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One problem there old chap. The EEC has declared that all works to be sold
in the EEC must support all the official EEC languages. Its gunna be a legal
nightmare for a while. You should definitely look at FIGS for European
saturation - French, Italian, Greek, Spanish.
What you need to do is to minimise your vocabulary, simplify your
constructions, and check all verbs are TIGHT and only have ONE meaning. Any
translation company, my favourite being www.ctc.com, can give you all the
advice you need.
You will also need a glossary of terms for specialist jargon for the
translaters to study to reduce transliterative errors. Std gotchas include
text in screen shots and metadata. Also, ensure your graphics and symbols
are truly international. I was almost going to use the Stop sign as my
octagon example, until I remembered that russia and a few other countries
use a round stop sign :-)
Steve Hudson , HDK List MVP
Principal Technical Writer
Wright Technologies Pty Ltd (Aus)
EyeSpring - the future of graphics has been created.
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Shepard
The "gerund phrase" thread has led me to ask about localization issues in
general. We have developed a version of our core software for use in Europe.
The project manager says we are not going to have the localize, but I am
sure he is in denial. It's going to have to happen if we are serious about
the European market.
Of course, this means I have the task of researching what it's going to take
to localize our docs. I am not sure where to start. Anyone know of any good
resources on the subject? Books, websites, etc. Anyone know of any
consultants or companies that localize docs that you could recommend? Any
other suggestions, hints, tips, warnings, cautions, or pointers in the right
direction would be helpful.
I am particularly interested in anything that would help me estimate the
cost of translation. Even just rough ballpark figures for page or word
counts. I don't think anyone in my company has any idea what this is going
to cost and I would like to make upper management aware of this before we
get to far into the process.
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