5:24 pm | 0 recommendations | 0 comments

Thinking about L10n

While many of the projects I work on at Learning Worlds are about communicating ideas using visual narratives, it's the localization (or L10n) part that I think about the most.  Unlike the act of translating text in a document, the localization processes I've had to use, create and replicate multimedia projects involve things like recording voice overs in Dutch, understanding regional business terms, managing hundreds of screenshots in other languages, and maintaining consistancy across languages and versions.  I'm in the midst of a series of disucssions around the topic of multimedia localization and I'll be posting some of the things I uncover along the way. 

When asked about my experiences, the thing I always start with is: when you create anything for anyone, ask them first, "Will this need to be localized at some point in the future, even if you don't plan on doing it yourself, or more importantly paying for it yourself?"  Communicating the possibility of future localization to everyone from Project Managers to Developers to Designers to even additional Client Stakeholders can help drive decisions that mean someday a project can be provided in additional languages that is cheaper, better and more quickly produced.