Whenever possible, translators should be put in an environment where they can see what they are translating in context. Ideally, they should see the user interface displayed in real time and understand where the translated strings will go.
Layout Issues
Majority of the layout issues are truncations and are discovered only after the development team has integrated the localized strings in the GUI. Some of these issues are visible to the engineers and some can be spotted only by people who can read and understand the target language. The development and localization teams need to find a practical solution how to identify those strings that don’t fit and their location in the software files, and determine by how much they need to be reduced.
Mistranslations
Once all of the truncations have been fixed, the linguistic validation phase can start. Our experience has shown that, on the average, 20 to 30% of strings are mistranslated due to the lack of context (E.g. the French translation of the word “Print” can be “impression” or “imprimer”, depending on the context.).
The process to fix these issues can be very time consuming, hard to manage and may require additional funding.
Contact us to learn about the possible methods of introducing context during translation and how this applies to your concrete software localization projects.