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What's involved in translating English-language instructions, web pages and other member/customer interactions into a foreign language? The Credit Union Journal asked just that. Here's how Fuze Digital Solutions' Chuck Van Court responded.
CUJ: How long does this process take?
Van Court: The process took a few months in order to: 1) re-engineer the code to support Unicode throughout (see definition at right); 2) have all outward-facing messaging (including every term a user can see online or via e-mail) driven from a database rather than being hard-coded in the programs; 3) create new search algorithms and spellcheck utilities able to deal with each language, and 4) refine web page templates to deal with potential for large size variations in labels and online messaging between different languages.
We also needed to create new functionality that enables a company to manage multiple Fuze instances in different languages. As an example, changes and additions to the base Fuze instance (usually in English but could be in any supported language) must be communicated and managed with translators and publishers in the other "sister" Fuze instances maintained in other languages. Once this coding is complete, adding additional languages is significantly less work since steps one and two above are already done.
CUJ: Why was it undertaken?
Van Court: Careerbuilder.com and a couple of our other customers required new Fuze Suite instances as they extend their brands worldwide. We also see a great opportunity with credit unions (and have been told as much by several of our credit union customers) and other U.S.-based companies wanting to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community and extend customer care to this rapidly growing population in their native language. Other languages also make sense in certain parts of the country.
Driving all outward-facing messaging from tables also allows us to provide unlimited flexibility to our customers to use whatever terminology best supports their users of the Fuze Suite.
CUJ: Who oversees the translation?
Van Court: Our project managers working with various translation firms.
CUJ: What is most difficult to translate? Are there concepts or terms that are difficult to convey? If so, which ones?
Van Court: It varies by language. Some terms just don't exist in non-English languages.
The biggest challenge is you just can't translate word for word, but rather must use terminology and expressions that best get your intended message across. As an example, is "knowledge base" best translated in Spanish to mean "knowledge base" or "database of knowledge?"
It all depends if the user understands what a "knowledge base" is. In this case, we opted to go with "knowledge base" or "base de conocimiento" in Spanish.
Wherever possible, we try to stay away from using technical terms in any language since our offering must be easy to use by anyone. Our customers will also have the ability to refine our translations any way they desire.
CUJ: These languages use characters not commonly used in the U.S. English alphabet; were additional characters needed? Do any of these characters or the terms used cause any problems or misunderstandings with the underlying code?
Van Court: For non-Latin-based languages, the system must support two bytes per character, called Unicode or doublebyte. A primary challenge in dealing with the different languages is that each takes a different amount of space to say about the same thing.
Designing web pages that look good and are easy to use while scaling in size as necessary to support each language can be challenging.
When/if we translate some of the internal pages for common support activity, only the user interface is touched and not the underlying code.
CUJ: What about the presentation of dates, which are mm/dd/yy in the U.S., but dd/mm/yy in other cultures, especially European? Did you make that change?
Van Court: Only a couple dates are exposed to the end-user in the Fuze Suite. As such, we have opted to not take this on yet but will provide a system option in a future release that allows customers to define how the dates should be presented throughout the system.
CUJ: What about Japanese and Chinese? How difficult is this translation, and specifically, what is most difficult or challenging?
Van Court: We have not taken them on yet, but we expect the biggest issues will be evolving our search engine and dealing with spacing on the web pages.
Our search engine includes many sophisticated and proprietary components that are aimed at getting people to information quickly based on what the system perceives to be the intent of their search. Each language has its own nuances that must be dealt with for the search engine to work well and fast.
CUJ: How does English-speaking management oversee this process?
Van Court: All the translators speak English very well. All translations are also reviewed and edited as necessary by another person that is also fluent in the target language.
