Globalization for IBM Watson Analytics
Watson Analytics was made available in Spanish as the second language. I worked with developers and project managers for planning the translation process and successful translation. The goal of this project was to enable all the languages that IBM has to offer, with Spanish being the stepping stone.
So, where did I start?
I looked into the different types of translating methods and purposes. From my research, there are internationalization [i18n], localization [l10n], and globalization [g11n].
Internationalization
It is "the process of designing that can potentially be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes.
It is the design and development of a product, application or document content that enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language".
Localization
It is "the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text. Localization (which is potentially performed multiple times, for different locales) uses the infrastructure or flexibility provided by internationalization".
Globalization
It is "the adaptation of international products around the particularities of a local culture in which they are sold. The process allows integration of local markets into world markets". So in summary.. it is both internationalization AND localization.
Knowing the differences led me to distinguishing the intent of each translation process, and how it applied to the given problem. We laid out what we knew about the foundation, formatting, UI, translation process and future phases to discuss any assumptions and questions.
Questions and Assumptions
What needed to be translated?
Prioritized on the experiences based on high importance to high feasibility for goal alignment
1. Numeric (separators), date and time formats
1,000,000 / 1 000 000 / 1.000.000 etc.
Sunday - Saturday vs Monday - Sunday
MM/DD/YYYY vs DD/MM/YYYY
2. Use of currency
Dollar / Euro / Pound / Yen etc.
3. Localizing keyboard commands
Different locales may use different shortcuts to the keyboard
4. Collation and sorting
English: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Danish: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z æ ø å
5. It can entail customization related to:
Symbols, icons and colours
ex. Red text could mean “warning” in the Western world vs. is a traditionally symbolic colour of happiness in China.Icons are incredibly hard to understand because they’re so open to interpretation.
Text and graphics containing references to objects, actions or ideas which, in a given culture, may be subject to misinterpretation or viewed as insensitive.
So..Where does design come in?
Different languages will affect the UI differently, depending on the width of the word. The following table provides a good indication of the amount of additional space needed to contain a text passage after translation.[http://www.globalization-group.com]
Other considerations
1. Bidirectional support: written from right to left
Bidirectional scripts are used in languages spoken by more than half a billion people in the Middle East, Central and South Asia and in Africa.
2. Bidirectional languages include:
Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Azerbaijani, Urdu, Punjabi (in Pakistan), Pushto, Dari, Uigur, Hebrew, and Yiddish.
This is an example of a mirrored bidirectional website for United Nations.
For LTR languages, the most important information is usually placed in the upper-left and the least important in the lower right. This is because the eye begins scanning in the upper left and will therefore see that information first.
So if the same content were to be localized for Middle Eastern markets, they should be mirror imaged, so the information on the left should be swapped to the right and vice versa.
UI sweep & pseudo-translation
UI sweep was the process that was done across the product as a whole. The purpose of this task was to identify areas in the content that may need appropriate UI adjustments.
Once pseudo translation was implemented, the next step was to identify any areas that consisted incorrect wrapping or overflow. Gathering this enabled me to make appropriate design input and suggestions to development.
