Localisation with non-experts: Poedit? Pitfalls?
Thread poster: TechStyle
TechStyle
TechStyle  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:35
Sep 4, 2015

I was asked recently about translating some of my company's software (currently English only) into other languages, so I'm hoping this will be a good place to get information.

We have native speakers of each of the target languages (Arabic, Croatian, Greek and Italian) more or less in-house, with experience in the field in question, so they should know all the relevant terminology in both that language and English. So, the actual language side should be quite simple: they are all fl
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I was asked recently about translating some of my company's software (currently English only) into other languages, so I'm hoping this will be a good place to get information.

We have native speakers of each of the target languages (Arabic, Croatian, Greek and Italian) more or less in-house, with experience in the field in question, so they should know all the relevant terminology in both that language and English. So, the actual language side should be quite simple: they are all fluently bilingual, though not professional translators.

I see the Basic version of Poedit is free and cross-platform, which seems like a good start - how easy and robust is it to use, and what's the learning curve like for new users? Could you give your bilingual but non-computer-expert granny a .pot file and a copy of Poedit and expect a working .po file from it, or would she struggle? Is there a better tool for the job, or perhaps a system better than gettext's .po files?

(One pitfall that just came to mind is the keyboard: I have an Italian layout keyboard, but I'm not sure if we have an Arabic one handy. I can probably get hold of one easily enough, but what else might I need to check out?)
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Arek Luczyk
Arek Luczyk
Poland
Local time: 13:35
English to Polish
+ ...
More than translation Sep 4, 2015

As someone who's worked in the software localization field I'd like to point out that translation forms only a part of the whole localization process. Depending on the type of software you also have to localize the units, the number, currency and date formats, user guides / manuals, make sure all the graphics / symbols / legal info etc. is appropriate for the target geography, plan for possible string length changes, prepare test scripts, and then compile and test the localized versions. If your... See more
As someone who's worked in the software localization field I'd like to point out that translation forms only a part of the whole localization process. Depending on the type of software you also have to localize the units, the number, currency and date formats, user guides / manuals, make sure all the graphics / symbols / legal info etc. is appropriate for the target geography, plan for possible string length changes, prepare test scripts, and then compile and test the localized versions. If your company has no localization expertize, I would advise to outsource it to an LSP and provide them with the translation, thus saving on the overall cost (just make sure you extract and translate all the localizable content).Collapse


 


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Localisation with non-experts: Poedit? Pitfalls?






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