Welcome to Knowledge Bits

I'm Robert Hopkins, the president of Weblations. Since early 1996, when I founded Weblations in Barcelona, my colleagues and I have been translating and localizing websites -- some 600 projects in all. We've learned a lot over the years, and developed some opinions as well. In this blog, we'll share some of the knowledge bits that we've picked up over the years. If you are running your own translation project, we hope that they make your life easier. If you're looking for an agency to outsource your project to, this blog will give you an insider's look at the issues we face on a daily basis, and hence the kind of skills you should look for.

To translate a website, you and your team need to know about culture and languages, copy writing, the technologies used by the website that you are translating, graphic design and the tools that you use to do your work. In our case, when we started the company, there were no adequate tools to assist a professional, high volume website translation team, so we decided to develop our own. Fortunately, the Web wasn't very complicated back then, and we were able to put something together in relatively short order. Since then, as the Web has enriched, we have enriched our two core applications, Weblations Cypher and the Weblations Workspace. You'll hear a lot about them in this blog, I bet, since developing them takes up a big part of my working day.

I didn't really start this blog on New Year's Day, but I will pretend I did to give me some breathing room and to remind me that this is a New Year's resolution to be honored.

Enough of introductions...on to the blog!