We've spent a lot of time thinking about the larger issues of localization -- cultural bias toward particular symbols or colors, getting the right faces for the photos, avoiding idiomatic phrases that don't make sense when translated. But the most basic technical issues can be just as important when localizing text.

This week the team here at Learning Worlds is working with Camtasia.  We're transcribing voice overs from China, Germany and England, and inserting the transcribed text into the subtitles within Camtasia.  Pretty straightforward stuff. But a first pass with the Chinese characters revealed that Camtasia did not seem to support double byte characters like Chinese (the audio files were of spoken Mandarin Chinese). Instead there were the typical characters you might see without the right character set installed and supported, sort of like this: [] [] [] [] [] []

In our English-centered design environment (Flash, Illustrator, even the computer settings themselves) we have to look out for how other fonts and characters are handled every time we change tools.  We may have the right kind of umlaut in Word, but that character or font set might not be in our copy of Adobe.  The more complex the media, the more of a challenge it is to make sure everything is shown correctly in every language. A Camtasia forum post seemed to imply that double byte characters (like Chinese) were not supported, but I spoke directly with folks on the Camtasia development team, who countered that we should be able to get it to work, as long as we had a Asian text-enabled set up.  The ultimate solution turned out to be as simple as the following:

    * First, make sure you're on a computer that supports Chinese characters.
    * Go to Regional and Language Options in Control Panel.
    * Click on the language tab.
    * Activate the Chinese character keyboard.

This is advice is simple, but in the rush to localize and work with a variety of tools, it's important to figure out process at every step, and find an expert to check your assumptions.