Changing the Game: A Painless Localization Process

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This talk will explain how our development team transformed a rather painful and costly localization process into a painless, less expensive process that resulted in higher quality results. We did this by rewriting the rules of the game: changing the development process, the localization infrastructure, the technical writing process, and the localization testing scheme, mainly through automated processes and a new team structure.

This was not just a pick-up game, either. Embarcadero Technologies provides the industry's broadest and deepest set of software tools for software developers, DBAs and architects. One of the company's biggest products, RAD Studio contains more than a quarter million software translation units, and offers more than 100,000 pages of documentation. RAD Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides native executable code for Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android from one code base, one team, and one schedule. When we undertook this transformation, we were aware that the wrong choices could have led to very serious consequences worldwide.

http://www.imug.org/images/embarcadero/arai-86px.jpgMasahiro Arai is a manager for quality assurance, documentation, and localization at Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. He manages engineering quality assurance teams, and teams of technical writers, localization coordinators, localization engineers, and linguists, in North America, Europe, and Asia. He was previously with Borland Software, where he managed localization engineering teams in the U.S., after working as a product marketing manager at Borland Japan. He holds a master degree in electronics engineering from Tokyo Denki University in Japan.

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