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There are also other considerations you need to ask the developers about things that may be hard coded in the software UI that need to not be. Best example is things like time and date settings - depending on the languages you are translating in to for specific countries, there are different preferences such as DD/MM/YYYY over USA English MM/DD/YYYY, 12 hour time vs. 24 hour time. You'll also have to be able to instruct the translators on how to handle these items for localization, if there are specific codes or elements they need to use and how they can or cannot be arranged, etc.
And also, if the entire team is new to translated UI, you may want to also ask about how things in the UI are designed for text that may be longer than what you have in English. We typically try to allow windows, fields and text areas to allow for 10% to 25% more text for some translated languages.
Start taking notes and writing everything down in to some sort of translation guide, just do you have all the information in one place. And start to stress to the upper powers in your organization that translation is not as simple as "we send it to a company, they do it, we pay them" and it may likely become a far bigger and more extensive process than you realize at the moment. If it's not, hey well great, but they should prepare that a lot of people from a lot of teams are going to have to devote some time to getting everything working, and unless you are a writer, engineer AND project manager you are not going to be able to do it all on your own - other people will need to play active roles.
- V
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Whatshisname
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 11:26 AM
To: techwrl <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject: Translation Software - pulling terms from software
Hi all,
I've recently been tasked with getting our UI translated into multiple languages. Does anyone have any recommendations for a tool to grab UI elements (Labels, hover text, etc.) from within the code to compile the translation list?
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