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In June 1998, the satellite communications company Iridium had launched nearly all of the 66 satellites that would support its new satellite phone and pager system. APL Digital, New York, had designed a website to be launched in tandem with the satellites. They asked us to translate the site to 12 languages - Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and Thai. All in three weeks!
As you can imagine, these languages present an array of technical difficulties that complicate their viewing on the Web. Simply translating the text was only part of the solution. The results had to be robust and visible to clients around the world on a range of computer platforms, operating systems and character sets.
We commissioned a market penetration study of Arabic browsers and recommended the implementation that would reach the highest percentage of the Arabic-reading audience.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean are double-byte character set languages which can be impossible to produce for the uninitiated. Our proprietary tools, built using Visual Basic and Microsoft Office, are fully double-byte compliant. We work with software engineers in each language to stay abreast of the latest developments in HTML coding and browser technology worldwide.
Thai is a new language to the Web and is poorly supported by browsers. We worked with our software engineers in Thailand to ensure that APL Digital's code wouldn't break when displaying Thai characters.
When we perform a translation at Weblations, we always implement three steps: translation, editing and proofreading. So in order to produce quality translations in 12 different languages, during the planning phase, we needed to build up a translation team of 2 to 3 people in each language that we can rely on and are familiar with a particular subject matter -- in this case, satellite telecommunications.
In situations like this, our 1,500-linguist database comes to the rescue. We contacted all the translators for the project and started to brief them hours after receiving the go-ahead from APL Digital.
Twelve sets of text and image files needed to be pre-processed in the shortest time possible using Weblations Cypher®. Some of the translators were using Weblations Workspace® for the first time. They found it very easy to use, saving us and them time in getting going.
Meanwhile, over a hundred images were translated, revised and sent to production artists around the world who had the correct native operating systems and applications to deal with languages from Arabic to Thai.
Iridium is now history -- a $5 billion technological marvel that failed as a business. Although the company and its satellites have fallen from orbit, we apply the lessons we learned from this early project every day.
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