’s first completely multilingual, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system. TermWiki’s advanced host of features is complete with definable data categories, allowing you to take precise control over the way in which your terms are organized.

In combination with TermWiki’s powerful, wiki-based data structure, the definable nature of its attributes and drop-down menus enables you to organize your terms in a way that specifically applies to your workflow. You can organize terms by industry, language, domain, product, product line, etc. There’s no limit.

Because of this, the granularity of TermWiki’s search filters is unseen among other enterprise-level terminology management systems. If, for example, you wanted to find the source terms not yet translated into Ancient Egyptian for version 5.0 of product ABC—and only wanted software-related terms to appear—TermWiki could proffer relevant search results in seconds.

• Find the right terminology management system for your organization.
• Click here to read “10 Good Reasons to Manage Your Terminology.”
• Check out more detailed information on TermWiki.

For as much emphasis as people put on the translation side of localization, it’s refreshing to come across some real-life examples of localization in the true sense of the word, where localized products aren’t just carbon copies of their source products, but truly redesigned and re-marketed for their target locales.

While I was sweating my [censored] off in Beijing’s subway the other day, I noticed a really cool shirt that only the nerdiest of localization nerds could appreciate. So I thought I’d share it with you ‘cause, hey… it’s localicious. (That’s right, I said “localicious.” It’s a new adjective that means awesomely localized. Use it, translate it. Make it viral, folks, ‘cause we need some more lively terms in this industry. In fact, I’m going to go add it to TermWiki right now.)

Anyway, before I talk about the T-shirt, you’re going to need some background information on Chinese eye exams. You’ve probably never even thought about this before—I know I didn’t until I lost a pair of glasses on an unruly jet-ski in Sanya—but eye charts in China don’t start with a giant capital E followed by a bunch of other letters in the Latin alphabet.

Just last Wednesday, we hosted a free webinar on terminology management entitled “Control Your Terminology—Control Your Costs,” in which CSOFT’s Chief Terminologist (who is the former Corporate Terminologist at Medtronic and a current member of the technical committee for terminology at ISO), Uwe Muegge, discussed ten basic reasons why terminology management is not only a necessary source-level quality assurance precaution, but also how, as a best practice, managing your terms at the source will save you a considerable amount of money on localization.

We’ve uploaded a replay of the webinar on Youtube, if you’re interested in checking it out. (It’s about 30 minutes long.)

In any case, at the end of the webinar, Uwe fielded some difficult questions from the audience. I thought they were interesting, so I went ahead and typed up a transcript of the questions and Uwe’s answers. Feel free to check them out below.