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Q: Can you download my site with a robot for quoting purposes, or do I have to deliver it to you?
A:
Unless you have a simple site with no databases or server side interactivity, you'll need to deliver it to us. We need the files that sit on your server, not the files that your server delivers to a client browser. A robot is nothing more than an automated browser. We'll try our robots on your site. If they fail (they usually do), we'll ask you to have the site compressed and sent to us to a FTP password-protected drop box that we will set up for you. Your technical people will understand what we need. Please ask them to contact us directly to sort it all out.
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Q: What languages do you work in?
A:
We work in the following two-dozen languages: Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Chinese (S), Chinese (T), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai. Every project is handled by translators and editors whose mother tongue is the target language. If you have other needs, please ask us to form a project team to do the job.
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Q: Who does the translating?
A:
We maintain a database of 2,000 linguists classified by language pair, direction, subject matter, test results and their working history with us. Using the database and our "short list" of preferred linguists, we form translator-editor teams who have the right profile for each project's needs. The linguists are always native speakers of their target languages. They work with us over the Internet from their native countries. Alternatively, depending on the target language and your requirements, we sometimes work with a single language vendor in the target language country.
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Q: I already have a translation supplier. Why should I switch to you?
A:
We translate websites, and only websites. Our tools, by design, enforce a level of quality and efficiency that a generalist translation agency simply can't match. Weblations Cypher® and Workspace® are unrivaled in helping the translator to concentrate on linguistic issues while preserving the original web page as you designed it. You can focus on the creative and technical issues in your language while we handle the others.
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Q: Do you use software tools to assist in the translation?
A:
Yes, we develop and maintain Weblations Cypher® and Weblations Workspace® for use by our project managers and linguists respectively. Cypher is a data processing application which automates the pre- and post-processing of an entire site, extracts text from databases, generates concordances and bilingual glossaries, performs version control, translation memory, word counting, proposal bidding and much more.
Weblations Workspace is a Microsoft Word 2000® application for professional translators. Our linguists use it to translate in a plain text environment while previewing their work in a browser. We grant free licenses to our clients to use the Workspace so that they can review our work more efficiently, and ensure that client changes are implemented in the published website. Weblations develops these tools exclusively for website localization; as such are especially powerful and focused in their design.
On the other hand, we don't use machine translation (MT) software -- the type that performs entire translations without human intervention. The translations produced by these applications are so poor that most professional translators would rather start again than try to edit the results into an acceptable translation. (You can see an example of machine translation in our introductory
article). While not appropriate for high quality linguistic work, machine translations are sometimes the only cost effective solution for the gisting (rough translation) of customer support e-mail. We would be happy to recommend a specialist in machine translation if your project requires it.
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Q: Should my people do the graphics translations or should yours?
A:
Although we can work either way, we recommend that our production artists do the job and that we coordinate this critical aspect of the translation, leaving you with one point of contact for all issues: text, links, directory structure and graphics. If you can supply us with the native PSD or Illustrator files and fonts, we will generate perfect reproductions of your originals. In any case, if the target languages use non-Western fonts, your own artists are not likely to have the proper operating systems and application versions to do the job.
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Q: How high is the quality of your graphics translations?
A:
It's impeccable. We can prove it by doing a demo translation of one of your images. Also, you can see our graphics work at our
clients page, under the clients where the Graphics column is checked.
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Q: How do you acquire our site for translating?
A:
We will contact you to determine the best way to deliver the site. Normally, prospective clients compress and send their sites to us by FTP. If this isn't convenient, you can send us the site in a compressed format via e-mail.
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Q: How do you deliver the project?
A:
Before we deliver the site to you, we usually agree with you to post it to our password-protected staging server for quality control. This allows you to view the site in construction and perform a linguistic review before mounting it on your staging server. Next, we usually transfer the completed website to your server via e-mail or FTP. However, if your site interacts with a database, contains a proprietary scripting language, or any of a number of other complications, quality control will need to be performed from the outset on your staging server. Only there will its true functionality be able to be tested.
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Q: Where (on what server) should I mount the translated project?
A:
Wherever you want to. You may want to keep and maintain the translation on the same server as your original language. Alternatively, you may want to keep it on the server of a field office or distributor in that language's home market, or on the server of an Internet Service Provider in that market. The choice is up to you and depends on the quality of Internet infrastructure in each country, your technical resources and plans to exploit the marketing information that can be gleaned from server statistics.
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Q: Who are your clients: the corporate owners of the websites you localize, or the interactive agencies that often create the sites in the first place?
A:
Corporations who create or maintain their own webs can contract us directly. Yet many of our clients are among the world's top new media agencies, each of which may have several projects running with us concurrently. They create the editorial content in one language and we localize it to other languages. We're happy to work for either type of client!
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Q: Do you provide your services in partnership with interactive agencies?
A:
End clients who out-source website creation and maintenance to an interactive agency can ask their agency to use us as a localization specialist. Alternatively, interactive agencies can and do propose our services to their clients.
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Q: What does the directory structure of a multilingual site look like?
A:
On a typical multi-level site which branches out from one home page, we duplicate the entire site for each language and place that language's files in a subdirectory named for the language. The directory structure, file names and relative links for each target language are exactly the same as for the source language, except that the target language root directory is a sub-directory of the site's root directory. In this manner the links created by most relative addressing schemes do not need to be touched. Your home page needs to be slightly modified to show the links to other languages. Some popular solutions are to use text-based jumps, national flags or a drop-down text box. Feel free to visit our clients
page to see some representative solutions.
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Q: How do you handle CGI scripts, Java Servlets, ASP files, databases and the like?
A:
Weblations Cypher extracts text strings from Perl scripts and other CGI scripts semi-automatically -- as efficiently as the syntax for string variables permit.
Cypher handles ASP files and embedded VBScript, Java Script, Java applets (that receive text as a parameter), Java Servlets, native Cold Fusion and any number of proprietary syntaxes that our clients have employed.
To translate a database, we ask you to export the tables to be translated to a delimited text format. Cypher processes your tables and returns them in the target languages for you to import. If you are using Access, we can localize your data in its native format. After the initial translation, we consult with you to design an efficient procedure for receiving, translating and posting updates to your database on a regular basis.
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