Impact of the tough economic times on the localization industry 

People have been asking me if worsening economy affects our business. Until recently I used to say no... In the last few months the amount of projects we had stayed the same if not got any higher. Our current clients, which in majority are language service providers, have quite optimistic goals for 2009 despite the fact that the rest of the word is worried about tightening pockets. We even entered into a few new bids for bigger localization projects... but at the end, all of them were put on hold due to uncertain market conditions. Translation and localization industry turned out not to be as recession proofed as I hoped for.

Why do I get garbage characters, boxes or question marks?

Part 1 - Introduction to character sets, glyphs, fonts and encoding

Character corruption or "garbage" characters are no doubt far from being fun. While character corruption was mostly a concern for the developers in the past, it became a common issue that anybody can face as Internet and computers became a part of our daily life. In these series, I will try to go over the most common corruption issues, reasons behind character corruption and how to avoid them. I will try to stay as far possible as I can from the technical jargon but will provide links to other resources for the ones who are interested in checking related content.

Localization 101

It may seem simple at the beginning but localization of your website may become overwhelming. You may have thought that all you needed to do was translating from English into the target language but it goes much beyond that. In addition to translators, you will need to have engineers and in some cases designers involve in the process. These tasks, however, can be simplified, if not avoided, in most cases if you plan ahead of time and develop for an international audience from the beginning.

Globalization Trends

Working 9-5 you tend to focus on individual tasks ignoring the generalities that exist within your field. Listening to John Yunker discuss web globalization trends in a recent webinar was a good reminder of what is occurring in the localization industry every day. Here are a few developments taking place within web globalization to improve business worldwide.

Internationalized Domain Names

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names denoted by local language characters. These domain names can use non-ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters such as Japanese or Arabic. Localized domain names were originally proposed in 1996 by Martin Dürst at the University of Zürich.

Localization QA Tester or Translator?

Can a translator do the job of a localization QA tester and vice versa? While there is no straight answer, you should definitely think twice before giving your translation project to a localization QA tester or asking your translator to do a quality check on a localized web site.

It is amazing how many people assume that if someone speaks a foreign language they can perform translation as well; it is equally common to assume that a translator is qualified to be a localization QA tester.