How many companies actually track development costs for internationalization?

When building global-ready software, there are remarkable opportunities to gain efficiencies during product development, refactoring and maintenance. Localization has traditionally focused on reducing the costs for translating words yet beholden to developers for fixing localization issues in source code as an ad hoc or separate iterative process. We’ve been talking about how there’s much to gain from streamlining internationalization (i18n), calling it “shifting left” – as in shifting focus earlier in product development. That said, the proof is in the numbers – real case study numbers.

Because Lingoport provides extensive internationalization services as well as enterprise internationalization software, we’re in a fairly unique position to specify, measure and analyze development issues and collaborate with customers on the results. We compiled data from 20 implementation projects comprising a wide variety of programming languages and product domains. We broke that data down by type and average bug density (i18n issues per lines of code) and considered issues like stages in the product development process, technical debt, ongoing development, testing cycles and more.

Internationalization and Return On Investment

To our knowledge, there has not been a study of historical data and a corresponding system that lets managers see why internationalization is often late and difficult to deliver. There are good project management studies on costs of coding issues at various times during the product cycle, but we couldn’t find anything specific to i18n and localization that was data and cost driven.

As a manager and stakeholder, you’ve got to justify and prove that improvements are worthwhile – even if they seem obvious to you. Organizational process change often requires the ability to demonstrate cost and productivity benefits.

We presented our findings in a webinar on June 5^th. You can register to watch the recording here: http://www.lingoport.com/events/internationalization-cost-study/

The training only has a few spots left, so sign up soon to guarantee your spot! There’s also a combined discount when you register for both the training and the conference together.

What will I learn?

Training attendees are taught i18n practices and given hands-on code examples & exercises for each of the following:

• Date/Time formats, Calendars, Time Zones, Currencies & Locale Strategies
• String handling, writing systems & encoding
• Bidirectional languages and pseudo-localization
• Morroring, text sizes & pseudo-localization
• Detection and resolution of i18n issues within specific code examples

Who is teaching the class?

Lingoport’s Globalization Lead, Olivier Libouban will instruct the class. Olivier has conducted many on-site training sessions with Lingoport customers and is a sought after internationalization presenter and teacher.

Who should attend?

Those with basic to advanced software development knowledge and those eager to learn best practices of internationalization to better their localization and globalization processes.

*Attendees are required to bring their own laptop with Java 1.5 or higher and their own development environment installed on it. Instructions will be provided prior to the class.

What Should I Expect?

Last year’s attendees came from Twitter, Zynga, Microsoft, NetApp, PayPal and Nook. We received an overwhelming positive response from last year’s training:

“Very engaging and knowledgeable”

“I wanted to hear the opinions and tips of someone who really works in i18n” 

“[I was] exposed to the deep technical process for internationalization of the code.”

“Great training class for becoming aware of i18n issues and how to avoid them.”

This year’s attendees are from world-renowned technology companies as well. You’ll be in good company.

How do I sign up?

Sign up through our RegOnline portal and see the detailed curriculum on the i18n & L10n Conference page.

Registration is $750 for the training, and $800 if you are planning on attending the conference the following day. We only have a few spots left, so sign up today!

We hope to see you there!

What’s Happening at the i18n & L10n Conference?

For the second consecutive year, Lingoport will host the Internationalization and Localization Conference at Techmart in Santa Clara, California.

Register now for $169 before our early-registration deal runs out this Friday (conference price will increase to $199; i18n Training price will increase to $750). Our popular i18n Training is being offered once again, and we only have a handful of spots left.

Pre-Conference Internationalization Training

We are proud to offer our internationalization training the day before the main conference, March 13th. Training will be led by Lingoport’s globalization lead Olivier Libouban, and will cover a number of concepts, including:

• Date/Time formats, Calendars, Time Zones, Currencies & Locale Strategies
• Writing systems & encoding
• Bidirectional languages and pseudo-localization
• Detection and resolution of i18n issues within specific code examples

View the full training agenda and sign up here.

Internationalization and Localization Conference

The main conference will take place on Thursday, March 14th and focus on “bridging the gap between software development and localization.” Like last year’s conference, this year’s event will provide a great opportunity to network and meet globalization professionals. Presenters are industry thought leaders from companies like Intel, Cloudwords, Marin Software, Adobe, Wikimedia Foundation, Elsevier (LexisNexis), Acclaro, Zynga, Smartling, HotelTonight, and SimulTrans.
The full agenda is now available and includes the following presentations:

• Squashing the Top-10 Most Common World-Readiness Bugs
• How Central Visibility of Translation Metrics and Process Changes an Organization
• Case Studies: L10n at Marin Software & Adobe
• Volunteer Localization at Wikimedia Foundation
• Demo Derby
• An Adventure in Internationalization
• 7 Tips for Successful Localization with Agile Development
• How to Drive Efficient Customized Localization with Agility and Intelligence
• Going Global in the Age of Agile Technology
• i18n QA Panel
• Seven Tips to Maximize the Value of your Translation Memory Assets
• Bridging the Gap Between Software Development & Localization Panel

Early registration pricing ends February 22nd; sign up now! Follow hashtag #2013i18n for updates before the conference.

Lastly, a big thank you to our sponsors Cloudwords (Platinum), Moravia (Gold), Smartling (Gold), Simultrans (Bronze) and Acclaro (Bronze) for making this event possible this year

Hope to see you there!

Early-bird registration prices end Friday, February 22nd, so register now!

First, some General Information:

Date: March 13-14, 2013
Location: Techmart Meeting Center, Santa Clara, CA
Training: Internationalization training will be held before the conference (see curriculum).
Hashtag: Stay up to date with #2013i18n

Session B2: Volunteer Localization at Wikimedia Foundation

Siebrand Mazeland of Wikimedia Foundation joins us to describe how crowd sourced internationalization and localization efforts work for websites in over 280 languages, including Wikipedia. Mazeland and his team have been working to bridge the gap between software development and localization as an open source translation community since 2005 and have helped assimilate the Wikipedia movement into new languages.

Follow @translatewiki, and learn more at the Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

Session A4: i18n Case Study: an Adventure in Internationalization

Internationalizing a decade’s worth of code enhancements for a high volume web application? Sounds like an adventure! Becca Gronau of Elsevier will give the developer’s perspective of what it’s like to internationalize an application from start to finish. After joining Elsivier in 2003, Gronau honed in a specialty in multi-tier web development and acted as lead architect for internationalizing a large, industry leading, web application.

For more on this presentation and Becca Gronau, visit the Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

Session A6: i18n QA Panel

Learn what it means to be truly internationalization compliant from experts Tex Texin, Kent Grave and Paul-Henri Arnaud.

Texin has been a part of numerous i18n teams, guiding companies into taking business in new markets, and is an advocate for i18n standards across the web.

Grave has worked with globalized software for over 20 years, managing large scale projects across Europe, Asia and the U.S. for the likes of IBM, Siebel Systems, Microsoft and Cisco. His work stems from a consistent internationalization strategy and stresses best-practices as the backbone of high-quality localization.

Arnaud is a senior process analyst on the localization engineering team at Autodesk. His specialties lay in testing globalized products to be used by millions of design professionals worldwide.

Early-bird registration for the conference ends on Friday, and we are expected to sell out! Register at http://www.regonline.com/2013-internationalization-localization-conference

Join us on Wednesday, February 20th at 11am MST (GMT -7) for an informative webinar detailing the solutions VMware and Lingoport developed to bring VMware’s Partner Portal to life for its global contingent of users.

Webinar attendees will learn:

• Building business and executive support as well as measuring impact of globalization on goals.
• Challenges and specific solutions to internationalization challenges of a web-based portal.
• Solutions to remedy technical dependencies with Salesforce.com, content management systems and translation management systems.
• Program Management support and practices for successful delivery across cross-functional teams.

Register at http://www.lingoport.com/webinars/vmware-lingoport-collaboration-globalization-partner-central/

First, some General Information:

Date: March 13-14, 2013
Location: Techmart Meeting Center, Santa Clara, CA
Training: Internationalization training will be held before the conference (see curriculum).
Hashtag: Stay up to date with #2013i18n

Session B4: Sprinting to the Finish: Seven Tips for Successful Localization with Agile Development

Emma Young of Acclaro shares how to successfully integrate localization into an already rapid process of Agile development. Young, the U.S. West Coast Operations Director for Acclaro will share seven practical tips learned from her 15 years of localization experience.

For more on this presentation and Emma Young, visit the official Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

Session B5: Going Global in the Age of Agile Translation: Smartling Accelerates HotelTonight

Andrey Askelrod of Smartling is joined by Russ Taga of HotelTonight to discuss how the two companies collaborated to bring HotelTonight’s app to French, German and Spanish markets through an Agile translation management system. Askelrod, the CTO at Smartling comes from a background of maintaining eCommerce platforms in a number of languages. Taga, the VP of Engineering at HotelTonight, a mobile-only start-up focused on finding last-minute hotel deals.

For an outline on this presentation, read Russ Taga’s blog post on internationalization and localization planning, tools and process: http://engineering.hoteltonight.com/internationalization-and-localization-plannin

For more on this presentation and the presenters, visit the official Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

B6: Seven Tips to Maximize the Value of your Translation Memory Assets through a Transition

Join Adam Jones of SimulTrans as he presents how companies may push through the move to Agile, and leverage the value of translation memory assets. As COO, Jones oversees SimulTrans’ worldwide operations, including project management, translation, engineering, testing, multilingual publishing and marketing.

For more on this presentation and Adam Jones, visit the official Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

Early-bird registration for the conference ends soon, and we are expected to sell out! Register at http://www.regonline.com/2013-internationalization-localization-conference

First, some General Information:

Date: March 13-14, 2013
Location: Techmart Meeting Center, Santa Clara, CA
Training:Internationalization training will be held before the conference (see curriculum).

Session A1: Squashing the Top-10 Most Common World Readiness Bugs

Michael Kuperstein from Intel leads us off with a presentation that “will explore how and why internationalization methods can be used to squash the top-10 most common world-readiness failures.” A localization veteran, Kuperstein has been instrumental in creating a partnership between Intel’s in-house localization group and the Intel business units. At last year’s conference, Kuperstein presented as part of the Integrating Internationalization with Localization panel and presented on Building an i18n Department. Both presentations are accessible from the 2012 Conference Video Library.

For more on this presentation and Michael Kuperstein, visit the official Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

Session A2: Case Studies: L10n/i18n at Marin Software & Adobe

Knut Grossman of Marin Software and Manish Kanwal of Adobe join forces  to discuss how their product development teams deal with the ongoing push and pull between L10n and i18n. Grossman has worked in most every aspect of localization: audio, video, documentation, animation, art, web content, & software, and now works with Marin Software to follow their principal “any user must be able to login and work in any country from any platform in any language and process data created in any locale setting.” Kanwal is a program manager with Adobe and noted presenter and author of many Project Management Best Practices at GALA.

For more on this presentation, visit the official Internationalization and Localization Conference page.

Session A/B3: Demo Derby

This is not your typical product demonstration. Presenters are capped at a maximum of ten minutes to demonstrate their technologies before they are rudely cut off to make time for Q&A. If you like to watch your presenters sweat, this is the place. Below is the Demo Derby from last year’s conference:

Early-bird registration for the conference ends next week, and we are expected to sell out! Register at http://www.regonline.com/2013-internationalization-localization-conference

There is tangible value in being able to confirm global readiness of product releases. At Lingoport, we often see i18n issues start at the top, with overall organizational issues. There is lots to lose in time, revenue, user experience and product acceptance when code isn’t well internationalized (see Inc.’s article on Intuit’s past global expansion).

Join us on Thursday, February 7th at 10:30am MT (GMT-7) for an informative discussion on how to build repeatable success within internationalization initiatives. Through the lens of Lingoport’s numerous successful initiatives, we will go beyond the requirements documents, assessments, and best practices to assess the true challenges to achieving global readiness. We dive into how i18n may be optimized with concurrent development, work alongside ongoing localization updates, and we assess the technical challenges faced in internationalization.

Register at Lingoport.com/webinars/building-scalable-efficient-i18n-initiative/

The webinar may be viewed at Lingoport.com in the webinar section: Path to Agile Localization Webinar.

Our next webinar, Path to Agile Localization is scheduled for Wednesday, December 19th at 10am PT and will discuss how smart technology and process quell the differences between Agile and localization methodologies. The complaint we hear so loudly about Agile and localization is that localization doesn’t fit into a three-week sprint. Agile has helped development to keep costs down, limit risk and pump out lots of improvements, so it’s not going away. Yet it’s hard for localization to keep up and bring new improvements to the rest of the world in their languages due to the nature of rapid change and last minute U/I edits. We’ve met teams that talk about how important “global” is for them, but simply can’t manage the process overhead so customers have to wait. Turns out, there’s a lot you can do to make localization more visible and effectively manage the process.

Presenters include Richard Sikes, noted localization technology expert, Adam Asnes, Lingoport’s CEO and Olivier Libouban, Globalization Architect and Product Manager at Lingoport. Attendees are encouraged to submit their experiences in advance of the webinar. Register here.

Today, Lingoport announced that it has released Lingoport Resource Manager (LRM) to support development projects in their localization efforts. By optimizing the manual and often error-prone process of resource file management, LRM effectively bridges the gap between development and localization, ridding the two areas of unnecessary testing iterations and file confusion.

In a press release sent out today, Lingoport President noted:

 “During our product research for LRM, we saw great demand for an automated resource manager solution yet no commercial product was available. Localization and engineering teams talked about the difficulty in keeping up with changes and even delaying global release versions because of the management and integration overhead. Our solution allows localization managers and project engineers to automatically view changes right at the build/source management level, prepare those files for localization and then reintegrate them back into the product build when translated, along with quality and error checking in every step. LRM particularly helps agile teams with complex applications in keeping up with development changes and translation processes. It makes globalized products easier to keep up to date for every market.”

Lingoport Resource Manager represents the next step in answering how Agile and localization can co-exist. So often we have heard at trade shows and conferences that the two were not made for each other and many outdated localized versions of projects were released without proper translations implemented. This conundrum inspired months of research and development and we are happy to bring our solution to market.

Watch this introductory About Lingoport Resource Managervideo detailing the processes that LRM automates.

For more details on Lingoport Resource Manager or to request a demo, visit http://Lingoport.com/LRM or download the white paper detailing the business case for LRM.

While we are known for our i18n tools, many clients realize great value and successful globalized releases from our internationalization services team. We’ve got an expert team that puts our technologies to use to get i18n assessments, planning, implementation and ongoing consulting done efficiently and to high engineering standards. We can augment and work side by side with your developers and know how to plan and match a project to phasing and agile methodology demands.

Back to the product side, we’re very close to the release of Lingoport Resource Manager. We had a webinar last month, which discussed the management and engineering issues it solves when having to keep localization in sync with application development, particularly when using Agile methodologies. This was a strong webinar for product, localization and development managers and we’ve made the recording available. We also have a corresponding white paper available.

In this newsletter we’re also highlighting two posts I recently wrote in response to a situation where perceptions of world readiness were greatly under appreciated, and a common need for simplified explanation of the basics of character sets and encoding.

Lastly, Adam Blau and I will be at LocalizationWorld and hope to see you there. We’ll also be in the San Francisco/Bay area the week after coinciding with the Unicode Conference. Email if you’d like to meet.

Cheers,
Adam

Download the rest of the newsletter.

ASCII Encoding: English alphabet and numbers are fine. Breaks if you add accented characters and additional characters. 128 characters supported in total. 7 bits per character. Don’t use it!

ISO Latin-1 Encoding (also referred to as ISO 8859-1): In addition to English alphabet and numbers (codes are the same), adds support for Western European Languages (i.e. French, Italian, German, Spanish). 8 bits per character (single byte).

Unicode Character Set: A super character set that includes digital support for all the world’s commercially used languages and more.  Unicode characters can be supported using the following encodings:

UTF-8: This is a common encoding for supporting Unicode characters. Uses a single byte (same codes as ASCII), adding additional bytes (up to 6) to encode additional characters..

UTF-16: This is another common encoding for supporting Unicode. Uses two bytes per character and can be combined with a second set of bytes for more complex characters.

UCS-2: The older version of UTF-16, and compatible with UTF-16 as well. Used on Microsoft’s SQL Server Database for supporting Unicode.

The difference between a character and its encoding is the character is the complete letter or symbol, for example the letter A or a Chinese ideograph. Think of the encoding as the configuration of zeros and ones (bits and bytes) that the computer/software uses to represent that character. You need more bytes to represent more complex characters. People often refer to languages such as Chinese or Japanese as double byte, because it takes at least two bytes to represent their characters. However, more than two bytes can be involved.

All this is important because it’s an area that can really foul up your localization efforts if you don’t get it right. Encoding issues can be quickly located in source code and database schema using Globalyzer’s static analysis.

I wrote a more detailed article about this a while back for MultiLingual Computing, and it’s available here.

A video also describing this (we shot it in one take and with no rehearsal) is available here:

Choosing the right encoding is based on market requirements first, but also relies on technical requirements that arise from your software architecture. Supporting Unicode is always desirable, but technical and business case constraints can affect your internationalization strategy.

Poll data added that 20% of respondents blamed an incorrectly scoped project as their biggest headache for i18n. By conducting a thorough assessment of a code base for internationalization readiness one will understanding which parts of the code need to be refactored and examined will remove the guesswork and lead to a higher quality i18n project.

Further reading:

• Top-Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Internationalizing Software

If you are facing internationalization quality issues, follow @Lingoport for daily i18n tips. Otherwise, contact us and start a discussion about your internationalization goals.

Engineers and managers are frustrated: this is not a good use of engineering time. Localization managers are hindered as they do not have access to code or source repositories. Developers are hung up on an unnecessary testing effort to ensure localized resource files are integrated into the build.

We invite you to learn how to streamline this process and avoid hiccups in localized releases. Learn more about staying global in an agile world as we’ll discuss how to:

1. Provide scalability for releases to many locales in agile cycles
2. Streamline resource file management between software development and localization
3. View visual status of locale-readiness and monitor progress

This online event is being held on Wednesday, September 26th at 11am PDT. Register here.

On Wednesday, August 22nd at 11am PT, internationalization expert Adam Asnes will offer his insights in a fast-paced 30-minute webinar. Asnes leads Lingoport in its belief that software internationalization is not a side project and is a vital cog to any global company’s bottom line. Often times however, global firms overlook vital pieces to the international software development puzzle, including necessary budget, expertise, test protocols and source code quality. All these pieces fit together to create a globally mature software company. It’s Lingoport’s job to help along the way.

Registration for this webinar is available at http://www2.lingoport.com/l/13612/2012-08-09/2r7sd

As a teaser for this webinar, be sure to read about the Top Ten Internationalization Mistakes to Avoid. We have found that projects will teeter between success and failure due to a lack of commitment to internationalizing a product. Assumptions about i18n are often unfounded and can lead to a product that doesn’t sell.

Webinar i18n Accuracy and Priorities with Globalyzer 4.1 showcases how rule sets are fine tuned at the source and how string detection is prioritized by what end users see.  More information and registration information is available below:

The software development and globalization groups that produce world-ready software are especially hard at work looking to fulfill the elusive but all aspiring goal of most “quality” with least amount of spend. Producing quality involves harmonizing processes across multiple disciplines, integrating systems and blending tasks with other groups to drive “improvement,” all within the magical realms that modern management and technology allows.

To really understand and share intelligence on all components involved in the release of world-ready products within the enterprise via dashboards, I could imagine a company requesting and asking the following to track and measure quality:

• Translation Manager: How consistent and uniform is terminology in our content?
• Localization Manager: Are we extending translation memory reuse consistently across languages?
• Internationalization Manager: Are we making progress in reducing the most common i18n bugs in our software?

In this instance, there wasn’t a standard dashboard available to measure software engineering and refactoring of i18n projects, visible to both development teams and management. Much of the progress and intelligence companies have produced over the years have focused on localization-only process.

That missing piece will be filled over the next two weeks as Lingoport we’ll be announcing the official launch of the Lingoport Dashboard. Integrated and now standard with Globalyzer, it provides managers, engineers and management the ability to view and share intelligence on all components of coding quality for world-ready products within the enterprise, including:

• A holistic view of software quality and compliance amongst all components to produce world-ready software
• Continuous integration with Globalyzer’s Command Line for development and managerial teams to review violations and their priority for completion, scan summaries across i18n projects and errors.
• Summary and in-depth analysis on internationalization progress, all in real-time.

The Dashboard reinforces Lingoport’s commitment to help enterprises shift the emphasis of globalization left by placing greater importance on ensuring software code is i18n compliant before localization and QA, and not afterwards. The first part of that component is driving visibility to the process, which may have previously been unknown to anyone at a company beyond the localization, QA or even customers.

We’re hosting two Lingoport Dashboard focused webinars in June and you are cordially invited to join us. Gary Lefman, Internationalization Architect at Cisco Systems, will be our guest presenter and we’re very excited to have him. If you don’t know Gary, make sure to follow his tweets at @CiscoL10n.

Targeting managers of software development teams, on Tuesday, June 19^th at 11am PT, we’ll be presenting the Lingoport Dashboard in an hour long online session titled Internationalization Quality and Progress at a Glance. Learn more and register for this event by visiting: http://www.lingoport.com/webinars/internationalization-quality-i18n-progress/

On June 21^st at noon PT, we’ll give software developers, program managers, and localization and internationalization managers the opportunity to learn how the Lingoport Dashboard could increase their productivity and also make it easier to report i18n progress to management. Learn more and register for webinar Analytics for Internationalization at: http://www.lingoport.com/webinars/analytics-internationalization/

Also, don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you’d like a personal demonstration of the Lingoport Dashboard.

Best,
Adam