A Scholastic Website's localization for a US client

The client

The client is a major player in the globalization services sector, focusing on providing a comprehensive suite of integrated globalization services and solutions to customers.

What the client wanted

With Internet bringing companies access to foreign markets, a single website targeted to a certain language audience is no longer affordable. It is stringent for them to build website with local language and culture for the need of their target market. So did the client who required our developers to localize a whole scholastic website, including the localization of all the graphics, the html/xml/is files, and flash files with audio, text and graphics integration in multi-languages.

Approach

Shinetech's extension experience in this field enabled us to provide a total localization solution with minimal technical support from the client. We were required to localize the English website to Chinese, German, European French, Canadian French, LAS, Greek, Italian, Spanish etc.

The project comprised three key stages:

• Localization process is closely tied to base translation process but relates to graphics and other technical assets. As a scholastic website, some flashes were presented to show the school in a clear and intuitive way. These flashes brought many graphics and audio files which needed to be replaced with the new ones that are flawlessly harmonize with the target market's culture and custom.
• Subsequently came the phase to insert the integrated texts and graphics, audio files into flashes and adapt them to combination of XML, HTML, js and texts. Since defeats will not reveal until Flash invoke XML, It is unreasonable to test whether a flash is running well without combination with XML etc. To save future bug fixed time, our engineers made flashes elaborately to avoid bugs as few as possible.
• After the site had been localized, testing was conducted to ensure that the website performed as it was designed. Files, audios and texts were reviewed and functionality testing was completed to verify that the site worked properly to the target users. Then the version was returned to the engineers for revision.

Robust localization process is far from achieving a successful localization project. Management on localization resources revealed a more important factor: The website with tens of pages which need to be in harmony with various target markets in over 10 different languages presented a great deal of pages with different states. Shinetech integrated the website localization process with version control software to provide complete resources management and risk management and documentation production . This contributed a lot to guarantee a strong backing for the smooth localization process.

Result

Shinetech's localization solution presented smoothly running Websites in diversified style to harmonize with the local culture and obvious cost savings and reduced time to rollout were achieved.

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