QualityHU

While preserving the necessary anonymity, please share the dysfunction you encountered. What were the difficulties and how did they impact the team? This situation happened a few years ago. I was part of a team working on some high-profile projects for a Fortune 100 company through an LSP. The LSP's leadership - somewhat inexperienced and young - wanted to create high-functioning teams based on languages where team members help each other. The projects were assessed individually but the team’s collective quality score decided how well the LSP performed.  How did you or your team leader (or anyone else in the team, for that matter) try to address the problem? What strategy(ies) did you or they use? The problem is that while they had a theoretical idea about creating a positive team, they did not have any strategy in hand. Naturally, the team started out positively but after a while because of miscommunication, misunderstandings, lack of instructions, and training fear started to cre...

    Designing for i18n and Culture - Books on Design By Annamaria Szvoboda, 2021 Books: #1: Susan M. Weinschenk: 100 Thing Every Designer Needs To Know About People #2: Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things #3: Don Norman: Emotional Design View Points I read and reviewed the above-mentioned books following these guidelines while working on the presentation: A brief summary of the main points in each book. How are the books similar? Where do they diverge? How can I apply the concepts in these books to my professional life, specifically in localization and internationalization? What concepts were new? What did I learn from each of the books and how will that help you moving forward? Were there any concepts or ideas that I disagreed with or that did not resonate with me? Overview of book #1 Today most people use digital interfaces on a daily basis. This book focuses on the creation of an intuitive interface design with the help of neuroscience discoveries. The way human being...

  Managing Stakeholders Have you ever heard the phrase “the stakes are high"? When we talk about “stakes,” we are referring to the important parts of a business, situation, or project that might be at risk if something goes wrong. To hold a stake in a business, situation, or project means you are invested in its success. Every successful team needs strong leadership and membership and program managers need to be able to manage stakeholders successfully as project managers need to deal with the specific tasks and activities of the project itself. Technical problems are not hard, people are hard and it’s inevitable that we run into a situation when we need to deal with difficult stakeholders. Let’s review quickly the steps for managing stakeholders: Steps for Managing Stakeholders Step 1: Identifying and analyzing stakeholders which is the process of identifying and analyzing the people, teams, or organizations that could impact or be impacted by a decision, activity, or outcome of ...

Quality, Cost, Time dilemma in Localization Translation projects  have to meet three main requirements as defined in the ‘iron triangle’ invented by Dr. Martin Barnes in the 1970s: quality, time, and cost. One side of the triangle cannot be changed without affecting the other two. According to this theory, translation projects appear to be locked in an impossible equation where the ideal process that is quick, well done, and cheap can never be achieved. According to this idea, projects can be: Fast and cheap  = this results in poor quality. This is what most clients are asking for, without taking into consideration that reducing the amount of time spent on a project will most probably cause issues. Fast and high quality  = expensive. You will need a bigger team, which will cost you more in terms of human resources and organization. High quality and cheap  = slow. In order to save money, the translation agency will choose beginners and give them extra time, and t...

When we think of terminology management in the translation and localization lifecycle, we often think of adding a new or unknown concept into an Excel spreadsheet and maybe translating it into another language. That's actually a very simplified way of looking at terminology management and the real work is much more complex than this. The image shows a simple example of a workflow of a translation project which includes terminology management. The translation and revision steps were simplified merely to emphasize what it takes for a terminologist to finish a lifecycle of adding one single term into the termbase. Terminology as a discipline stretches back to the 18th century and identifies Carl von Linné as the founder of terminology organization, standardization, and planning. According to ISO, terminology is associated with particular areas of specialist knowledge. In terminology, we are not dealing with everyday worlds, with general language. But what we do we do with terms then t...

  What is a TMS? When a business needs to translate a high volume of assets to many different languages and regional dialects, the project becomes complex very quickly. Translation management systems help organize assets and provide collaboration tools for all parties. Beyond just issuing simple translations for text, translation management software includes features to maintain brand vision and identity by making sure content is contextualized. Much of the translation that’s performed with translation management software is done so automatically, and then reviewed and revised by native speakers. For small, occasional projects using emails and Excel sheets probably will do the job. But when the scale of your project outgrows the spreadsheet method, it’s time to consider a software. The TMS marketplace is huge. It's not easy to decide which system we should choose. Let's consider our needs first: And break it down into steps: Side by Side Comparison: Smartcat vs. WordBee Smartca...

  I grouped together with 3 other translators to simulate a Trados delivery project from beginning to end to learn about Trados's challenges and setbacks in more depth. The project included creating a SOW/work proposal based on CAT tool analysis, pseudo-translation, establishing a Style Guide, a glossary, and TMs, delivering the final language packages, and recording a video on lessons learned. Follow along with our experiences of the creation of a Trados delivery project for localizing a short text from the website "Bike Inside" divided into 4 languages. The translation process simulates the experience of translating in a small, in-house translation team or in a small group of associated freelancers. Introduction WHAT IS TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY? Translation Technology refers to technologies that are important in management, engineering, and linguistic roles in translation and localization, including various tools that aid the process of translation and editing workflows. ...