In October last year, Google rolled out the biggest update to its search in five years: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or BERT. BERT uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to better understand the meaning behind longer search queries that we type in the browser’s search box.

Google Search is about understanding language. Its job is to figure out what we are searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how we arrange the words in the query.

With BERT achieving a human-level score of 91.2% in language understanding, Google was quick to state that “BERT has helped us grasp the subtle nuances of language that computers don’t quite understand the way humans do.”

As they describe on their blog, BERT models can consider the context of a word by examining the words that come before and after it and determine its relation to other words in a sentence. That’s why it’s especially good at understanding the user’s intent behind longer search queries.

The new Search works not only in English but in other languages, too, and in some 70 countries around the globe.

Therefore, all that I write below applies to content in many other languages, not only in English.

How does this impact content writing or content localization (l10n)?

Well, BERT can tell if your content is all keywords and no substance — and your rankings will suffer for it.

You already know very well that your business depends on how discoverable in search engines your product or startup is. You need your website to come up in SERPs and not your competitor’s.

Due to its most recent improvement to Search, Google estimated that 10% of search results would be affected. The affected 10% is the content that may have been poorly written, badly localized, or written purely for SEO purposes. How so?

Google makes it clear: Content that reads naturally, is engaging and well-structured, focuses on understanding user intent, and answers user-specific needs will get top rankings.

We need to rethink with what content we fill our websites and product pages.

Keywords are dying away, welcome quality content

With the introduction of BERT into the ranking and featured snippets algorithms, we can finally write naturally, adopt a more casual tone of voice, use colloquialisms and a cadence that you would use if you were speaking, says Vanessa Jones, better known as Jones the Writer.

Realistically, it is no longer possible to optimize for BERT due to its constant learning and adaption. All you can do is produce high-quality content. Vanessa writes on her blog:

Optimizing now means that you can focus more on good, clear writing, instead of compromising between creating content for your audience and the linear phrasing construction for machines.

In 2020, it’s time to take a hard look at the quality of your content — and optimize that content for users rather than search engines, said Michelle Robbins, VP Product & Innovation, Aimclear. She pointed out:

In a way, the key to staying successful in search marketing 2020 is the same as it ever was — put out good content… As the search engines become ever more adapted to natural language understanding, the best-written content — in all forms — will win the day.

BERT has taken a huge leap forward into making search really about intent matching rather pure string matching. Google Search can understand more of the connections between user queries and the content that it is able to index and interpret. That’s why your content should always be looking to answer the questions for the user, and by doing it well, it will enhance your SEO campaign performance in 2020 and onwards.

Jesse McDonald, Global SEO Strategist at IBM, and Jessica Levenson, Head of Digital Strategy & SEO at NetSuite, both said 2020 is the time to move away from the obsession with keywords. We need to stop targeting individual keywords, chasing page views, and “spraying and praying” with content.

The goal of switching the mentality to more of a topic-focus is to create content that addresses an entire conversation holistically as opposed to just worrying about the single keyword a page should be targeting. — McDonald said.

So, if you want to rank high with BERT, the quality and specificity of your content is the most important thing — more important than your word count, how many keywords you have, or the words you use.

Neil Patel in a similar vein suggests that now it’s better to create highly specific short post on a topic that answers one specific user query, rather than a long read on a bunch of related topics.

High-quality content creation and localization are two sides of one coin

When dealing with BERT, there’s no difference whether one is writing content for a website or localizing this content. All the above points on creating high-quality content apply to content localization as well.

With most multilingual websites, you first write the content in one language, and then you get it translated or, more correctly, localized into other languages. In some instances, content is transcreated (transcreation is a form of reworking your content to adapt it better to the target market). Whatever the linguistic process is, make sure that it doesn’t mess up your SEO efforts.

See what the makers of WPML, a WordPress plugin for translating websites, advise in their knowledge base on how to make sure your international SEO is effective. Their main points: You need to make it clear to your translators which pieces of texts are especially important for SEO; discuss with your localizers how to specifically localize key texts (your long-tail keywords); make sure that the localized text is clear to your audience in different languages.

While Motoko Hunt, President of AJPR, a US-based digital marketing firm targeting Asian markets, believes that in the world of international SEO, the time is now to invest in good localization of content:

Many global websites have poorly translated content that hasn’t been edited for the local tongue. It’s not the placement of the keywords, it’s about how well your content is written for the local audience.

As we see, high-quality well-localized content is king in 2020 more than ever.

Start by getting your long-tail keywords rewritten and localized

What if you can’t afford to rewrite your content from scratch to please the new Google Search? Start by rewriting and localizing your long-tail keywords.

It is not enough to have them just translated. Localizing keywords means “researching best working keywords and translating them accordingly.” One common mistake is to assume that direct translation of keywords will work in other languages. Often it will not. Each country is different, even if the people in different countries technically speak the same language.

A classic example: Most Italians tend to search for “voli low cost” for low-cost flights, rather than the direct translation “voli a basso costo.” Or take this one: While a regular French translation of “car insurance” is “l’assurance automobile” the most popular search terms is “auto assurance.”

Also remember the differences between dialects. Just as there are numerous differences between US and UK English (an apartment in America is a flat in the UK and a unit in Australia), the same applies to Spanish, French, Arabic, and many other languages. For example, “a coche” is a car in Spain, but “a baby stroller” in much of Latin America.

Keyword research should be the first step to identify the most popular search queries that people in the target locale use when they want to find a product or service similar to yours. You have to know what words people are actually using in order to successfully target them.

This research can be done by your SEOs, yourself, or your localizers who have sufficient understanding of SEO and tools of the trade. The research done, your localizers can start translating the keywords.

BERT needs regionally correct content

Higher quality content also means more relevant for the target region. Target by country which means that you can include local cultural and geographic references, giving it an authentic feel and making it rank higher in SERPs.

If you translate your website for Canadian readers, then you’ll also pick up European users from France and some other parts of the world. It’s certainly cheaper to have one French website for all these countries. But you’ll be much better off by having separate localized sites for each target country.

This, however, doesn’t imply that simply getting a top-level domain name .ca or adding a subdomain /fr_CA will suffice. Google and other search engines penalize duplication (one of your duplicate sites will be excluded from SERPs), but they don’t recognize it in translation. This means it’s OK if your French and Spanish are direct translations of your English site, but you should rewrite content for your French-Canadian site.

Top ranking with BERT = great user experience = content well-localized

For Google (as well as for most of the other SERPS), user experience is king, more so than ever in 2020.

Erika Varangouli, International Digital Marketing Manager, told SearchLaboratory.com:

Almost every single Google algorithm update over the last five years has indicated that creating a solid user experience is at the top of Google’s agenda. Brands wanting to rank well (and stay there) will need to align their SEO and UX strategies together, ensuring that everything from landing pages to creative campaigns are designed to offer a five-star experience to users.

To ensure top user experience, your local language websites must be well-customized for each locale. Everything from the layout to visuals to currency and date formats must be localized. Of course, poor-quality translation or MT content don’t improve the sort of user experience that BERT expects.

Making sure your product hits the right notes with your international audience requires professional localization. Your product needs more than just a word-for-word translation of the original source for a success. The whole feel of the content needs to be carefully adapted to ensure your international customers engage with your information in the way your main content does.

Hiring professionals that specialize in website localization and marketing translation is very important here.

Quality l10n creates a quality UX, period.

Future-Google-proof your business

Frédéric Dubut, Senior Program Manager at Bing, predicts:

There’s no sign of NLP [natural language processing] and deep learning research slowing down anytime soon, and you can expect search engines to shift even further from keywords to intent in 2020.

Make it your goal to have the best content on the web for your topic, or better an important subset of your topic, suggests Eric Enge, General Manager at Perficient Digital.

By doing so, you will be future-Google-proofing your business.

Quality multilingual content will allow you to compete effectively for long-tail searches (which is about 70% of all search queries, by the way) and will help to build your site authority and demand for your content globally.

]]>In Ukrainian: Nature-Addicts: Why Are We Drawn Into the Woods?startupsArtem NedryaTue, 13 Nov 2018 17:01:58 +0000https://www.translationdesigner.com/articles/2018/11/13/top-tech-tips-for-icos-in-201956454ec4e4b0dd8e62e383c3:5653f03fe4b0a1d6c2d68860:5beaff42352f53894a6b3e5f

ICOs have been around for only a few years, and we saw them explode only last year, in 2017. But already today, we can step back and take a look at those stories of success and failure. Precedents have been set and new teams can learn from them.

If you are thinking of starting your own ICO (or STO), you’ll do it a favor by doing everything just right from day one. No one wants their multi-million undertaking crush and leave the founder(s) with those millions of debt on hands, right?

In preparation for this article, I’ve chatted with quite a few ICO founders and devs. Here’s what I’ve found out — use these tips to realize your ICO’s potential to the fullest in 2019.

Continue reading on the Indie Localizers’ blog.

Поради українського перекладача

Сьогодні будь-якому бізнесові, малому чи вже ні, важливо мати веб-сайт або хоча б сторінки у соцмережах. А для Інтернет-бізнесу без цього просто не обійтись. А якщо у вас американська компанія чи американські клієнти, мова ваших веб-сторінок має бути англійською (також іспанською, китайською, російською…). Знадобляться послуги перекладача. А де знайти такого, який візьме гроші і зробить якісну роботу, що пасуватиме вашому бізнесу (а не псуватиме його)? І ще такого, який би не завищив свої розцінки.

Розглянемо ваші варіанти.

По-перше, одразу відкинемо варіанти перекладу особою, що не є носієм мови (справжній професійний перекладач ніколи навіть не запропонує такої послуги), та машинного перекладу (Google Translate тощо).

Перекладачі-фрілансери

Усім відомі сайти, де можна швидко знайти та найняти фрілансерів для майже будь-якої роботи. Але, ні для кого це не є секретом, якість роботи можна отримати різну — як пощастить…

Отож, варіант із фрілансерами досить ризикований. Якщо вже хочеться випробувати удачу, то вже краще, напевне, поїхати в Атлантік Сіті або Вегас.

Тоді, напевне, звернутися до професійної перекладацької компанії?

Перекладацькі компанії

Я сам перекладач і протягом років працював із багатьма такими компаніями, до того ж в мене свій перекладацький бізнес, тому з власного досвіду знаю наступне:

• Цей варіант дорожчий, з простої причини: Такі компанії мають свій штат працівників (менеджери з проектів і реклами, бухгалтер, власник, веб-дизайнер тощо) їм потрібно сплачувати зарплатню і кошти на це приходять із гаманців клієнтів, таких, як ви.

• Якість також різниться: Частенько після узгодження з вами ціни менеджери з проектів віддадуть ваш переклад перекладачу з найнижчою ставкою, щоб виручка компанії була максимальною. Чи дійсно це так? За визначенням саме так працює модель бізнесу таких компаній.

• У більшості випадків у вас немає впевненості (і немає способу перевірити), що обраний перекладач має достатньо досвіду саме із такими текстами, як ваш (одна з головних передумов якісного перекладу).

• До того ж, спілкуватися із перекладачем напряму не вийде, а отже, пояснити свої ідеї чи задум щодо тексту чи відповісти на запитання перекладача доведеться через третіх осіб (загроза зламаного телефону).

Звичайно, такі компанії мають свої сильні сторони, та, враховуючи перелічені вище негаразди, запитайте себе чи дійсно воно того варте.

Адже існує кращий варіант, про який мало хто знає.

У розробників ігор є ще варіант залучення фан-спільноти, про який я гарно написав у цій статті (англійською).

Незалежна команда спеціалістів

Існують професійні команди перекладачів. Це такі собі групи чи спільноти перекладачів-спеціалістів, які самоорганізувалися і працюють із клієнтами без посередників. Їх небагато, мені відомо лише близько десятка.

Найбільші відмінності у тому, що:

• В таких командах немає штату працівників, яким потрібно виплачувати зарплатню. А отже, замовляючи послугу перекладу, ви оплачуєте саме роботу перекладачів, а не роботу дизайнера, бухгалтера, спеціаліста з реклами і т.п.

• Зазвичай учасники таких команд досвідчені професіонали, які вже неодноразово працювали разом і перевіряли роботу один одного. А отже, можна бути впевненим, що цей досвід відповідає реальності. Як правило, вони хороші спеціалісти із вищою перекладацькою освітою та принаймні кількома роками досвіду. Також ризик отримати неякісну роботу нашвидкуруч відпадає.

• При виборі, хто буде робити для вас переклад, обираються не ті, в кого ставка нижча (навпаки намагаються, щоб перекладач заробив якомога більше), а хто вільний, хто має схожий досвід, має бажання тощо.

• У вас буде повний контроль і можливість спілкуватися з перекладачами напряму. Навіть, якщо ви не знаєте іноземної мови, в такій команді знайдеться перекладач, який розмовлятиме з вами російською або навіть українською.

Кілька слів про мене:

Я українець, в США з 2010 року, і працюю перекладачем-фрілансером. Минулого року я зібрав команду незалежних перекладачів веб-сайтів, програм, та ігор під промовистою назвою The Indie Localizers Team. Відвідайте наш сайт, щоб дізнатися про нас більше.

INTRO

Half-through Johnson’s fact-packed, well-researched hell of a GDC talk, I knew I had to reiterate that essential advice and publish it on our team’s blog— now in a readable form. This post has been in works for a long time, but it still presents a pack of fresh and valuable insights into the business, making, and localization of video games for the Chinese-speaking gamer

Interview outline:

• Taiwan+China=Soft-launch sandbox+a lucrative market

• Chinese game approval process & censorship

• Political mishaps in previous games

• Unique pitfalls of game localization into Chinese

• Gamer sentiments and expectations

• Devs’ shortcuts to avoid and comical mistakes

• How to get budget-friendly Chinese localization

• Tech tips (fonts, encoding)

# Hi Lin. Could you briefly outline what opportunities China and Taiwan offer game devs today? And how Taiwan can be used as a soft-launch sandbox for games?

While I don’t have first-hand data, but recently there are more and more posts from developers on their social media or professional blogs such as Gamasutra, explaining the market potential of Chinese and Asian markets in general. This tweet is fairly recent:

Localization, especially in Asian languages, will up your sales on Steam. #INDIGO17 pic.twitter.com/CoVfLEIE24

— Eline Muijres (@ElineMuijres) June 30, 2017

Which explains that the localization of a few key Asian languages, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese included, can net you significant boost in sales. Simplified Chinese accounts for the huge market in China and also Singapore, while Traditional Chinese is mainly for Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong. And Taiwan by itself is a pretty significant market, comparable to some of the largest European countries in gaming.

In terms of soft-launch opportunities, Taiwan’s market is known for very accepting of foreign products and culture. We are influenced majorly by the US, Japan, China and more recently South Korea in all kinds of media exposure, not to mention our history is intertwined with China and Japan. And if you want to go into China, there is the approval process that I think we’ll be talking about down the line in this interview. As a result, Taiwan becomes a very good place to gather preliminary user feedback and gauge market potential for those bigger regions.

# What should Western devs know about the Chinese game approval process, to be better prepared? What are some regulations that can raise eyebrows of a regular Western dev?

TL;DR version: Get a publisher/representative in China to help you with that, end of story.

There is currently no sensible way for anyone outside of China to get through the approval process all by themselves, due to numerous paperwork and back-and-forth communication required with the government, and this communication is exclusively in Simplified Chinese / Mandarin. There are ways to sort of “workaround” this, such as tapping into the Steam users from China in some fashion (and of course most the the games on Steam are not “approved” as of now). But this goes way beyond the scope of this interview.

On the other hand, getting yourself prepared for the approval process is crucial, even if you’ve already got help with it. The approval process typically lasts 3 months, sometimes even 6 months if there are more complicated issues and thus more back-and-forth, but as far as I know most of this is queuing time, since it’s not just your game that’s being approved.

In terms of things that are immediately related to localization, the no-foreign-language policy, which is being enforced on games that are officially published in China since late-2016, definitely is the biggest one. Make sure you are prepared to make a lot of UI adjustments. Sometimes we choose to leave words that are already nearly universal to gamers in the UI design, often in an image form (and not dynamic texts), such as “LV,” “Win,” “Lose,” and “Ready? Go!” — all these have to be translated into Simplified Chinese as well. Only text elements that are purely decorative can be left out.

The PSVita version of Deemo, a rhythm game made by a Taiwanese company Rayark, was sent to the approval process with the help from Sony. At one point, even the song names and composer names (upper left in this case) were asked to be translated. After some back-and-forth, they finally understood that composer names are often untranslatable and effectively constitute the branding of the composers, translating that would cause major issues. But the translations of song names were still enforced in a way: Rayark devs had to add the translated names in the upper right corner, because changing hand-made textures for all the song names at that point would be too costly.

Another big topic is related to censorship.

This is also very much out of the scope of this interview, but crudely put, you have to understand the fact that in the eyes of China government, all video games are essentially “ESRB Everyone”. There is currently no established rating system for publishing video games in China. So when one wonders why the approval process feedback says blood splash in red and skeletons need to be changed in your game, this is why. Also, try to remember that this approval process is a manual process that’s based on previously established cases, with the human involved who is not fluent in game culture. There are advocacy groups in China trying to push forward changes, but things are moving slowly, understandably.

# What do game devs need to know to avoid any political mishaps?

Disclaimer: I am a Taiwanese, and I can only promise I will try to answer as neutral as possible.

If your game doesn’t have sensitive content, generally it will be fine. However, sometimes you don’t realize what could be actually sensitive in your game.

Take Street Fighter V as an example.

As an esports game, it’s fairly common to have a national flag system that goes along with your in-game user profile.

But if you want to release the same game into both China and Taiwan (or other countries that have a similar issue), this inevitably creates a problem.

Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee flag is essentially what Taiwanese players/teams are forced to use in formal international sports events, like Olympics. Capcom used the CTOC flag and mashup with Capcom ProTour logo in Street Fighter V.

The most recent similar incident is Overwatch World Cup.

In the case of Yakuza 6, it’s a bit more interesting. The series of Yakuza actually has never been officially released in China, due the content of the game depict the underground world of Japan and the gangster life vividly, granting an “ESRB Mature” rating to most games in the series. Like what I said just a few paragraphs ago, this is not going to fly for the China approval process. However, due to the online feedback from the netizens in China after they saw the reactions of Taiwanese people celebrating SEGA initially for using “the country of Taiwan” line in the game, SEGA had to go and “fix” the content for a game that’s not being officially released there.

Ignoring the obvious self-censorship and protecting SEGA’s own reputation in China by “fixing” it, in hindsight, if they just mentioned Taiwan as “Taiwan” in the game initially, I would imagine there wouldn’t have been any fuss about it at all on either Taiwan’s or China’s side. But, on the other hand, if your game absolutely requires a national flag system, well, I have no suitable suggestion for you from a purely neutral perspective.

# You must have seen a lot of localized games. What comical or interesting mistakes have you seen and how they could’ve been avoided?

The most famous example we all know in Taiwan is the Traditional Chinese version of Neverwinter Nights 1. The localization of NWN1 was a very rushed project, to begin with, and they end up using a lot of machine translation. The most memorable error happened in this dialogue:

The Traditional Chinese version literally translated that into “the grandmother kicked the person’s teeth”, not only that, this whole paragraph was erroneously copy-pasted into a few dozen more dialogues in the game. Thus the Teeth-Kicking Old Woman (踢牙老奶奶) was born.

Of course, the root of these problems are probably just project management issues and/or underestimating the effort needed.

For AAA games, the ecosystem and the best practices for localization is quite mature nowadays, but with the current rise of indie games, it is going to be a lot harder when you consider the budget restrictions that indie devs usually have, and also the general inexperience towards localization.

# What are some unique difficulties of game localization into Chinese?

Localization process is always non-trivial. But for the target audience of this article, there are probably 2 major factors which contribute to the difficulty of Chinese localization.

Firstly, roughly speaking, because of the cultural and social “distance” from Chinese speaking regions to “the West”, you are dealing with a very different language system, hence it’s harder to find corresponding vocabularies, harder to make a sentence that reads like it’s coming from a native speaker, and sometimes you just don’t know where to look for localization services. Of course this by no means only occurs to Chinese localization, but secondly, you also need to understand the fact that “Chinese” is a lot of times a vague designation: for the writing system, you have to account for at least Simplified and Traditional Chinese, not to mention regional and national differences; there are also a few prominent spoken languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese to say the least. Some people would categorize these as “dialects”, while it’s actually more suitable to treat them as individual languages.

Considering the reasons mentioned, it’s not hard to imagine there are many subtleties and nuances got mixed up or simply neglected, when you naively talk about the term “Chinese”, and subsequently all sorts of confusion when it comes to localization.

# Could you share gamer sentiments/reactions when the game simply states Chinese without stating Simplified or Traditional?

I mean, by nature we will feel uncomfortable when we see one labeling itself as one thing, but when actually it is another. As a Traditional Chinese user, of course I will think my Chinese writing system is the default one, when not labeled otherwise, and vice versa. The easiest way to avoid confusion and potential complaint is to simply understand what version of Chinese localization you have, and state it as such.

While people who read one version of Chinese probably also can understand things written in the other version, there are still cultural, aesthetic (typography) and vocabulary differences, and those are by no means small. People usually ask how big the difference is when comparing to English in the US and the UK — although it’s hard to precisely put down a number, in my opinion, the difference is easily 10 times as big.

# What are some shortcuts devs like to take when localizing for the Chinese market? I know some use S to T converters? And how big is the difference between the two languages?

Continuing my point from the last paragraph, due to the differences between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, the auto-converters are just not the way to go.

Since we all are familiar with the word “Game,” let’s break it down in its Chinese form. In both Traditional and Simplified Chinese versions, it has 2 Chinese characters. The idea of the second character here is easier, which just means “Drama”, and just a one-to-one mapping between Traditional and Simplified.

But for the first character, both “Play” and “Swim” characters are used in Traditional Chinese, and they have totally different meanings. But in Simplified, the two characters become one. So the mapping is many-to-one in this case, which is not viable if you want to do a Simplified to Traditional conversion.

Next when you consider the fact that a lot of daily vocabularies between China and Taiwan (also Hong Kong to an extent, and I am not talking about Cantonese in written form) are different, the character / word mapping between Simplified and Traditional easily becomes many-to-many, rendering conversion totally not viable both ways.

# Could you share your insights on choosing the right game name that will work for Chinese gamers? Or how to go about translating names?

Frankly speaking, I think this is very hard to do well. Sometimes it’s very easy due to the straightforwardness of the content of the game or the original name of it, but sometimes there is simply no good solution (to a point that leaving the name of the game alone may be a better option, just that this option is not really available for China).

But be sure to ask your translator to come up with multiple suggestions, and explanations for each suggested names. If you happen to know anyone from Chinese-speaking regions, try to get opinions from them. Moreover, the opinion may very well be different based on where they come from. In terms of movies, TV, and to some extent video games, usually, China’s naming is more straightforward, while Hong Kong and Taiwan tend to utilize local references, the summarizable and marketable idea of the actual content, or make it sound like a specific phrase or idiom if possible. And of course, HK/TW’s takes are usually different to each other.

These nuances are impossible to explain briefly — there are actual academic papers on this topic! So I’ll simply suggest you to try the most straightforward one when in doubt. One thing I’d like to add is, considering the fact that gamer demographic is continually widening in Chinese-speaking regions, and also the potential mishap of fans or gaming press choose a name that misses the point of your game — it’s best if the developers themselves decide an officially translated name before launch. There’s still a good chance you can find a name that can be well-received in all Chinese-speaking regions. But if you (or your translator) really can’t do that, at least it’s still OK for regions outside of China.

# Professional localization can be out of question for many smaller teams due to a limited budget, so many resort to their fans and end up with negative forum comments from the same community… Any tips on how to do budget-friendly localization into Chinese and still get the quality?

I think it may be possible to let the fans do the first pass if there are volunteers, and then find a professional to proofread it. At least from what I know translators usually charge less for proofreading. Some even distinguish both “editing” and “proofreading” from “translation” works. Pick the option that’s most suitable to you.

But I don’t deny how costly it can be for a good Chinese (either Simplified or Traditional) localization can be when it comes to video games. Other potential costs including fonts and UI adjustments, etc. It is just not a cheap thing to do when your game is text heavy.

# So, in your opinion, how can a regular dev folk find quality game localizers and not feel like “the translation sucks and always just a waste of money, and I’d better used Google/fans and spent that money on marketing?”

First of all, I think you should be aware of who you are actually working with. Be aware when a translation agency say they can do both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Do they actually have different people on this? Be sure to ask this question.

Secondly, I understand the practice when working with a bigger localization studio, you’ll be talking to a studio rep but not the actual translator (since if you are going to do a bunch of languages at the same time, it’s may seem non-sensible to talk to all the translators). But when I am doing translation works for fellow indie devs, I always find direct communication a lot more productive. There are a lot nuances, when it comes to game localizations, that you really can’t relay through a third party and just by a google spreadsheet. I always keep the communication going, asking for references, knowing the contexts, understanding the devs what they want to achieve at certain points in the game. With a studio middle-person I don’t know how to keep this as effective.

Last but not least, it’s pretty important that the devs do their ‘homework’ on their end. If you invented a lot of made-up words for your game, put the explanation down for the translator. Use visuals to supplement some of the more unique parts of your game. Things like that. This extends to all kinds of translation works and not just for Chinese. Dumping a text file to your translator without any additional context and expecting the end result would be good? The fault is totally yours.

# Could you briefly share some tech tips on encoding, fonts, space issues?

For encoding issues, the answer is very short: UTF-8. In almost all cases there’s no legitimate reason not to use UTF-8 in your game, even if devs themselves don’t plan to localize it! One thing I would like to bring up is that game development, as we all know, is a very complicated and multifaceted process. There are many people with different talents and a lot of tools and editors involved. Once in a while there may be an in-house tool or other 3rd party stuff in your toolchain that does NOT support UTF-8, not use it by default, or you forget to choose UTF-8 — and fuck everything up. Just be very careful with double checking it.

About fonts, the first thing any developer should understand is, for either Simplified or Traditional Chinese, font designs are expensive for a reason — the characters (or glyphs) count we need for daily usage is in the thousands, with each character design more complicated than ASCII characters on average. So a general purpose font in Chinese is easily hundreds of times, if not more, costly than ASCII or Latin-only fonts. Free fonts are almost non-existent, and overall you have less choice of style.

Fortunately, there are some notable free font resources (legally) available:

• For sans-serif style, Google Noto Sans CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) font family is an excellent choice for most usages. You can also investigate WenQuanYi, a very long standing open source font project for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
• For serif style, Hanazono Mincho is a font that originally designed for Buddhism research by a university in Japan, which covers Traditional, Simplified Chinese and Japanese Hanzi and other more general usages. Google also released Noto Serif CJK series more recently, providing a slightly different looking and very good serif choice.

Another common issue is that Chinese characters’ stroke-density, especially for Traditional Chinese, is higher than English (and lots of other languages), meaning you can read texts in small font size in English more so than in Chinese. Also, 10pt texts in Font-A may not appear as the same size as 10pt texts in Font-B, so all the UI texts after localization needs to be checked visually, to prevent situations similar to what’s being shown in the image here.

# Are there any resources on the web with tips for devs looking to localize into Chinese?

In fact, when it comes to video game localization, there really aren’t much resources/tutorials/explanations online for English-speaking developers looking into Chinese, which is part of the reason why I submitted my talk to GDC17. However, of course, most of the general localization rules and best practices are still required, and there are plenty of those posts you can search for online.

Lastly, thank you a lot for this opportunity. I am also going to revise and make some additions to my original GDC17 talk about Chinese localization as a Gamasutra post. Some of them are already incorporated into this interview, but for more details covering all other stuff that was in my talk, please check out the post when it is online. : )

# Thanks a lot, Johnson, for sharing a ton of useful advice!

This interview was originally published on Gamasutra. 

Intro

“Missing Translation” is an exploration and puzzle game in black and white and with no human language text; there’s an alien language instead. It won a bunch of awards (“Best original idea” at the hoPLAY festival, best game of the year, best PC game, best design, best debut game — all from Gamelab) and got a few nominations.

With all the above, I couldn’t pass such game by and asked the game’s team for an interview. So, below goes my interview with Luis Díaz Peralta of AlPixel Games.

# Hi Luis, would you like to introduce yourself and your colleagues?

AlPixel Games is an indie game studio based in Madrid. We have two sides, we work on a main project in which the whole team pours hours every day but, on our spare time, we work as a collective, making lots of games in smaller teams and collaborating with others. One thing that we all have in common is that we need to keep constantly moving, improving and doing different things.

As for me, I’m a game designer, though I also do PR. While we’re working on our smaller projects I’ll sometimes code or draw assets, but those aren’t my strongest skills.

# Missing Translation is a very interesting name, especially for a localization team like ours! Could you tell how you’d chosen this name?

In “Missing Translation” players explore a strange city filled with creatures that speak a different language.

Understanding what they say isn’t a requirement for finishing the game but you can, up to certain point, interact with them.

The game’s main theme is “being lost”, and one of the things that reinforce that thought is the fact that you can’t communicate with others.

# I spent some time playing the game. You find yourself in a bizarre new world with no means of communication, much like traveling to a foreign country without any language skills (nor a phrase book). But you can learn the world’s language to converse with the villagers and find your way around. So what does that language look like?

Basically, at any given moment you can open what I always called the “speaking interface”. You see a grid with 9 points in the screen and use lines to join those dots, whenever you’re done you just press “ok” and your character will say whatever you just drew.

I first came up with the input method and left the language itself for later, which clearly isn’t the most reasonable thing to do. Though I haven’t made many games for mobile devices, I love touchscreens, it’s an amazing input. It’s easy to see Android’s pattern unlock system was my main inspiration for the “speaking interface”.

Coming with the language rules was really hard and required lots of iterations. I kept throwing away concepts because they weren’t just working. At first, I drew inspiration from real languages and, though that was necessary, I ended up creating complex messes that didn’t really make sense in a game like “Missing Translation”.

After a while, I decided to go for a set of simpler rules that seemed to fit the world better. This is one thing that could have been improved a lot, like many other things in the game, but I believe that, at that time, I just didn’t have the skill to craft anything better.

# Very interesting. Could you expand on the grammar of that language and your creative process?

I feel that talking about the creative process of this system will be more of a list of “things you shouldn’t do” instead of being actual helpful stuff, but let’s give it a go!

When I started designing this language, “Missing Translation” had already plenty of puzzles and content. For some reason, I forgot about all this and focused on doing a deep complex language, which is cool, but it wasn’t what I actually needed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have games that take a look at language (Sethian seems to be doing a great job at this), but the game’s core theme wasn’t languages.

One of design most important rules is being aware of “the bigger goal” and focusing on it. The kind of language I was trying to design seemed interesting, but it wasn’t right for the game I was trying to make at the moment. After some time, I realized I was just trying to build a language I thought it’d be cool, instead of building what I felt I needed for this particular project.

With the skills and resources we had at that time, I wasn’t able to come up with a new drawn language that I could explain without the help of text. And having some kind of large reference to check didn’t seem like a good system to reinforce the feeling of being lost.

I tried to free my mind of complex rules and went back to the very basics. If I’m lost in a weird town and I want to get out, I’m not going to look for a grammar book or pay attention to subtle details, I’m going to try to understand some general concepts that can get me out of here.

And that’s pretty much it! The language in “Missing Translation” isn’t as deep as the one in newer games such as “Sethian”. Don’t think I’m just hiding its internal logic and avoiding to explain it, it’s just that I haven’t opened that game in two years and I really can’t recall all the details, who knows? Perhaps in a couple of years, I’ll almost be able to play it like a total stranger would.

[Spoiler alert! You can have a deeper look into the “grammar” of that language on their devlog.]

#Were there any problems or player feedback about your language’s characters actually having some unintended meaning in some human languages?

Not as far as we know, given resource limitations we didn’t have a professional adviser for this matter, so we relied on player feedback.

# Was this the original plan to have no text in “Missing Translation” for maximum impact — so that players from any country can enjoy the game regardless of their language?

“Missing Translation” was our first project. It was supposed to be a learning experience and, hopefully, get some coverage. Our main goal was to make something that, even when it was made for a small audience, many people could enjoy. That’s why it’s on PC and mobile and why we decided to avoid all text.

# But is there any regular text in a game at all? Any UI messages? Have they been localized and if yes, how did you do it?

There are only two written things in the game, the title and the credits, which have absolutely no effect over the gameplay or narrative. We did have those localized for China thanks to Another Indie, who took care of the whole process, but that’s all.

# Just curious here, how many cold requests do you get form translators or fans about translating your game with no text?

Oh, you have no idea. I couldn’t say a specific number, but there were A LOT of them.

# About gender now! You decided to give the player an option to choose a male or female protagonist. The matter of fact, our team touched on this topic recently too. It’s kind of a hot topic today. So, could you comment on your decision?

We never planned to include a female character in “Missing Translation”, that was something unexpected that happened a couple of months before launch. We were displaying the game in a show and a girl played for almost an hour so, once she was done, I asked her for some feedback.

She said that the only thing she missed was a playable female character. I pointed out that having a female character would only change player appearance, but she still felt that using an avatar she could relate with would make the experience more enjoyable for her.

After the show the whole team talked this over, we all agreed that she was right, even if it changed nothing, having a female protagonist would be important for many players. We estimated how long it would take us to implement it and, once we checked it fitted our production calendar, we went for it.

# Do you agree with the opinion that a game dev being an artist is free to address their female players however they like, that is even as males?

I believe that anybody doing creative work should be free to decide about pretty much every detail of the project. It’s great to see more games trying to be inclusive (and I hope that keeps getting better and better), but sometimes production and creative limitations get in the way of that.

# How have you implemented this gender option in the code? Any tips or techniques for other devs?

“Missing Translation” is a fairly simple 2D game. We made the new animations and had the game choose male or female sprites depending on a value. We had to check many parts of the code because they were linked to animations and started doing “funny things”. To wrap it up we made a new menu where you chose the character you wanted to play with.

I don’t consider myself a programmer, though I did code “Missing Translation”, so I don’t know if my advice will be that helpful but here it goes: Decide it right at the beginning of the project, otherwise your project structure and logic might make adding a new gender a very tedious task.

# On your forum, I saw that at some point your team considered adding non-white characters. Because you wanted to make your game more immersive and inclusive?

We considered every feature we could think of that’d make the game more inclusive (and that wouldn’t destroy our production). Having different skin tones is something we discussed but decided not to include for two reasons: It’d take too much time to implement and, since “Missing Translation” is in black and white, it’d be impossible to change the whole player palette and still make the whole thing look good.

# How did you do the distribution? Any insights for other devs?

“Missing Translation” is free on Steam, so its distribution will differ a lot from your average commercial game. Still, we did learn many things that will sound like a cliché, but you know what they say, clichés are clichés for a reason. Basically promoting your game is a necessary skill, one that you need to work on. Talk to every journalist, iterate your pitch, try to understand what gets big articles, take the game to shows, be active on Twitter, submit it to festivals, etc. Never forget about these things nor leave them for the last months of development.

# How is your upcoming game “A Place for the Unwilling” going? What inspired you for this new game?

Our new game was inspired by so many things that we’d have to make a list, that said, I guess Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, “Over the Garden Wall” naive yet twisted world and the works of H.P. Lovecraft are on the top of that list.

We’ve been working on “A Place for the Unwilling” for quite some time now and it’s going great. It got into the Casual Connect showcase, it was chosen to be part of the Leftfield Collection at EGX Rezzed and it recently got nominated for the “best narrative” award at BIG Festival. There’s a long road ahead before its release but we’re happy with how it’s shaping up. We’re doing a streaming soon showing gameplay for the first time, so that’ll be a perfect opportunity to see the game running.

[Here’s a link to the streaming page]

Related links:

Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/395520/Missing_Translation

Dev logs: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39679.0

AlPixel’s Website: http://www.alpixelgames.com/

Luis’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ludipe

AlPixel’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlpixelGames

Gender discussion: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/updates/346625739/1429207270

In their 2014 GDC talk, Sony QA team wondered:

“Why don’t translators get it right the 1st time and make 40% of all errors?”

After some number crunching, they’d found: Most of that 40% of loc’n errors aren’t linguistic but bugs resulting from dev’s shortcomings.

So why didn’t game devs get it right the 1st time?

Find out in my interview with Paula Ianelli, my fellow team member at the Indie Localizers Team and a game localizer with many titles localized under her belt.

When a big chunk of localization failures and bugs are shortcomings of game devs themselves and not localizers and could’ve been avoided with just a proper approach, her insights are a must-read for devs who are new to localization, and especially forthose considering to launch in Brazil.

The country has a large market with a very passionate gamer community, but it’s quite different from Portugal, so make no mistake! Read further to find out exactly how to make a localized launch in Brazil.

# Hi Paula! You are a video game localizer. How different is your job from, say, website localizer’s? Could you briefly tell about yourself?

Hi, Artem! Thank you for inviting me to this interview. I am a Brazilian translator and conference interpreter based in Sao Paulo. I have been working with game localization for a few years now, and I love it. I have always been a gamer — my first console was a Master System Girl my parents got me when I was six years old — so being able to translate games has been a dream come true. I have been part of projects like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Far Cry 3 and 4, ZombiU, among many other AAA titles. Each of them pose different challenges and game localizers have to be extremely versatile since games are full of styles, registers, puns, jokes, plays on words and nuances. As translators, we need to be very creative and detail-oriented to make sure the message is conveyed without a hitch.

# Any tips for devs on how to help your localizers do the best job of their life and ensure the whole localization effort is a positive experience?

It is all about teamwork and context. When we dive into a new localization project, every bit of information is valuable.

I always explain to my clients that they spend years working on every detail related to a project, but we are usually included towards the end, when there is not much time before a game goes to market. Sometimes we have just a few hours or days to translate what you guys took months to craft, and that may hurt the translation.

So do your best to treat the localization team as part of your company and to include them in your pipeline as soon as possible. Schedule a short call with them right off the bat to go over your goals, any challenges you faced when writing the original script, who your target audience is and any major decisions you had to make thus far. By the way, any piece of context is highly appreciated.

Do you have character sheets? Gameplay videos? Pictures and descriptions of items?

Please hand them over to the translation team! The more, the merrier.

In addition, be available to interact with us on a regular basis so we can ask questions as soon as an issue comes up. Trust me: your translation team will appreciate it and your game will be way better localized — a classic win-win situation.

# I would add: Just reviewing and following i18n and l10n best practices would save from reworking your game in future. Personally, I had to reject a project with a couple game devs simply because their code wasn’t ready… [My French colleague recently wrote a nice rundown of such best practices for game devs].

Back to our interview: How to pick talented localization specialists and be more or less sure that the money is well-spent?

Look for people who are willing to become part of our team for the duration of the project. People who care about the outcome. Experience helps a lot, so check what they have done before and ask a few questions about their strategies to cope with common challenges. See if they ask questions too — that is key. If all they ask is how much the project is going to pay and what the deadline is, that is a bad sign. The thing with game localization is that there are lots of gamers who are dying to enter this market, but they are not qualified whatsoever. Never hire them to save money. Jeopardizing quality to cut costs will not be a smart move in the long run. A background in translation is always a great start, for example. If a freelance spent 4 years in college to study translation or has been working in this industry full-time for the last 8 years, chances are they are serious about what they are doing. Look for that. You want to work with people who know their craft and who want to do their best.

# If you were an indie dev, how would you know if localizers did a good job, given you don’t speak/understand those languages?

Definitely invest in some third-party testing. At this last stage, every penny will be worth it. Preferably, you should look for a native tester who is a gamer, who speaks both the source and the target languages perfectly and who understands the translation industry, because that is how he or she will be able to judge quality. You can also hire a linguist to prepare a guide on what to look for while testing. With clear, simple instructions, testers will be able to assess if the translation is true to the original while sounding natural to the target audience. Ask them to fill out a standard report provided by you with examples of positive and negative translation choices, as well as a to write a final assessment on overall localization quality. You can also ask the same from beta players as the case may be.

# How different is Brazilian and European Portuguese? Is it worth to localize into both or just one is enough to save the indie budget?

That is a great question. Sometimes the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese are majorly overlooked. Brazilians usually have a really hard time understanding European Portuguese. Grammar and vocabulary are not the same, and we are not that exposed to the European accent — though the opposite is not true, because they are used to our music and soap operas. If you are a game dev and you are planning your localization pipeline, I definitely recommend including both varieties in your budget. Now, if you have to choose between one of them, there are tons of reasons to go with Brazilian Portuguese: we are a country of over 207 million people (compared to under 10 million in Portugal), we have a large and active gaming community, and it is very likely that most Brazilian gamers would rather play a game in English than in European Portuguese.

# How much demand is there for localized games as opposed to English-only ones in Brazil? What are fan expectations?

Localization is key in Brazil. Even though most people do have English classes in school, not many Brazilians are fluent enough to enjoy a game thoroughly without missing any nuances and bits of information. Moreover, we know how much immersion plays a role in the experience. Some older gamers are used to playing in English, but they probably will not make the most out of it. Most gamers will play in English if needed, but they will definitely prefer playing with subtitles or dubbing in their own language. Now that most major games have been localized in recent years, the audience surely expects to have this option off the shelf.

# Could you cite some games that failed or nearly failed when they were launched in Brazil? Why so?

Well, Mortal Kombat X faced huge criticism when launched in Brazil because of how the game was dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese. Famous Brazilian singer Pitty voiced character Cassie Cage, and players hated it. Though she probably did her best, Pitty had no dubbing experience, and it showed. All of her lines sounded off and distracted players from enjoying the game. At the time, there were heated discussions on whether studios should hire celebrities to dub games or not. While that might work with movies most of the times, it seems gamers are not really into compromising quality just to hear a familiar voice. We need to respect that. Here’s hoping we learned that lesson.

# Would you like to share something about your work at the Brazilian Association of Translators and Interpreters (ABRATES)?

I have recently joined Abrates as a council member of its Board of Directors. Abrates is a non-profit professional association managed by translators and interpreters since the 70s. We offer a variety of programs, events, conferences, benefits, and services to independent professionals and translation company owners who rely on our support. We are really looking forward to our annual conference — the largest of its kind in Latin America, which will be held at the end of this month (May 2017). Our goal is to advance the translation and interpreting professions and encourage professional development in our industry so we can strengthen our market and help bridge the gap between clients and translation providers. It is challenging work, but I love it. That is how I have been fostering the translation and interpretation market in Brazil and I hope to keep on doing so.

# Thanks, Paula!

This interview is was brought to you by the Indie Localizers Team and was originally published on Gamasutra.

This post was inspired by a publication by Vlad Magdalin of Webflow.

Unlike web designers who now can build websites from scratch visually, without a line of code, video game localizers still work in the black and white of their translation tools, without visual clues.

Hopefully, this post will inspire someone to create a WYSIWYG or visual translation app.

First, let’s take a look at how other creatives work.

Web Designers

Can see their design, real time

Web Developers

Can see right away the violin is white where it needs to be brown

Digital Magazine Designers

Can read a magazine at work

Copywriters & bloggers

Markdown on the left, live preview on the right

Modern Bloggers

Need to have a basic design sense and see their design preview

Sound Designers

Can hear audio output, they don’t guess how that beat feels in a song

Vloggers, YouTubers

Use their cameras’s front/flip screen to keep their handsomeness in check (and shoot a crisp picture for us)

Game Character Designers

Know their character’s inner thoughts and even can see it in context of the game

3D Animators

Can make a timid eye contact with their furry character

3D Modeling Artists

Will know right away if one eye of the lizard is missing or something hasn’t been transl… created

Architects

First build computer models, then construct buildings (because any reworking would be way too costly)

And…

Video Game Localizers

Have no clue how long their translation is allowed to be, nor whether “psychic attacks” requires following plural rules, nor what “perfect size” refers to:

In the best of cases, their tool allows to see where the original string appears in the game (but no way to see the translation):

Concept Visual Localization App

In the mockup below, it’s clear to the localizer that the cat-boy speaks about the hat. Now, they can play with this string (the impersonal “it” can be replaced with “the hat”) and make it the sweetest line it can be — since clearly there’s plenty of room on the screen

Today, it seems only back-end devs, unicorns (designers who code), and game localizers are forced to work in the spartan beauty of their text-based UIs.

But the real problem being the strings that are taken out of context: Localizers are never fully sure about the success of the whole effort — until all the job will be compiled for a test run (and more reruns) and debugged.

Visual video game localization is not genome sequencing. The technology is there, somewhere, one needs to simply start building

Such app will simplify testing/QA and will help avoid issues like below:

@AdventureMtn Zombie King has some issues on my iPhone 6S with cropped text and overlapping elements. 😕 pic.twitter.com/4LUsAGaDyi

— Raphael Fetzer (@pheraph) January 1, 2017

@ClydeMandelin Localization mistake in Game & Watch Gallery 2! Coins give you bonus points, and Bob-ombs are game over. pic.twitter.com/vwcg4vxIQQ

— JVeg199X (@JVeg199X) October 18, 2016

@WayForward Hey guys. I just wanted to let you into a little text error I found in the game pic.twitter.com/8kDlZqTLNI

— Momo♡ (@momosaamaa) December 28, 2016

Bootstrapping in a foreign language with a limited indie budget

My interview with Eliott Jabes, the CEO of Sneakerguy, a web app that helps you choose a perfect pair of sneakers. He had some interesting thoughts to share about why they decided to release their app in English and not in French (French being their native language) and how they went about it relying only on a limited lean startup budget.

Hi Eliott, so could you briefly introduce yourself and your team and tell us what Sneakerguy is all about?

Hello, devs!

So many people are tired of looking for a new pair of sneakers for hours, in-store or on the web, so I decided to create Sneakerguy.com — the first sneakers search engine, to help them find the shoes of their dreams at the best price. You can enter filter sneakers by color, brand, price, gender and size to find the perfect pair, and shop it on one of our 15 best-trusted partners. And Sneakerguy is two devs/co-founders and one other employee.

I see. Did you have similar experience prior to Sneakerguy?

I had developed a few apps before that, such as a social music app and a TV program recommendation app… I have also worked as a freelance designer for a few companies, but my first full-time startup is Sneakerguy.com.

Congrats on that! You come from France, but you decided to write the website copy in English all yourself and only review it with the help of the Indie Localizers Team [our suggestions are yet to be applied on the website]. How did you make the decision? Did you consider actually hiring professional translators or copywriters for this?

At first, I did not think about hiring professional translators for my website. I believe I had so many things to do to build this properly that I forgot to ask myself many questions. But then I thought it was essential to make the content reworked by native English speakers and professional translators. It is not easy at all writing relevant content in a foreign language. Many startups don’t want to spend money on this kind of services but actually that might be very useful help you should seek.

What was your thinking behind the decision to release it in English and not in French first and then add English maybe?

We decided to release it directly in English and not in French, because we wanted to target the whole European market, without knowing if our product was fit for the UK, Germany, France… So the easiest way to sell stuff to people all around Europe was to make it in English from the beginning.

What did your team learn about writing a copy for your platform that you’d like to share?

If I were to give a few tips we have learnt developing sneakerguy.com in English, that would be the following:

• Use in priority words with an easy pronunciation (‘i’, ‘a’ and ‘o’ are memorized better than ‘e’ for instance). Also don’t use words/expressions you are not 100% comfortable with. You should always be able to explain very clearly and talk to anyone about your website’s content.

• Use short words that are rich of meaning. Always ask yourself the question: Could I say this simpler/shorter/more precisely?

• Make all your content read before launch by at least 5 different native English speakers. Your level of language is your credibility. If you make more than 1 language mistake on a page, a user with a good English will most likely loose faith in you before having a chance to get to know you better.

Now, on to more techy things: What was your tech stack for this project?

We are full-stack Javascript. Sneakerguy.com is an Angular2 based web app, our backend is node.js. For code-testing I would recommend CircleCI and Saucelabs for end-to-end tests.

Would you like to share some dev tips for other indies?

The most important thing when developing a web app is to do it very methodically.

• Make your code as modular as possible!

You can never create too many components. The more modular it is, the simpler it is for you to bring in modifications (both in the app logic and the design). And don’t think “It’s alright, I am pretty sure I will never change this, so I don’t need to create a specific component for it…” You would shoot yourself in the foot thinking like that. The main competitive advantage of a startup is its ability to change everything, at anytime. Another reason why you should make your code modular is that it makes it so much easier when you have a new developer working with you.

• Give the right responsibilities to the right components:

A small button somewhere in your app should not have the rights to make a major change in the app logic. For instance, the change of the language should not be executed by the component of a tiny button: it should trigger an event that says “Hey, the user wants to change the language of the whole app” and then the change would be made by the big and important component that handles the language of your app. This prevents your app from huge bugs and helps to test easier your code. It also allows you to change your tiny components very easily without any risk.

• Don’t believe the core of your code is your “JS objects”.

The core of your code is the way they communicate. The most important is to have a clear idea of the role of each component and why you architectured your app that way. If you have clean communications between your components, you will definitely have a healthy app.

Nice, thanks a lot, Eliott!

This post was originally published in Chatbots Magazine.

I hope you enjoyed the first part of this article. In this part, I share tips on collaboration and choosing the right partners for your multilingual bot project, and why bother localizing your bot at all — benefits of localization.

# COLLABORATE, IT’S A TEAM EFFORT

Designers will need more than just design tools to do their jobs. […] The reality is: this person doesn’t need to be you, but work with you on that. 

— Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, source: uxdesign.cc

Releasing a scripted polyglot bot is a team effort that takes more than professional dev skills. Your work might expand into such areas as AI, NLP training for other languages, script writing and possibly developing different bot personas for different countries, cultural appropriateness, visuals and text l10n, i18n, and more.

Collaborate with Writers

Building conversational interfaces sparked the demand for a new profession — conversational scriptwriting, and conversational or chatbot writers are increasingly being hired by some of the largest tech companies.

From Google hiring writers from Pixar and The Onion to help build Google Assistant to Microsoft’s Tay bot (not the best example, as it was phased out for its racist attitudes) to Microsoft’s Cortana team, which includes a poet, a novelist, a playwright, and a former TV writer…

Obviously, writing for AI is becoming a quite sought-after job in Silicon Valley.

Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote about this for Washington Post in a more extended piece titled “The next hot job in Silicon Valley is for poets.”

Not only tech giants but also indie devs are following the suit. For example, Humani: Jessie’s Story chatbot was created by Hollywood screenwriters.

It’s clear to me that designing the conversational interfaces is not the property of only design or development teams

To humanize their dialog-based AI/autonomous email assistant, x.ai created an entirely new team role —an AI interaction designer. Diane Kim, a former folklore major from Harvard, who used to direct and star in plays and now an AI interaction designer, says:

Think of an interaction designer for a visual interface — they’re interested in how different arrangements of visual elements (such as typography, color, motion, etc.) may influence users’ actions or behavior. Similarly, I’m just as concerned with how the precise word choice, punctuation, and tone of Amy’s dialog will impact our users’ behavior. […] It’s through these subtle means (whether to use an adverb or not, whether to end a sentence with an exclamation point or a period) that we are able to humanize our autonomous agents.

— Diane Kim, x.ai

Adrian Zumbrunnen, a designer who as an experiment made his website conversational, recounts that writing becomes more and more important for web devs.

“Now, we can see it too — the future of UX design is writing,” writes Leszek Zawadzki (The Rectangles) in his Medium post.

That’s plenty of examples!

And those examples align with the above premise that conversational bots are a team effort and emphasize that skilled foreign language linguists (or comedians, actors etc.) should have a prominent seat at the table.

Invite “Verbal Designers” To The Dev Team

[In 2017] the definition of “design” will loosen up

Cross disciplinary teams will thrive

 — 99U, source

Such developments present chatbot writers with job opportunities in tech. And for brands and bot devs who are in conversational commerce this is an opportunity to engage users on a deeper, more personal level.

Engaging means converting.

Any brand wants to turn conversations into conversions. The converting conversations are not just working but also engaging and actionable. And such conversations between brands and customers need to be designed by writers in order to be engaging.

Devs who care about the top quality and have the budget for it, should team up with chatbot writers who will craft engaging conversations for their bots.

The Gyant bot team hired writers who had written the voices of toys before and partly their team has roots in the game industry. And their users show good engagement. Their dev recounts that 89% “actually go from the first to the last question — that’s 15–20 questions!”

Partner With Translators

Designers, developers and translators. A wonder team. 

— translationisux.com

It comes down to dollars. If money is not an issue then a conversational writer who lives in the country in question and speaks the bot’s original language fluently is ideal.

But not everyone can afford hiring pro scriptwriters for all languages. If you’re on a budget, good specialist translators should do a decent job too.

When you already have that text by a writer that mirrors the bot’s personality, you maybe just need a good translator that can transfer the personality to the new language. That doesn’t need to be a writer. Personality of the bot character is already there and chat text is often modern, simple, and uses youth language, and nothing complicated.

 — Matthias Nannt, chatShopper

Not just any translator will suit such needs, though. Look for ones skilled in creative types of translation (localization, marketing, literary) and those who are willing to become a long-term member of your (remote) team.

Below are just a few cases when having dedicated linguistic partners will prove useful.

Translating User Data and Feedback

You’ll want to understand the data you capture from your users and use it in your analytics.

There will be cases when you’ll want to get feedback and be able to understand it. Conversations are filled with feedback: Users will give it whether they realize they’re doing it or not. Your linguists will help you analyze interactions and learn from them in order to improve the conversation flow and targeting and to train your bot.

Help With User Intent and Trigger Phrases

Linguists with special skills like SEO could help collecting all possible intent phrases that foreign users might type.

For example, using Keyword Planner.

This is a great source of aggregated searches that users regularly perform in Google.

Help with building the vocabulary is obvious.

Also, your linguists can help planning for non-standard language.

Preparing for Non-Standard Language

They’ll help to prepare for sexts, swearing, or gibberish that users will be sending to your bot. They can help with generating or finding obscenities lists in their languages, like these for English, for using those later to detect and properly deal with such messages.

They’ll advise you on text-speak and what words are most likely to be misspelled and how etc.

For typos, they can use an SEO typo generator or similar tool to generate common misspellings and errors

Help in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD)

Today, AI is having a tough time interpreting the context of a human discourse. The same word or phrase in different contexts may acquire different meanings.

When the machine encounters ambiguous phrase, it essentially is playing a statistical guessing game. Even the state-of-the-art in the Supervised Machine Learning field is achieving only about 90% accuracy.

Working with dedicated linguists, you’ll be able to handle those cases when your AI fails to understand the input and keep retraining it.

Researching For Recommendations

If your bot recommends resources from the Web, they must be in the user’s native language (e.g. a chatbot giving movie recommendations).

But if you don’t speak that language, how are you going to find such resources?

You’ll need collaborators who’ll research and find content in their languages.

A long story short: Those are not your translator’s regular services, so you’ll need to find more flexible and dedicated language specialists willing to work with you on such non-standard project.

# INSIDER TIPS ON CHOOSING RIGHT PARTNERS

Onboarding the right people upfront is crucial.

Because your bot’s language skills is it’s core UX you can’t get this wrong: User sentiments and the bot’s value, popularity, and retention will depend on it.

Since I’m from the translation industry and currently managing an indie localization team I know a thing or two about choosing translators. I’ll quickly share insider tips.

Here are your options with my comments:

• Community, crowdsource — free, but it’s a make-it-or-break-it gamble
• Bilingual friends or coworkers — affordable, but hardly the skilled specialists you need for the above tasks
• Professional freelancers — starting to eat your budget; it’s a hit or miss; plus, it requires time and effort to search job boards and review applications, and they might not be available next time you need them
• Translation agency — a big pool of translators, but more expensive: they will charge extra on top of the price for localization because most often they are a company with some staff, and where does the money for their salaries come from if not from the clients/you? Overall, the agency business model works like so: Quote you the highest price and then find the cheapest translators so that their profit is the biggest while trying to deliver quality work. Plus, you almost never know who does the actual job (whether localizers care about your project or more about $, and if they are localizers at all)
• Dedicated translation/localization team — many vetted specialists, so there will be someone available when you need translation again. Such teams usually don’t have extra staff (CEOs, co-founders, marketers, accountants, cleaning ladies) that drives the pricing up which means no additional costs for you as you’ll be working directly with your translators. And you can pick best-suited linguists for your project one by one. In my view, the best, modern, and agile solution.

Let’s not even attempt to put MT on that list, for obvious reasons

No MT shortcuts should be taken

I share more tips in this post I wrote for IndieWatch.

Here’s Max Lobanov’s take on MT (Localization Manager at Google):

Machine translation, crowdsourcing, and all other horizontal activities had the same goal — to reduce the cost of localization. […] The only problem with this approach is that there are no levels of quality. […] Even user feedback at the travel sites needs to be at least grammatically correct as when machine translated they often say the opposite of the original message, just because they were not post edited. So any localization shall be of the “first freshness”.

 — Max Lobanov

His article on pitfalls of taking shortcuts when localizing digital products can be found here.

As previously mentioned, not just any translator will do this kind of job. Look for ones skilled in creative types of translation: website/video game localizers, marketing, audiovisual (with subtitling experience), literary translators and such.

# BENEFITS OF LOCALIZATION

Localization is UX

“Copywriting is Interface Design”. So is translation. 

— translationisux.com

Last but not least.

Adding languages to a bot is sure a challenge, but it’s a benefit for the same reason: You can reach a wider audience, jump ahead of the competition, and take your share of the foreign market before others do it.

People like using things in their native languages, and business owners know this! So, the more languages you can teach your bot, the more clients will be interested in buying your services as a bot dev.

While bots are in their early stages of usefulness, a lot of your potential clients are already realizing that bots is a handy tool and new channel for making money by reaching a lot of people at places they frequent the most — messaging platforms: Bot$.

Website owners (online businesses, e-commerce stores) are realizing that serving customers from around the world your existing content in multiple languages is not enough — you need to provide support to those people in the same language they were browsing your website in. Think multilingual customer support bots.

Marketing agencies are realizing bots give them the abilities similar to email marketing — to reach potential customers directly in a personalized way (one-on-one messages, segmentation, and addressing by the first name). Since most online businesses have international customers, it’s a good idea to start creating and offering them such bots before others catch up to this opportunity. Think conversational commerce bots.

This is the tip of the potential bot devs can tap into if they can build polyglot bots.

It’s not only me.

Makers of PokerBot advise to “translate your bot to different languages” to expand your bot’s reach and list localization as one of the hacks to help your bot get to the top of StoreBot.me. PokerBot is translated into 14 languages.

The ContentRobin bot’s team shares that having dual language interface (Russian and English) helped them expand the bot’s audience. They are not going to stop and plan on adding new languages (Spanish and German first) and forecast it could increase their audience by another 3,000–4,000 active users monthly.

If your bot’s first language is not English, localization is almost a necessity and should pay off better.

Voice-Controlled Bots

Thinking ahead, there are AI devices that speak rather than send text messages (e.g. Google Home), but today they speak only 1–2 languages (Amazon Alexa supports English and Echo also speaks German). There’s a huge potential for teams who’ll make such bots speaking foreign languages.

When localizing such vocal conversational UIs, you’ll need to onboard voice-over artists and the sound design team, but even then, you’ll still need to first write or translate their scripts with linguists’ help.

# FINAL THOUGHTS

Bot localization is in its infancy. No best practices or guidelines exist yet, so now is the time for creative teams to start developing those best practices for multilingual bot development and bot localization.

Brands are just getting started on the conversational bot trend, so this is the perfect time to start offering them the multilingual tools they need.

Start building your polyglot today.

Below are the only few online resources on multilingual bots I’ve been able to find:

1. Internationalize your Messenger Chatbot by Klemens Zleptnig
2. Reach a wider audience with multilingual chatbots by Inbenta
3. How to build a multilingual chatbot for billions of users by Gal Opprnheimer, Built.io

Do you know other resources? Or, do you know other tips on building polyglot bots? Leave them in a comment and I will add them to this article.

Hope you liked this article! If you did, please click 💚 below. And if you digged it and would like to be notified about my next one, please subscribe. Also, join my brand-new Polyglot Bots Facebook group here.

This post was originally published in Chatbots Magazine.

The interactions of the future are not made of buttons. 

— UXdesign.cc

Anyone with or without dev skills can build a simple conversational bot — what Phil Libin of General Catalyst calls a “fart bot.”

But how about building quality polyglot bots?

Even most of the top bots on Product Hunt and elsewhere speak only one language, most often this is English. Multilingual bots are few and far between, and this is for a good reason.

This is partly because bots are in their early days, but it’s also because rolling out a quality social bot able to speak foreign languages and understand them (at least to some degree) is an ambitious project. It takes longer than a weekend to pull off, and is yet to be fully attainable today — the technology needs to take that leap.

In our chat on Facebook, Adit Jain, an indie bot developer, said:

Non AI-based bots with carousels, buttons can be created in other languages with ease as they are just like apps. In the case of AI-based bots, it is a completely different ball game. The amount of work you have to put in is at least 100 times of that. [And for the bot to understand a foreign language] the developer or someone he/she is working with must understand the language for this. 

— Adit Jain, a bot dev

It’s a challenge, but an opportunity too: The more languages you can teach your bot, the more clients will be interested in buying your services as a bot dev.

Adding languages to a bot is a UX problem and not simply the matter of translating all text. Think of it as a redesign project or building new versions of your bot and this approach should help ensure a bug-free, enjoyable UX.

This is a 2-part article. In this part, I’ll share some workflow insights I’ve collected from bot devs and also my localizer’s perspective on building with future localization in mind, shaping a localizable personality, crafting a localizable script, and even the dangers of your bot using certain emojis🙌 when socializing with foreigners.

A short disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of the below startups or developers, nor am I aiming to promote them.

# WORKFLOWS THAT WORKED FOR OTHER BOT DEVS

The chatbot ecosystem is fragmented.

As a dev, you know how many tools, languages, libraries, and platforms there are already. Which ones do you choose?

Below are some workflow ideas I’ve collected from bot developers.

ChatShopper’s Way

In our conversation on Facebook, Matthias Nannt, the founder of chatShopper, shared with me how they build their multilingual bot:

At first we only had the German version of our bot. We are using wit.ai as an NLP system and a Node.js backend for the bot logic. As we started adding multilanguage capabilities, we first replaced the bot answers we stored mainly in wit.ai’s bot-engine with placeholders we resolve in our bot logic based on the language. Then we trained a new wit.ai instance to handle conversations in English (clone of the existing German wit instance with new English training data). For the answers of our bot we also copied the German language file, translated it ourselves, and let a native speaker do some corrections.

We use the locale set by the user in his/her FB profile to choose which languages the user gets and added a language change option to the bot. From that point on, with every change to the bot we needed to make sure, that both wit.ai instances have the same functionality what makes developing and deploying new features more complex. Translating output of an app and a chatbot is nearly the same. You have placeholders in the frontend and language files in the backend that contain the strings used in the app/bot based on the user’s language. The main difference in a conversational interface like we have with our chatbot is that you also have a complex language input by the user that needs to be handled by an NLP engine. So, translating a chatbot is not just translating the output message, but also training an NLP model for the new language.

Developing bots at the moment is a bit more unstructured and you don’t have a fully functional development environment like you have for apps (Android Studio or xCode). You just get messages from Facebook (or other messenger), do something, and send a response back to the user. What you do in the “do something” part is totally up to you. You can choose whatever programming language you like and design it in the way you like. So there are different ways to implement multi-language functionality. But there are existing i18n patterns and plugins for different programming languages that all mainly function the same… It’s kind of best practice. 

— Matthias Nannt, chatShopper

Of course, not all bots will need AI capabilities.

If you opt for NLP, it’s worth remembering that while it may work for English, NLP for other languages doesn’t cope as well.

Visabot’s Way

Here’s how Visabot’s team implemented multilingual capabilities for their bot:

We decided to build a two-language version from the very start and do it from scratch. This approach removes any limitations and constraints which we would inevitably run into had we chosen to go with a bot builder. Speaking of multiple languages, it was relatively easy: During the first interaction, we ask the user their preferable language and show options to choose from. The bot uses that language. The script is stored in a database, and similar to how it’s done for multilingual sites, to ensure the right database architecture, we implemented language selection in the least complicated way. We used a pretty simple approach for building multilingual functionality. But, in principle, there are no limits for creativity here, as the developer works on the server side. It’d be very difficult to achieve the same, if we worked in the builder. Builders are good for those who doesn’t want to code.

The trickiest thing is when a user sends an emoticon or suddenly starts writing in English. 😊 

— Artem Goldman, Visabot

Visabot’s team plans on adding support for Spanish and Chinese next year.

For the cases when your user switches to another language you may use a language detector in your conversations that will recognize a different language based on the percentage of words in an utterance. Then your bot can offer the user to switch to the language with the highest proportion.

One Indie Dev’s Insights

I reached out to Vic Yankoff, who had build polyglot bots before, to learn how he would implement multilinguality. Here’s the gist from our Slack chat:

A great way to localize your chatbot is using Google Translate’s API. Google Translate is not very good about giving accurate grammatical translations, but is excellent about translating keywords which is often good enough for chatbots to understand what the user is asking or saying. I know many people would disagree, but I also like using buttons in my chatbots because they are really easy to localize. With the buttons, the developer knows exactly the meaning and action to take, so the only difficulty is translating the button labels since the postbacks are controlled and known in advance by the developer. Not sure about the other bot platforms, but Facebook makes localization really easy by giving you the language the user is using on Facebook. This is abbreviation like en (English), de (German), sp (Spanish) etc… Each time a new user tries the chatbot, the developer can detect what Facebook language preference they have, and invoke the correct language in the chatbot. Debugging a multilingual bot is entirely different can of worms and something that needs to be done more carefully because you need someone that understands what the user is saying.

The benefits of multilingual bots are enormous. They are hard to get right, but if you succeed, the benefits and number of new users and markets you tap into are astronomical! 

— Vic Yankoff, a bot dev

If you need help adding languages to your bot, Vic will be glad to chat with you. Feel free to reach out to him via his LinkedIn profile.

Make Your Resources Easily Accessible

Plan where is best to store your translation files. Maybe it’s best not to store them in your code repository: your linguists should have access to files early.

If you plan on training the NLP engine, linguists will need a way to come back and make adjustments. Make it easy for editors/linguists to get at the input/output messages, so you can farm off the language editing component to them.

Suggestion: Google spreadsheets integrate well with machine translation — using MT, you can get a fast feel of what is being discussed in the languages you don’t know and the training the linguists are providing.

Here are more insights on the whole process and i18n from Klemens Zleptnig (Toni bot).

When is the Right Time to Start Adding Languages?

Before adding languages ask yourself if your users actually want to talk to your bot in their native languages. For most cases the answer would be yes. It’s a well-known fact that we like using products in our native languages.

To decide which languages to add first, analyze what countries your current users are coming from and what their preferred languages are. Also, consider how strong your competition is in those countries and what your stakes are.

A great idea or product is awesome. But only when it’s timely, might it be worth millions

If you think your bot has big potential, it makes sense to think big, plan ahead, and roll it out in other languages to capture the foreign markets early — before others do this.

Microsoft released WeChat bots in China and Japan (Xiaobing, Xiaoice, Rinna, and Toy) — obviously, Microsoft is poised to bite a piece off the Asia’s bot pie, fast.

Fast, though, doesn’t mean rushing things: Teach your bot one language first. You’re luckier, if you’re a native or proficient English speaker, for obvious reasons.

From my other Facebook conversation:

If there are budgetary constraints and English is your native language, stick to one language version: focus on getting the English chatbot “perfect,” learning what works and what doesn’t, getting to product/market fit for a problem that truly needed solving PRIOR to exporting to other countries and languages. 

— Sat Panesar, a bot writer and dev

This strategy aligns well with a lean startup approach.

In one other chat, Matthias Nannt shared:

Get as much learning as possible in one language and iterate fast. When you are sure what to build and how (and things don’t change that often), build it with i18n in mind so you can always add second (and later third…) language when it makes sense. 

— Matthias Nannt, chatShopper

Learnings: Plan ahead. Start with one-language solution, code it to work with different languages from the start but don’t implement them yet; polish it, constantly tweak the script to improve the flow and responses based on what you’re getting from users; once the concept has been proved, start adding more languages.

# BUILD FOR FUTURE LOCALIZATION

It’d be only fitting here to reemphasize the importance of i18n. Especially to young developers with no prior development experience trying their hand in bot development.

To save yourself the trouble of reworking your code later on, make sure to review established i10n and l10n best practices and transfer them to the area of bot development.

There is a ton of resources online. See, for example, this post written by my fellow team member, or see a small list on the very bottom.

Most of the advice will be, if not directly applicable, very helpful when building, especially when building from scratch.

Before releasing, test your bot’s UI against l10n and i18n bugs. Implementing i18n and testing should help you avoid some common localizability (l12y) bugs — such issues as croppings/overlaps, wrong date/currency formats, missing characters.

Build “foreign first:” It’s very difficult to retrofit me once I have been created

# CRAFTING A LOCALIZABLE SCRIPT

A lot of users responded [to the bot] as they would to a human, and when they got non-human responses, they’d stop using it. 

— The Guardian team

It’d be wrong to assume your bot’s responses will work in other languages after localization just because they do in the main language. Below are just a few examples of areas where things can go wrong and suggestions for improvement.

Variables and Different Word Forms

You might want to take the user’s input and use it in your bot responses at runtime; however, taking a word or phrase out of context and putting it into another sentence works fine in English, but breaks in other common languages. This will give away the feeling of speaking to a dumb machine when your bot’s goal is to speak the least robot-like.

Many languages have inflections and cases, so where in English you have one form of a word, in other languages there can be a variation (form) of this word and in another context yet another variation.

Here’s an example of using user’s intent as a variable going south in localization (and I’ve seen a very similar one actually being used in one bot builder docs):

The same exchange in Russian, simply using the user’s input and not accounting for the case change, results in a wrong grammar use:

How to improve: In your code, instead of placeholders/variables (unless the bot has been coded to handle this properly) use full sentences and send those to localizers. Also don’t reuse a string in different contexts as it might get an opposite meaning.

If using placeholders (variables), add comments for your localizers explaining what each placeholder will be showing:

You may also use graphic elements instead.

For example, when giving a selection of pizza toppings, you might just need a few images or emojis. Besides, this way, the user will need to type less.

Some icons might have a different meaning in other countries or foreign users simply might not recognize an icon because in their country designers use a different one.

A good localizer will advise you if there’s any problem with any icons or emojis in their culture or simply will localize it as any other content — replace it with a more suitable one.

Another example is from Roll bot (a group chat bot from Kik devs), that uses variables to make it more human-like and personal. When a user is being offensive to Roll, the bot reacts “with a response that substitutes in the name of the user who produced the offending content.”

While bot’s responses work fine in English, they wouldn’t work that nice in inflected languages (all Slavic languages are, Japanese too) like Russian and Ukrainian (native for me). When the bot simply reuses the user’s intent, unless it has been coded to handle this, the user’s name will be in a wrong case (grammatical form) in these bot’s responses:

I’ll be taking questions from <name> less serious from now on…

Can someone besides <name> ask me something?

This is just an example for illustration purposes, Roll hasn’t been localized into other languages.

How to improve: Don’t rely heavily on variables. Think about showing visuals instead of text. But remember, some images, icons, and emojis might not be suitable in certain countries — more on this below.

Expansion

While it’s very tempting to use carousels, buttons, and quick responses (they ensure user input is consistent and you save the user from typing etc., thus reducing friction), but it’s a room for UI bugs introduced during localization if you don’t plan ahead.

For example, Messenger allows only up to 80 characters in title and subtitles, everything that exceeds that will have to be reworked. Remember to point this out to localizers (e.g. add localization comments), otherwise, you’ll have to get back to them and ask for shorter versions (from experience, this happens quite often).

Here are Messenger’s detailed guidelines on sizes for titles and subtitles (and image dimensions).

Other places to watch for croppings: calls to action, carousels, conversable forms (HTML-like elements such as checkboxes, checkmarks, and radio buttons in chat bubbles), and in persistent menu buttons.

Croppings or overlaps are common UI bugs. A developer from Mozilla actually statistically calculated how much text expands after translation.

A chart to the right shows proportions for different languages (English is 0 and those are language ISO codes).

The chart to the left illustrates that only a handful of languages are more concise than English according to this dev’s effort. Here’s the original post with findings.

Devs can use this chart to estimate text expansion.

If you have the UI mockups with all the text in place, you’d make localizers happy if you sent those to them.

This way they could not only see the text in context, but could even translate in context by opening them in an editor and seeing how much room they had.

One more tip: John Saito suggests using Google Spreadsheets in combination with the GoogleTranslate function to approximate translation lengths: You can quickly machine translate your strings in multiple languages to get the feel of how much leeway you need to have.

How to improve: Follow best practices, avoid verbosity, be concise when writing for your bot. In bot responses, you may want to use non-text elements like images, video (Messenger and Telegram), audio (Messenger, Telegram, and Sequel), and icons/emojis instead of text. If using buttons or quick responses, account for text expansion and make sure to provide localizers with character limits they should stick to.

Give Your Bot a Gender

If your bot is a native English speaker, it’s understandable if you didn’t even think about what gender your bot is. But when translating into certain languages, the gender question will be hard to avoid.

Some parts of your script might be untranslatable unless your translators know whether your bot is female or male. In many languages pronouns, verbs, nouns etc. have different forms depending on the gender (yep, English is that gender-friendly).

In something simple like “I’ve told you,” the gender-neutral ‘told’ in other languages will be translated differently depending on whether your bot is female or male

Translators might be able to find a creative walk-around solution, but not all the time.

One example of a gendered bot: Microsoft made its Toy bot to be a 19-year old American girl.

The fate of Toy bot is also an example that slipping in delicate matters, be it gender or politics, can have most unpleasant consequences (it was phased out shortly after the release).

How to improve: Be sure to plan ahead prior to writing the original script and tell your translators upfront whether your bot is female or male. Giving it the neuter gender will most likely raise eyebrows (it does in Russian and Ukrainian).

Avoid Using Machine Translation

And if you decided to use Machine Translation, be aware that your bot might become sexists for the same grammatical reasons as above.

When translating from gender-neutral to gender-specific languages (and vice versa), statistical MT will inevitably have to attribute this or that gender, thus it’ll be essentially playing statistical guessing games (leaning towards masculine). And because AI has trouble getting the context, this issue is hardly programmable.

How to improve: Even though Neural MT is making strides, for now, rely your business on human translators. If you’re on budget, consider using a hybrid MT+escalated human in-chat translation; there are such solutions on the market already.

Emojis Can Get Dangerous 😈

A UK-based language company recently ran a job advert — Emoji localizer needed. The responsibilities would involve “explaining cross-cultural misunderstandings in the use of the mini pictures.”

Emojis help eliminate ambiguity and add context and emotional layer to the conversation. If mishandled, though, they can spark an international brawl… or just a frown.

SwiftKey did an extensive research on emojis use in various countries. Here are some of the findings of interest in this delicate area (a professional localizer will be sure to use these in their work):

• Substitute smiley faces with hearts for French users: 55% of emojis sent in French are hearts vs. 8% in English and US Spanish, where smiley faces prevail
• LGBT emojis are OK in the USA, but you’ll want to forgo them for some other countries
• Alcohol-themed emojis are high in Australia and the US, but limit their use when localizing for Turkey and Arabic countries.

To avoid any cultural inappropriateness, consult your linguists, as there are gestures that might be misunderstood abroad.

You might also want to instruct your linguists to consider even the color of human-themed emojis.

This must be an important issue if Apple has introduced racially diverse emojis in iOS and Slack introduced a welcoming hand that doesn’t discriminate, among others.

How to improve: Have reliable linguists and discuss with them. Instead of emojis, consider using your chatbot’s images with different facial expressions or body gestures.

Limit Topics Your Bot Responds To

After a failure with Toy (which caused controversy with its racist and unpleasant comments, leaving the company with no choice but to phase it out), Microsoft released a new bot, Zo, which refuses to converse about politics.

Zo refuses to discuss political topics and responds,

“People can say some awful things when talking politics so I do not discuss.”

Consult your linguists on topics that should be avoided in the countries you’re targeting to avoid the fate of Toy.

Some more suggestions on scripting a conversational polyglot bot:

• Limit jargon, humor, sarcasm, and similar witty language: Those are not translation-friendly and often doesn’t translate well. However, adding humor and wit will help to avoid the robotspeak and make your chatbot sound more human-like. So, if you want to include jokes or puns, make sure they are at least understandable and suitable in the countries you are targeting
• Limit pop culture references, memes: They might not be familiar for users from other countries; or tell linguists to replace those with relevant memes from their cultures. When in Rome, do as the Romans do
• Ban gendered pronouns from bot’s speech: This is unless you know if the person on the other end of the conversation is a man or woman. For example, X.ai’s scheduling bot is programmed not to use any gendered pronouns because its makers “don’t want to burn a bridge with anyone by calling them a he when you’re talking to a woman, or vice versa”
• Remind linguists to be as concise as possible because translated text will expand: No one likes to read walls of text. The bot should speak in single digestible sentences
• Remind linguists to keep the character count low: As a chatbot lives within a chat, every character counts: Try to use short 1–2-syllable words and ask the linguists to do the same where possible
• Avoid complicated grammar structures, better simple than failing.
• Further reading by John Saito of Dropbox on localizable UX writing and designing words.

# LOCALIZING PERSONALITY

More chat-y, less bot-y. 

— XandraLabs slogan

Your bot might be working and able to carry on quite extended conversations, yet users might not want to reengage with it.

Giving it a personality will up your game. Of course, not all bots will need personalities, but having it should help improve retention (something that bots are struggling with) and virality.

It’s important to give your bot a proper, foreign-friendly name; that is a name which is not associated with anything uncool or downright offensive in the countries you localize for. 

You know this localization tale about Chevy Nova, perpetuated by many translation vendors and marketers? As claimed, Nova translates into Spanish as “no go” or “doesn’t go” which spoiled sales for GM in Spanish countries. This “tale” has been debunked, but still serves as a good reminder.

Consider creating different bot personas for different countries but remember about cultural differences.

For example, when attributing some animal image to your bot (metaphorizing), take into account that in different countries there are different connotations associated with different animals.

Or when targeting South Asian audiences, you might want to soften the bot’s image and adjust emojis and visuals (there are studies on this difference in localizing for the East and West).

Share with localizers all the details about your bot personas and their personalities and remind localizers to retain them.

Tone and Empathy Matter

The Guardian found people can be turned off if the experience is too robot-like or casual, so they opted for a polite tone. X.ai found empathy and compassion help their AI assistant, Amy, achieve her goal (getting the meeting scheduled).

Besides sounding less “bot-y,” your bot’s tone should match your company’s voice or simply be suitable for your bot persona. This shouldn’t be lost or altered during the localization — remind your localizers to keep the right tone.

A bot for a legal company shouldn’t speak like a bro. And a bot giving bar recommendations shouldn’t speak like a corporate consultant.

Similar to the traditional app development practice, you may use different tone depending on the message type (e.g. system messages vs. chatting).

Create a styleguide, or “toneguide,” and give it to your foreign wordsmiths.

Let them know who your ideal audience is: They should already be familiar with how that audience communicates in their countries and should imitate that when crafting the script. If not, you might want to instruct them to study conversations between people that represent your target audience prior to writing or localizing your script.

Localize for Human Emotion

Designing for human emotion is a well-known guideline in the dev and design world. This is something you already are doing as a bot dev, but it is as important that your linguists follow it when writing or localizing the script.

Personality is the mysterious force that attracts us to certain people and repels us from others.

 — Aarron Walter, source

When done right, you bot’s personality will evoke emotions and thus will help keep users engaged. The more natural it feels, the more enjoyable the experience is.

For example, Amazon’s Alexa has very human “hmm’s” and “um’s” in her responses. Apple’s Siri assistant knows how to crack a joke and can beatbox upon request.

The personality your bot exudes is what will be upping it’s rankings and virality.

The job of your linguists is to correctly translate that personality and such little traits like above for users in other countries making sure all is as relevant and engaging.

If your team does a good job, people might be actually saying “thanks” to your bot like to a human.

Some good resources on developing for localization:

• Twelve Commandments of Software Localization by Zack Grossbart, Smashing Magazine
• Build Apps for the World by Apple
• IBM Globalization Design Guidelines
• MDN Localization Content Best Practices

Hope you enjoyed it! In the second part, I share tips on collaboration and choosing the right partners for your multilingual bot project, and why bother localizing your bot at all — benefits of localization.

If you liked this post, please click 💚 below. And if you digged it and would like to be notified about my next one, hit subscribe. Also, join my brand-new Polyglot Bots Facebook group here.

Recently, I was interviewed by folks from SoGoodGaming, "self-proclaimed gaming specialists" as their website says. The site itself is a great source for independent opinions, news, and reviews for everyone interested in the indie game scene.

The interview was done via Facebook (a very indie way) and touched such topics as what game localization is about, its challenges, the Indie Localizers Team and game localization in general. The original interview was published on the SoGoodGaming website.

INTRO: UNLOCK NEXT LEVEL

When your game’s taking off nicely—a steady rise from obscure realms of the underground to the bright spotlight—and sees more weekly downloads and fans that you’ve ever dreamed of, you surely feel like celebrating.

And you certainly should, but also it is the time to think big and unlock the next level of your Game.

It is the time, much like a savior, to bring your game to distant lands and enlighten all their inhabitants who speak weird languages and are forced by Dark Babylon to play games only in those languages and to forever live in darkness about your Game.

The only way to accomplish that mission is to teach your game those weird languages. Luckily, there are mercenaries who’ll help you along the way (you want to ally with them)—they call themselves the IL Team.

They’ll help you release polyglot games.

FAN OR PRO?

Let’s assume you’ve accepted the challenge and set off on a mission to bring your game to distant countries—who would you partner with to teach your game new languages?

Here are your options:

• Engage your fans
• Translate it yourself (only if you’re a polyglot)
• Task your bilingual friends or coworkers
• Hire professional localizers

(Let’s not even put MT on this list, for obvious reasons)

If you’re an indie dev, you’d go with the free option: it’s the best when you’re on a small budget, right?

Hold on, not so fast—it might turn out less favorable option for you than the paid one!

In this post, I’d like to offer one more option which might seem utopian at first glance:

• Fans doing pro quality localization

Also, I’ll show examples from the past of the consequences of opting for free localization and briefly talk about the value of pro localization.

PROFESSIONALS VS. FANS

All this talk about quality is not just a marketing pitch.

A decision between fan and pro localization is hard, but it’s really about making it or breaking it.

See this tweet from Clyde Mandelin, the author of the Legends Of Localization blog:

If you're thinking of getting Breath of Fire II off the eShop in the near future, this is important to know! I learned it the hard way 😵 pic.twitter.com/oyEWymss5s

— Mato (@ClydeMandelin) October 21, 2016

Localization error impeding the gameplay

The error above could have been avoided easily if the localizer was proficient in Japanese.

Localization done right will save you from outcomes like this one and discussions like this one, but rather generate players’ feedback like this one or this one.

Or, to give a visually stimulating example, would you rather your fans were like this (when localization doesn’t make sense):

Or like this (when the localization doesn’t impede the gameplay and the UX is great):

Reviews and Retention

When done right, localization generates better fan reviews which means fewer negative reviews/comments in app stores/on forums and higher retention rates.

Source: Medium

And you’d definitely want to avoid the cultural and legal clashes Microsoft and other big makers went through with their games.

The same also holds true when it comes to chatbots, since all the UX is grounded in bot’s “conversational skills,” or its fluency, and the effectiveness of the conversation. User retention will surely suffer if your bot’s foreign language skills are not there and the messages feel stiff.

And, of course, no MT translation shortcuts should be taken. Here’s Max Lobanov’s take on MT (he is Localization Manager at Google for Russia and Eastern Europe):

And many times I’ve seen job posts on freelance job boards, wherein an inopportune website owner looked for localization reviewers to fix the previous localizers’ work—in the end, ending up paying more for localization.

Why not do right the first time by hiring decent specialists?

These were just a few quick points that illustrate the value of pro localization and dangers of going with free and quick.

Fans doing pro quality localization? Possible

Let’s go back to that localization option which does seem unreal at first glance.

Ever wanted your fans produced top-bracket translations? It’s possible with a localization team that embodies the dedication of your fans and the skills of professionals.

I’m happy to be part of a cool indie team that united professional localizers, SEOs, developers, and testers.

We like to think of us as your fan base producing professional results: Many of us have dev background and/or are die-hard gamers, which means we’ll care when working on your game.

You might wanna ask, why are you, guys, so special? Well, let me elaborate on that. Actually, let me share with you a quick insider’s look at the translation industry.

When localizing with agencies, you never know if localizers care about your game or more about $, and if they are localizers at all (as compared to regular translators) and have what it takes… Plus the agency will often try to quote you the highest price and then find the cheapest translators so that their profit is the biggest.

Is this really so? Well, This is how the agency business model works.

Plus agencies often have an in-house or remote staff that needs to get their salaries. Where do their salaries come from? Well, from charging extra on top of the price for localization…

Our team is not your traditional agency with a pool of hundreds, if not thousands, of per-project-minded and per-need hired translators and a full-house staff. In our business model, there are no middlemen (the agency staff) that drive the pricing up. That’s why there is no additional costs for you as you’ll be working directly with your translators.

To be objective here, some agencies do have their own strong incentives. But also not without pain points, which our team solves.

So you should consider wisely: Are there really strong incentives for you to work with an agency or you should go with an indie localization team?

And when localizing with the help of fans, there is a big room for very pricey errors. Localization is a complex undertaking and it should be done by localization specialists.

As we also say on our website, we are not translators, we are localizers with years of experience localizing websites, apps, games, bots, and such. The room for mistake gets slim then.

MEET THE IL TEAM

LOCALIZERS, SEOS, DEVELOPERS, TESTERS

The Indie Localizers Team is a ragtag squad of specialists passionate about websites, apps, bots, video games, and, of course, localization: professional translators, SEOs, developers, and QA/localization/play testers who teamed up to take on more complex and challenging localization jobs that otherwise would’ve been out of reach for mere solo freelancers.

“Indie” fits nicely in the name of our team and it’s in our internal culture too. Our team was created out of the desire to be independent. As an indie dev, you certainly hear us.

Read this blog post to learn more about our values and views.

By the way, if you’ve had your app or game professionally localized, it’s quite likely that you’ve worked with us before without knowing us. We’re the localizers behind most well-known translation companies that you, game devs, might be well-familiar.

Things have changed.

We were faceless then, now we have faces!

TRIVIA

Localization Speak

Come join our Facebook group, Localization Speak, a fledging forum of sorts where devs and locs can meet, share advice, and learn from each other about launching better products.

Follow us on Twitter, we tweet about loc’n, startups, tech, SEO, growth, promotion, and not only.

By Artem Nedrya,

from The Indie Localizers Team

As an indie business owner, you most probably don’t have a dedicated marketing staff and you do all the marketing, promoting, finding leads etc. yourself. We hope this post will prove helpful in your efforts!

When client hunting on social media it’s important to remember that most people use social media for entertainment and socializing, and any blatant marketing or pitching can be very annoying. Speak like a real person, not like a corporation, be helpful and friendly, and refrain from openly pushing your brand. Telling a joke or sharing a funny GIF will help in that. Also, when on social media, be social and network with people. That’s probably the trickiest part.

Do not simply shoot tweets left and right every day. Tweet your thoughts, ideas—people like such profiles much more, no one wants to follow a marketing machine or a Twitter robot, and it’s unlikely they want to do business with people behind such accounts. Whenever you tweet an article from the Web, offer your opinion, include your comment or just an emoji.

Let’s start with some basics and move on to more outside-the-box techniques that we use in our marketing efforts:

FOLLOWING AND HASHTAGS

It’s advisable to follow your potential clients to attract their attention. They might follow back and then they’ll see your future tweets. And we find it more rewarding to follow real people versus brands. If you haven’t done so yet, determine who your potential clients are.

Hashtags work like streams: The tweet with a hashtag will be automatically posted in the relevant stream (or feed) and many more relevant people will find out about you and some will surely follow. If you don’t use hashtags, no one will see your tweets apart from your followers.

Research has shown that hashtags can double the engagement with your tweets and that 2-4 hashtags is the optimal number of hashtags in a tweet.

TWEET MORE THAN ONCE

Another tip is to tweet important content (read your blog posts) twice or three times a day, not just once. Some studies have shown that any link you share on Twitter or Facebook will become irrelevant after 3 hours, as it gets buried down in the feed.

Once tweeted out, you may delete the previous identical tweet so that your feed looks neat and clean with no duplicates.

MENTION

And if your article has reviews or references to well-known companies or products, a smart tactic would be to include hashtags with the name of that company or product (or DM’ing that company directly): That company probably has a large user base, imagine the exposure you’ll get if someone from that company retweets or mentions you.

@Artjaazz Oh my goodness! SO grateful to be included here, Artem! 😍 -Julia

— Buffer (@buffer) August 27, 2016

Another cool tactic: If you do cold contacting on Twitter, before sending your DM to the client, visit their website, visit their blog, and if you liked a blog post or two, tweet those mentioning the company’s Twitter account (using @). They will definitely like this and might retweet you etc.

AUTOMATE

Use Buffer or similar. The registration is free and you can connect up to 3 accounts. Buffer allows to save time by automating sharing on social media: use it to schedule your tweets a week ahead, this means you won’t have to worry about tweeting every day and can move it to the back of your mind.

See how I’ve scheduled 2-3 tweets for every day of the week:

Plus, with the Buffer browser extension, you can quickly tweet any snippet of text or an image you come across while net surfing. Simply highlight or right-click it and push the Buffer button, and your tweet will be added to your queue.

USE PICTURES

Make sure you add a picture in every tweet, as such tweets are more engaging. A tweet with a picture gets more retweets, @-replies, and mentions, and generally performs much better than a tweet with no pictures.

I realize you may not have that many pictures readily available, and this is when Buffer (or similar) comes in handy as well. When you tweet or schedule with Buffer you will see the “Create a picture” option, and that’s a handy function I mentioned above: You can quickly search for a stock picture, add some tagline, save it on your PC, and then conveniently drag and drop it into your Buffer tweet—done.

See how quickly I schedule a tweet and create and paste a picture:

DESCRIPTION

The Twitter description should make it clear what your business is about, and the clients should realize at a glance that what you tweet is something useful for them. 

It’s best to use a real picture of real you (or at least an avatar) versus your logo. You may publish your logo and branding in the cover picture (the big background picture).

The description should give away the feeling that behind this Twitter profile there is a real interesting person who offers original ideas and not a marketing robot.

Include your website address or contact details right in the description.

This address will be shown on the preview of your account on the Twitter search results page and in other places like email notifications. This way your potential client is more likely to engage and visit your website.

This is a screenshot of an email notification, note the website address:

Another small tip is to use relevant hashtags right in the description so that your profile shows up in search results. Although this may be frowned upon by some.

IFTTT

We have used auto thank-you tweets before using IFTTT but then opted not to, as some people perceive them negatively (we certainly hear them).

Instead, consider using these IFTTT recipes:

• Automatically tweet tagged articles in Pocket (tip: add hashtags)
• Automatically tweet new articles favorited in Pocket (tip: add hashtags)
• Automatically tweet new articles favorited in Feedly (tip: add hashtags)
• Automatically save links from favorited tweets to Pocket (for later reading, a self-development tip)

MASTER ADVANCED SEARCH

There are more advanced techniques that help to automate client hunting on Twitter.

By using Twitter advanced search in tandem with IFTTT, you can automate the process of finding leads. Read this article, if you want to be a pro.

TWEET AT THE RIGHT TIME

Time of the day and the day of the week you tweet is also important. The article boils down to the following.

The best times to tweet for engagement are quite the inverse of the most popular times to tweet.

The latter is around noon when people are on the smartphones during the lunch time, and the former late at night when the competition is small:

As you see tweets posted around 9:00 p.m. in the U.S. on average earn the most retweets and favorites.

Tweets sent between 2 and 3am earn the most clicks: Non-peak hours are the top time to tweet for clicks and on average tweets earn the most engagement.

Besides the Buffer’s, there have been other large-scale studies by various social media outlets, which, to be honest, showed quite different results.

Here is a run-down of the most important findings:

• Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends.
• For B2B marketers, it’s not surprising that weekdays see 14% more engagement over weekends.
• Rakacreative’s study found that Twitter gets the most traffic between 9am and 3pm.
• When optimizing for clicks, research from bit.ly showed that the best time to tweet is 1–3pm.
• In line with that, Twitter found that users are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute.
• Another research from KISSmetrics also says noon and 5-6pm are the best times, and retweets have been shown to be highest around 5pm.

So in the end, what you want to do is to schedule your tweets around the times these studies suggest. One thing to keep in mind is that you should correlate the times based on the time zones of your target follower base, not your own time zone.

Besides the above considerations, there are tools out there that tell you when your followers are expected to be most active on Twitter so that you can be there at that time too.

TWITTER LISTS

Consider creating lists in Twitter and grouping users you follow in those lists. There are many uses for Twitter lists, for example, see this article (especially the uses #7 and 8). Tools like SocialRank, TweetDeck, and Audiense help managing lists and also give insights on your Twitter follower base.

And with IFTTT you can set up recipes and automate Twitter lists creation based on whether someone mentions you on Twitter, what they favorite, and so on.

USE SHORTCUTS

Speed up your tweeting with keyboard shortcuts (press ? on the keyboard when on a Twitter page):

UNFOLLOW

If you follow the tip #1 from our list, it’s very easy to flood your Twitter feed with unrelated tweets from users that are either irrelevant to you, tweet too much, or are brands. Consider unfollowing them along with any inactive accounts. There are tools like ManageFlitter that were designed exactly for this purpose.

We hope this post will be helpful to you!

Visit our official Twitter account to see how we tweet or say hi.

We will be writing more of similar content on SEO, localization, and other topics, so be sure to subscribe to our blog.

The Indie Localizers Team

We are thrilled about the launch of our brand-new website and our blog!

We plan to regularly publish new articles that would be of interest to business owners, indie developers, fellow localizers, and just anyone interested in all things business, SEO, modern technology, video games, and, of course, localization.

In this post, we’d like to introduce our team and sketch out some of our core values and views.

BLUE IS THE NEW COLOR OF INDIE

The main idea behind our team is that together we are more competitive than on our own. Our nouveau team wants to be more dynamic and reactive in today’s business landscape and, of course, we want to be more competitive. When we, freelance translators, work on our own, we stand little chance of getting a direct localization client since in most cases we can offer support for only one language.

As solo freelancers, we compete here with big companies that have the resources, and increasingly often the technology, to take on multi-language projects from top-bracket clients. Therefore, it’s much less headache for a client to hand over the job to a company that will manage simultaneous localization into several languages than to seek multiple translators from each target geography and manage all of them.

That is unless we work as a team. Then, with the right approach, indie translators stand a good chance.

STEERING FREE

Our team was incepted three months ago out of the realization that things don’t have to be the way they are and out of the desire to be independent—take the helm of our careers in our own hands and not rely on anyone else’s whim or preferences. We know all too well that being mere freelancers in a pool of hundreds, if not thousands, of similar fellow translators employed by an agency, we are easily replaceable and our value, therefore, is diminished.

If we take a look deeper down, Indie Localizers embody a core principle which is a well-known old truth: Together we are more than the sum of us.

Our indie spirit has a liberating feeling to it, but we realize there are big challenges and risks associated with going solo.

LOCALIZERS, NOT TRANSLATORS

Because localization is a complex undertaking and there is a big room for very pricey errors, it should be done by localization specialists. As we say on our website, we are not translators, we are localizers. Individually, we all have years of experience localizing websites, apps, games, and such. Many of us are also experienced in translating marketing, legal, business, and other content.

Being indies, we have to be more than just localizers and manage all the workflow on our own. Therefore, many of us have more than one role.

Not Your Typical Agency

We’re sustainable, being a virtual team with no physical office. And with hoffices around the globe, you can get in touch with us day or night, and one of us will get back to you shortly

Self-Organized

Our team was created out of the desire to be independent. As a solopreneur or an indie dev, you certainly hear us. Let’s do something cool together

Self-Managed

We manage all the workflow on our own and have different roles: project lead, social media marketer, accountant, Twitter admin, client success manager etc

Versatile

To deliver a comprehensive service, we have to be web developers, copywriters, designers, and illustrators. And because we partner with SEOs and testers, we got that covered too

LOCALIZERS, SEOS, DEVELOPERS, TESTERS

Because localization is much more than pure, linguistic translation and can get quite technical we’ve partnered with experienced SEOs and developers. Their job is to advise you (and us), perform SEO on your product, and provide technical assistance when needed and as a premium feature. After all, being a localization team means being able to provide a comprehensive localization service so that you don’t have to look elsewhere.

Initially, Indie Localizers were devised as a tight-knit team composed of translators passionate about localization. It was later on that we’ve on-boarded SEOs, testers, and developers to offer the client a more comprehensive service and give an extra edge to our indie team.

We want our clients come to us and not having to look elsewhere to cover their additional needs, such as SEO or dev support.

This is an important point and it was a nice move we made, as entering new markets is not just about localizing a client-facing UI and translating top-level marketing content into more languages. It’s about tuning up your product or service to new cultures in new locales, making it easily discoverable in SERPs by local people, grabbing their hearts and souls, and ensuring you are where your prospects are, or going to be, by localizing your online ads, social media profiles, landing pages, email campaigns etc.

All along we aim to make the whole localization project as smooth as possible, in part by ruling out an unnecessary hassle and extra time you would have to spend finding non-linguistic specialists when you need SEO or tech support.

LOCALIZATION AND SEO: INSEPARABLE TOGETHER

Localization without a proper SEO research seems unimaginable in the age when being on the first page of search results is equal to whether your clients will know about your existence or not.

Take keyword localization for app stores that so many language companies offer today. It’s clear that simply translating all keywords won’t work.

The idea is to research the best ranking keywords that local people actually use and then implement them in all localizations, website structure or store metadata, descriptions etc. Not just localize keywords from language A to language B. Therefore, the whole term “keyword localization” doesn’t reflect the reality, as keywords are not being localized, but rather researched and implemented.

“Keyword research and implementation in localization” seems to be a more proper term. And many language companies do not offer SEO service at all, or simply advise clients to “do their homework,” meaning do a research on their own or hire third-party SEOs.

While this can be done by a freelance localizer with proper SEO skills, it’s best to employ a market-savvy SEO expert who’ll share research results with the localizer and the localizer will deliver an optimized product to the client. This is the workflow that our dynamic team adopted and will be following.

Comprehensive doesn’t mean extensive: Although we offer a comprehensive localization, Indie Localizers do not currently support such services as voice-overs and redesign.

TRANSPARENCY

Besides the core services (l10n, SEO, l10n testing, and dev support), we offer something that few language companies do—total leverage over who is going to work on your project. You may visit our personal pages and actually review qualification of each localizer, SEO, developer, or tester and only then decide whether you want to award a project to us.

Also, we give you a way to pick the team members who in your opinion are best-suited for the project. And that’s a pretty cool thing about ILs. Our team is based on transparency and trust.

And because we don’t have offices with the numerous staff you don’t pay overhead. Be sure that the pricing reflects only services you seek and is not pushed up to cover the staff’s salary.

To learn more about us and see our faces, visit Our Team page on our brand-new website that we’ve built using exclusively our own talent and have recently happily launched.

The Indie Localizers Team,

One Team To Take You Global

EMAIL SOFTWARE

• Nylas N1

https://www.nylas.com/
https://github.com/nylas/N1

Built by developers, for developers... and everyone.

An extensible, open-source email client with some smart features like:

Click Tracking (for tracking clicks on links in your emails), Read Receipts (as shown in this Medieval Reaction's tweet, but way faster...), Send Availability (send your availability for the week ahead by click-and-dragging to select available time slots), Mail Merge (allows to easily send a customizable individual email to many recipients), Quick Replies (templates with a very handy functionality, whereas you can quickly customize your templates before sending, e.g. put the client's name, change rates, language pair, service, or areas of specialization), Unified Inbox (mail from multiple accounts in one folder), Send Later, and Snooze. It comes with PGP Encryption, a must-have encryption functionality for online communication in our era of omnipresent surveillance.

Update: As of November 2016, Nylas team added a bunch of other nice features like: 

• reminders for sent messages if no one replies (for following up with your clients; pictured) 
• a multi-language spellchecker
• social sharing of email threads
• Salesforce plugin

And new features and plugins are being developed and added by the dev community; here is a public Trello board for tracking the development process.

Because any indie developer can extend Nylas N1's functionality, it can go a long way, just like Google Chrome has become a monster of a browser thanks to apps and extensions added by the community.

A stand-alone desktop or mobile app that used to be free. Currently, those who registered before May 1 will enjoy a one-year free license, others will need to purchase Nylas N1 Pro.

License: Select free and paid licenses, open-source

• Proton Mail

Free secure and anonymous email with end-to-end encryption from Switzerland. It works in your browser or on iOS/Android.

Paid options are available with more storage and a custom domain.

• Missive

A single application for email and team chats. Currently, it supports Mac only.

License: Free and paid plans are coming

• Trackbuster

A little cloud-based service to protect our privacy. Here is a quick description from the developer's website:

Your emails are being tracked. Automatically untrack them and find out who tracks you. Trackbuster™ prevents stalkers from tracking and monitoring your inbox activity without your permission.

I find this tool very cool, the only thing it didn't get along with Nylas N1. Sorting email didn't work well for me in that letters which were supposed to skip the Gmail inbox and land in a designated folder after being untracked ended up in my inbox anyway. Probably, as the tool matures, this will be fixed.

Currently, being phased out and transitioned to Senders.

License: Free for everyone to use, no nonsense

• Unroll.me

Having been overflooded with emails for quite some time, now I am a proud owner of an elusive inbox zero.

This is in part thanks to this smarty-pants service. It integrates into your email client and works behind the scenes bundling up certain mail in a daily "roll-up," which appears as a single letter in your inbox. You have full leverage over what mail gets "rolled-up." Of course, the same can be achieved with Gmail labels; however, this tool makes it a less boring experience. 

Available as a folder in your email client, in your browser, or as an iOS app.

License: Free for everyone

• Streak

A browser-based tool with some powerful functionality that claims to convert an email client into a full-blown CRM. Allows us to create a database of leads or prospects, converted clients, rejected clients etc.

One possible use I can think of is tracking client acquisition. It makes possible to track which clients we've sent offers to, who's responded, who is yet to respond, and who's accepted our offer and become a paying client.

Freelancers can follow their application process with agency clients: Tracking which agencies you've applied with, agencies you've rejected, tests waiting for results etc. However, I didn't get to use this one yet. In part because I prefer desktop email applications over browser-based ones: They are more responsive/do not lag, the UI is slicker, and this way, there is one open tab fewer in my browser.

License: Free and paid plan

• Clearbit

A Chrome extension that works as a global address book for Gmail.

• MailClark

An email bot-clerk for Slack.

Allows your team to communicate via email as you would do regularly, but without leaving Slack.

• unSend.it

When we send a wrong email to a wrong person.

• SignEasy

When an agency client sends us a document to sign.

BETTER WRITING & BLOGGING

If you're running a blog in English, these are the tools you might wanna be using:

• Writefull

This is a light-weight app that gives you an idea how good your writing is by proofing your text against databases of professionally-written texts. From their website:

Writefull uses large language databases to search for the frequency of chunks of text. The three databases used are Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Web. All you need to do is select a chunk of text (in whatever writing tool you use), activate the Writefull popover, and request the information you need. 

It works in any text-based tool, including MS Word and Gmail. Available in desktop Windows, Linux, and iOS beta versions.

License: Free for everyone

• Reedsy

A cloud-based beautiful tool for writing, editing, and publishing with features like collaborative editing, commenting, track changes, and more.

License: It's free for everyone

• Airstory

A software for writers, bloggers, and the like. Those who are looking to improve their writing will surely find it helpful.

Currently in beta.

• Hemingway App

One more great tool to make our writing bold and clear.

License: Paid

• Grammarly

A smart spell checker that, according to creators of this tool, "can spot 10 more errors than a word processor." It seamlessly works in a browser as we type, as a browser-based text editor, and a Windows desktop application. There is also an MS Office Add-on. 

License: Free

• Draft

Collaborative web tool for writers and the like.

License: Free

SELF-DEVELOPMENT

For every professional self-development should be a non-stop endeavor. By reading advice from veteran freelancers, we get practical guidance and learn first-hand how to improve in our solo careers.

• Domino Spot

A platform devised by Brooklyn-based creatives with "step-by-step guides to help freelancers get stuff done, written by people who have been there and done it."

Besides the wealth of advice, there is a helper Dominode for guidance and Domino Fast Track for innovative tracking and invoicing.

License: Free

• FreelanceLift

Freelancer community with forums, videos, podcasts, a blog, and more.

Free and pro options

• Free 1-year Subscription of MultiLingual Magazine

Multilingual is a great resource, and it's free with a promo code. Regularly, it costs $29.

Follow these steps to get your free 1-year digital subscription: Go to this page, hit the black Subscribe Now button, pick the Digital Only radio button, and enter this code: UOFFER. Finish the subscription process. In addition to all issues dating back to 2006, you will receive new issues in your inbox during the next year as they get published.

Following blogs and reading articles is easier with these tools:

• Pushbullet

Web page sharing across devices. A very useful tool for freelancers hopping from home to a coffee shop and back on a daily basis. Allows us to share websites or articles we want to look at later on another computer/device. Other features include sending files, text messaging, and viewing phone notifications. 

A desktop application, a browser extension, and a mobile app.

License: Free and Pro

PRODUCTIVITY

• Infinit

File sharing between multiple devices made easy and nice by developers from Paris. 

Most email clients have file size limitations. This desktop application and mobile app doesn't, it allows us to send large files via email. 

From their website:

Because Infinit is a file transfer app built for sending anything, we don’t discriminate on file size or file type. You can send large files without ever experiencing the regular frustrations of email attachments.

Also, with Infinit making screenshots is a breeze. It literally takes a couple of seconds, and a share link is instantly ready to paste anywhere.

And if you own a domain, you can share links containing your domain name, instead of unprofessionally-looking links.

License: Free and Pro options

• CloudApp

Whereas a picture is worth a thousand words, an animated picture (a gif) is worth a thousand still pictures.

Technical issues with our software happen all the time, and often it's crucial that we find a solution quickly. When we run into a problem, it's a lot easier to show a picture than to put what happened into words.

This Windows app allows making gifs and short HD videos. A share link is instantly ready in the clipboard waiting to be pasted somewhere. 

This app supports file sharing between devices and boasts such fancy functionality as scheduled self-destruction of shared files.

License: Free and Pro options

While CloudApp looks certainly very attractive, I've found that this unshowy little tool makes gifs of much better quality. Thus, the former will be suitable for quick sharing, and the latter for making visuals for your blog post. If you know other similar tools, feel free to leave a comment below.

• Gifox

A beautifully-designed menu bar app that records your screen into animated gifs. It has some advanced options for recording, and sharing options are coming soon.

Only Mac is supported. 

License: Free

• Toggle

A time-tracking tool with a nice interface. It works as a desktop or mobile app. Plus, if you are a Pomodoro convert, they've recently added a Pomodoro timer add-on.

License: Free with basic features and Pro

• 1Clipboard

A clipboard that works across devices.

This will be useful to those who work simultaneously on two PCs and do not use two screens.

• PhraseExpress iOS and Android apps

A great text expander software which I (ab)use daily now on iOS and Android. It syncs all text snippets between your Windows PCs and your apps. Apple Mac OSX client will be added soon. The newest beta version is available for download here and an Android app here.

License: Free and Pro options

• OneTab, TabCloud, and The Great Suspender

These are just a few of many Chrome browser extensions that deal with the "too-many-tabs-open-browser-crashed-lost-them-all" problem. I find such little helpers indispensable for every passionate web-surfer.

• Highlight to Search

A Chrome extension that makes searching Google even faster.

• Unstuck

When nothing works. This app claims to help solve our every predicament.

License: Free for everyone

FINANCIAL

• Invoicing with PayPal

While PayPal is not available in many countries for payments, one can still use it for invoicing. Setting up an account is plain simple and takes less than a minute, no credit card is necessary.

It doesn't cost a penny (a kopeck, a shilling...).

• Digit

A digital piggy bank for mindless... saving. An SMS bot that monitors your bank account, learns about your spending habits, and sets aside some little money if you can afford it.

Digit currently supports over 2,500 banks and credit unions within the United States.

License: Free for everyone who can use it

• Fundbox

Finally, a freelancer can get paid instantly after the project completion. Sounds too good to be true? Well, in reality, it is a tad trickier, but still this web service lives up to that loud statement. This service allows us to get around Net 30 and receive an advance payment for an outstanding invoice.

• Zipbooks

Modern invoicing platform utilizing some latest technology. Also, similar to Fundbox, it pays your invoices when you want it (for a fee, and if you're a US business).

Bye, Net 30 and your bigger friends.

License: It's free :)

Here are a few more smarty-pants financial apps:

• Anchor

Free invoicing software for those who can host it on their own domain/CMS.

• Bstow

An app for donating spare change from credit card purchases to a charity of your choice.

• Powr of You

Get a few pennies for your data on social networks when it gets used.

ALTERNATIVE TEAM COMMUNICATION

These will be of interest to you if you have a remote team.

• Wire

A beautiful UI and Swiss privacy: End-to-end encrypted calls, video calls, and group chats. It works on all modern devices, on any modern platform.

License: Free

• Sync

Free Windows/Mac desktop software and iPhone/Android app with a nice UI for team communication.

Developed by Wantedly, a Tokyo-based startup.

License: Free

There are many others, Slack included.

Or check out my portfolio:

Here I've gathered some points that should do away with any doubts whether to localize your creation into Russian (and Ukrainian, they go hand in hand), or not:

The largest online market in Europe

The Russian Internet, combined with the Ukrainian, is the largest in Europe with over 100 MILLION INTERNET USERS and some 40-60 million gamers (roughly the population of Spain or France, I have seen different estimates). This is not counting countries neighboring Russia, where people speak Russian as a second language (roughly 100 million people)

We don't buy what we can't use

A localized product (read your website, software, or game) pays off better in Russian-speaking countries than its non-localized English version. The reason for that being Russian people traditionally have a very limited command of English. In the EF English Proficiency Index Russia is in the yellow, low proficiency sector, nested between Ecuador and Mexico... Only about 7% of the population speak English, and when people claim they do, most likely it is what Americans call Runglish. Hence the desire to use a product with a Russian UI.
This echoes what Jonas Wæver, a creative director at Logic Artists, said in this talk, "It's not the question of how many people speak the language, but also how many people that would play the game in that language would not play it if it weren't in that language."

5th largest in the world

AppAnnie estimates that the Russian app market is the 5th largest in the world

M-commerce and gaming are on the rise

Despite the fact that the Russian market is troubled and infamously unstable, people don't mind spending money on mobile apps and games. Developers from Google say, "Only 38% of the smartphone users in Russia surveyed said they only download free apps. 26% would spend up to 100 RUB and 15% up to 200 RUB." Gaming apps and m-commerce apps is what that money gets spent on most often

Lower piracy rate

Localization removes the need to seek a pirated version of a product resulting in a lower piracy rate. TinyBuild writes on their website, "The most interesting conclusion though is localisation and its impact ... Localising games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate." The same probably goes for Russian, since its app econimy is on the rise, but works the opposite way for Brazil, the article says

Huge Russian user base on Steam

The segment of Russian-speaking users on Steam is the 2nd largest (after English).
Or see the statistics from SteamSpy on this screenshot:

The choice of many developers

Now, something to consider if you're a game developer: On Steam, there are almost as many indie games localized into my languages as there are into Spanish.
I've conducted my own little research, and prepared the chart you can see on the right. I've searched Steam directory of games with Indie and Russian+Ukrainian filters applied. Then I've done the same for the rest of languages.
I've found that there are almost as many indie games available in Russian and Ukrainian combined as there are in Spanish (!) and more than in Italian (or if we take only games in Russian and factor out Ukrainian, the picture is still the same). Of course, some games were developed in those languages originally; even if that is the case, the data stays truthful.
If you're unsure whether to localize your indie game, or into which languages, this chart makes it clear that indie developers do have their creations localized pretty often (approximately, 1 out of 5 developers) and they choose Russian and Ukrainian almost as often as Spanish

Rubbing shoulders with the linguistic who's who's

In March 2013, the world got the news that now Russian was the second-most used language on the Internet after English. Though Chinese has since taken the 2nd place and Russian moved down to the 6th, that news is still pretty thought-provoking

"Western" is associated with prestige and quality

Decades of the deficit in the 70s-90s reverberate till today in that inostranniy product, meaning "foreign" or "Western," is expensive, yet desired. Likewise, Russian mobile users are eager to use foreign apps and play foreign games

Success stories for inspiration

360 Security (a Chinese antivirus app, which I have been localizing on and off English into Ukrainian for over a year now) has seen some 12 million installs in Russia over the past year.
A software developer Autocad WS "tripled their user base by getting the localization right."

The bottom line:

When considering localization into most common European languages, Russian and Ukrainian should be on the list and never overlooked. Really, why localize into FIGS* (pun intended).

*French, Italian, German, and Spanish

See what other apps I've localized besides 360 Security.

Or check out apps, games, and websites I recently localized:

…Sinister. Sinister feel in the air. Chill gusts of the wind. Strong. Stronger… The air infused with tiny splashes of sea water. Crashing water. More water above. A heavy blanket of clouds. Dazzling sun. Clouds again. Seagull creaks. Massive ocean out there. Massive…

A couple of days later, piles of rubbish, debris, and dumped, laying in heaps belongings array the road, thrown over the backdrop of the devastated cityscape—the view from my bus window. That school bus, going through Far Rockaways, Queens, New York, a couple of days since the ocean retreated, has been lively and bouncing a moment ago, now turned hushed and vigilant. We, a bunch of volunteers, are just a small yellow pebble in the vast of the ocean of the work ahead of us. There are other buses too, though, coming from all different parts of the City to this small devastated community and to others alike—people willing to come and give their help to complete strangers. It is enormously inspiring, isn’t it? But, still that means just a bunch of pebbles in the ocean. Massive ocean.

How many more city dwellers would have jumped on such a volunteer bus those days, had they been pointed the way? Or, if they had been inspired by a story...

Speaking of writing.

I am a volunteer, hardly a writer. But, we all need to tell stories. It is, in fact, the purpose for becoming a writer. And I strongly believe that, when helping a stranger, really we are helping ourselves. Months since I returned from that trip to a city dweller’s routine, I had a strong motivating feeling, a feeling of self-content. And still do. That feeling is what gets you through. How many more people would have gotten on a similar volunteer project, if they shared this thought?

Back to my story.

That sinister view as I was standing on the southern tip of Manhattan, hours before the hurricane’s landfall, is very vivid in my memory even now. It was foreboding, though beautiful. 

We have carried out our small mission back then.

In a preparation to writing this essay, I have read a number of other students’ essays in the discussion forums. Some are really strong pieces of writing. It is certain that, in the beginning of each story, there is always something a writer feels the need to convey, or something that sparks the storytelling.

For me, it was that menacing look of the ocean and the doomy feeling coming with it what helped to make the first keystrokes today. For one another student from Brazil, it was the urge to "fill the blank white walls of her toys room with writings of some sort." She could not help but fill in the void surrounding her and create, what now she calls, her “first book.”

Back to writing.

I am a musician, hardly a writer. Pressing the right keys at right points in time is much like making keystrokes, typing word after word—spinning out a narrative. Simplified. In those terms any composer is a writer. A sonic writer? Speaking in those terms I have already added a few short stories to my writer’s portfolio, musical pieces, however simple they might be.

I have seen that so many students in this course have really professional aspirations, and many are working on making writing their career. For one person from Russia writing was really transformative: She met her future husband through common interest in writing. They met online and kept communicating online for a couple of years before actually meeting in person and living together ever since.

Another student showcased her strong character to me. She faced a professional dilemma: Whether or not to forgo her hard-earned personal writing style in favor of successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis, since she adored the labored, evocative language of non-technical writing and hated the dry and succinct academic language. One feedback post suggested that she made two versions of her paper: one conforming to the academic norms, another one—an edited-down copy to help her maintain self-consciousness in writing.

I have a higher goal here as well. No, it is not about putting an end to corporate greed and austerity in our society nor bringing more justice into this world. A more mundane and personal one: I hope this writing course will boost my translating skills and language proficiency, as English is not my first language.

Back again.

I am not a writer. I am a translator-wannabe.

         by me, on a kitchen table and my lap, in Brooklyn, NY, May 2013