In this day and age of technology, the use of different software and apps has increased more than ever. These are used for a variety of reasons. Customers from around the globe use certain software and games to get through the hassles of their daily lives. These software programs are also helping businesses climb the ladder of success and popularity, generating more revenue and sales.
One major factor that contributes to the global success of software products, (be it game or some application), is translation. Translation has become an important aspect and a prerequisite for enabling global access of software. When done before the technical process, it has a great impact in shaping up the application and software design of these digital products. This is also why it is important to integrate translation early in the development process.
Here is how early translation can have a great impact on different aspects of your software products.
User interface design
Simple and easy to navigate UI improves the usability of your software. To ensure your product’s UI is user-friendly, early translation can help. With the help of software translation services, you can get the translations ready beforehand. It will help with better UI design and proper text placement for your targeted languages.
Modular design
The translation further makes the process of breaking down the UI elements easier into relatively smaller and more reusable components. The relevant team can pick out the chunks of the text and adapt accordingly. Translation of the text in the required languages makes it easy for everyone involved to adapt the model and design accordingly.
Furthermore, translation also has a great influence on the process of iconography, enhancing clear and culturally appropriate icons and images to ensure that there is minimum relevance to the text.
Text expansion and contraction
Text expansion and contraction are an integral part of a software translation. The software products often come with limited space for text. Therefore, a translation has a great impact, and translating in advance makes everyone’s work easier. The translator and the software experts can do their experiments with the text box accordingly. So make sure to design the layout and accommodate the variations in the text length across different target languages. Moreover, it also helps to manage and organize the whitespace. This should be sufficient enough according to the text and also prevent the text from crowding in the languages with longer words.
Right-to-left languages
The languages starting from right to left often pose great challenges for software translation services. Companies have to struggle while making the content fit and working on the dimensions beforehand. Therefore, it is important to work on translation in advance. This can make the insertion of text of the right to left languages easy. Furthermore, it also helps to design the UI to support both left-to-right and right-to-left languages. Already translated content also helps with better text alignment ensuring the right flow for right-to-left languages.
Important steps to adapt for an accurate software translation
Terminology management
The translation management system has introduced amazing and beneficial features to help businesses and companies with a streamlined translation process. Software is a technical product and often contains industry-specialized jargon and phrases. Setting up terminology management empowers you to produce a consistent translation. A centralized terminology database allows the team to have consistent results. Moreover, translation memory is another useful feature that comes with the translation management system. Utilizing translation memory helps with streamlining the translation process while maintaining consistency.
Accessibility
Many software products, such as games, include dialogue boxes and characters that ask for subtitles and closed captions. Considering subtitles and closed captions from the start can help you widen your reach and make the people with hearing impairment part of your clientele. Moreover, you should also ensure that your software product is compatible with every type of screen for readers and visually impaired users.
Hiring a professional translation vendor
Lastly, it is extremely important that you hire a good and competent vendor. If you are developing a gaming software, for example, choosing the right game translation company can help you in the long run. You should be checking their previous experience in the field, ask for their past projects, and you can also reach out to their previous customers. Moreover, brainstorming with the team of translators and linguists can also give you a better hint about their work and expertise. As software and gaming translation can come up with certain technical challenges demanding subject-matter experts, it is important to scan for the right attributes in your translation partner.
Conclusion
Software and gaming products can be tough to handle when it comes to translating their content. If you can plan ahead and translate your content early for the languages you’ll need later, it will uplift the overall quality and user experience of your software. It’s also important to follow the right practices and choose the right translation partner for optimal results.
