Silicon Valley Conference Focuses on Yin and Yang of I18n and L10n

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Global Watchtower

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Posted by Rebecca Ray on March 19, 2012 in the following blogs: Technology, Translation and Localization, Best Practices
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More than 150 engineers, product managers, and content creators gathered in Silicon Valley this week for the Internationalization and Localization Conference to hear lessons learned from companies like Adobe, Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, LinkedIn, Rearden Commerce, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga. Several companies relatively new to the internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) scene made for lively conversations and critical examination of current solutions for recruiting executive sponsors, ROI, setting up teams and centers of excellence, scorecards, and keeping globalization strategies on-track for enterprise software, mobile, and social media and games.

The event was organized by Lingoport and underwritten by several sponsors and exhibitors: Acrolinx, Alchemy, Cloudwords, e2f translations, Jonckers, Moravia, Rearden Commerce, and VistaTEC. Here are some of our takeaways from this jam-packed, one-day event which focused on the yin and yang of internationalization and localization:

Twitter demonstrates that engaging the translation crowd is just the beginning of its global journey. With 77% of its traffic now originating in non-English locales, 28 officially released languages under their belt through crowdsourced translation, and 500,000 contributors to their Translation Center, the eight-member team attending from Twitter shared how it is scaling to stay ahead on its mission to serve as many linguistic communities as possible. Initiatives include their new right-to-left releases in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu; an open-source translation memory tool based on Lucene; machine translation for Arabic tweets; a reputation system for contributors; and a program for contributors to become more proficient.

ROI: don't be a wimp! Attendees were reminded that their teams are huge contributors to half or more of their companies' overall revenue, so they have a right to data needed to build their cases for return on investment (ROI). That being said, it is harder to collect some types of data than others, so they should focus on data that matches the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most important to their executives, and cast the discussion as one of revenue enablement supported by investment, rather than by cost savings.

Attract and hold developers' attention through scorecards and metrics. Engineers are attracted by interesting problems that they like to solve and are often very competitive when measured. Therefore, they are often willing to collaborate with localization teams to build dashboards and scorecards to monitor their own performance for internationalization compliance and bug fixing. Adobe, Autodesk, and Yahoo have been sharing their metrics, dashboards, and scorecards over the last year. During the conference, they shared a very detailed template that can be downloaded for free at http://goo.gl/eigIb by other companies that want to get a head-start in this area.

Software developers – for desktop, web, or mobile – that are used with languages other than English, should be aware of Lingoport's upcoming release. The conference was preceded by a day of internationalization training provided by Lingoport. The company also conducted a demo of an upcoming major release of Globalyzer, which enables world-ready source code. The new version will allow Eclipse developers to install the product as a plug-in. This means that they will no longer have to rely on their localization teams to understand how to be internationalization-compliant. They will be able to pinpoint in real time exactly what line of code is causing headaches for localizers and then fix it.

Expect next year's incarnation of the event to be bigger, as news of this year's event spreads by word of mouth among engineering teams in the Valley. As more and more long-tail languages gain "short-tail" status, even developers at small- and mid-sized companies know that it may be a question of "when" they support right-to-left, for example, rather than "if." Conferences like this one go a long way toward making the execution of internationalization decisions much smoother for inexperienced engineering teams and product managers.

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