Localization: Engineering Software for a Global Market
Here is a PDF that I printed from a Powerpoint presentation. This PPT was part of a presentation I did during my CS350 class (Introduction to Software Engineering). I have also added it to the company intranet as a quick reference for new developers - apparently, localization is rarely touched in CS classes.
If you work in software localization, have a look at it and let me know what you think. Is there something I should add?
Localization: Engineering Software for a Global Market
If you like to use this for anything, it would be nice to mention me as the creator. I have spent a lot of time creating this and you wouldn’t want to be credited for someone else’s work, would you?
Something funny happened on my way to work…
…well, maybe funny is not the right word. On my way to work, there was a truck in front of me and all of a sudden, something fell off the truck to the right and into the ditch. A second later, I saw a tire - the whole thing including rim - bounce down the highway and then off into the median. I was freaking out, what if more crap comes falling off the truck to hit me? I was swearing up a storm about some idiot dump truck driver who didn’t fasten his load properly! The truck pulled off to the right and in passing I noticed it was crooked - and it wasn’t a dump truck but a Comcast bucket truck and he actually lost two of his wheels WHILE DRIVING. I have no idea how that happens but I believe that getting hit by a truck tire including rim while drive 70mph on the highway must be a real blast - probably not the best way to start your day! Thank God nothing happened!
And in case someone is wondering why it got a little quiet around here, I am really busy with my ASP.NET class. Seems like this is the first class at Davenport that is challenging enough to keep me from blogging! I spent the last two weekends working through the chapters, doing examples and homework. This is a condensed 7 week class and we are doing what you are usually supposed to do in a whole semester, so it is 70 pages a week while still working full time. I am glad I am really enjoying this class and that the weather sucks anyway, otherwise I would be miserable.
How I learned English :-)
A couple of days ago I caught a rerun of The Golden Girls - and I have to admit, I love the show. First, it is just really funny - Dorothy rocks! The other reason why I like it is because it taught me colloquial English (together with The Cosby Show). Growing up in Germany, almost everything on TV was dubbed, there was almost no way to hear anything in original language, and while I appreciate it for non-English languages, I would have loved to see more TV in English.
Luckily, Cologne was close enough to the Netherlands so we actually were able to receive a couple of Dutch channels. There was too much on that I cared for - I am pretty sure it was public television mostly showing news and Dutch TV shows, but they did air The Golden Girls and The Cosby Shows - and boy am I glad it was those shows. Not only are they fun, I also believe that both use relatively proper and well pronounced English. In addition, they had Dutch subtitles and while I don’t speak Dutch, it often helped to figure out something I didn’t understand.
I was an English major in high school, mostly because I wasn’t able to pick German as my first major but had to pick a foreign language or a science. I picked English because it is pretty much like German class but in a different language. And boy, did I NOT do well. I remember that my teacher Mrs. Hellmund while handing out the graded papers said “You start out nicely but after about a page you are really losing it” to which I replied that I’ll try to stick with one page the next time. My biggest issue was that I tried to construct my English sentences like my German sentences but then I got lost in the grammar. The first page was find because it was just the intro. Once I reached the interpretation part, my brain took off but my language skills did not follow.
Now, on a completely different note, in Germany there are always those people who tell you that you have to watch this movie or read that book in original language and I always think it’s bull. Yeah, if your English is very very good, you may be able to pick up on some nuances that may not have been translated well into German but to be honest, for the vast majority speaking high school English - they lose a lot more information due to the lack of vocabulary than they gain by hearing the original language.
And of course, the recommendation usually comes from someone who is convinced that “he can English very good”. Most of the time, I find this recommendation pompous and condescending and I would never recommend it to anyone who wants to watch a movie for entertainment. Now if someone wants to improve their English, it’s a great idea - worked for me, right?
Feeling the economy
Today is one of those days, where it is uncomfortable to be an in-house translator.
From friends I have heard, that they have been approached by clients who asked them to lower (or not raise) prices because of the bad economy. I am pretty sure a lot of people just do that to increase revenue, but it is a simple fact that US companies are struggling - a lot. Here in Michigan, there are a lot of companies in the news. Of course there is the automotive industry - we all know how they are doing, but there are also a lot of small and midsized companies who are struggling. I am not a business major, and generally business/finance bores me - unfortunately, this time it affects me.
My company has announced lay-offs today - no secret, the press release is on our web site. It was actually there before they even told us about it. They had an immediate meeting at 8.30am - tough noogies for me since I usually start at 9am because I am not a morning person. Anyway, I am part of Engineering and we had a department meeting afterward, where we were told that Engineering/R&D is not affected. While it was nice to hear that, it is still unsettling. It don’t like the feeling of not being on control of my fate. There are so many more things hanging on this than just my income. We would lose health insurance - right now, my company covers the both of us. My 401k would stop - and since I only started to work here 10 years ago, I don’t have a lot of retirement savings to show for. I would have to pay back the tuition reimbursement for the last 12 months which would probably eat up any possible severance package so there goes that.
I like X-Rite. Working here is so tightly connected to living in the US, since I came here in February 1999, and started to work in June the same year. I didn’t get here on a work visa - they actually searched for a German translator right after I arrived. Big coincidence! I basically had the job before I even had a work permit but having a job offer helped to speed up the process at the INS a lot. For me, living in the US means working at X-Rite.
I also think we have great products. I work with them when I translate the software or hardware and it really confuses me why we are not doing better. I don’t know if it is our products or business and financial decisions, and I would love to know. But then, hopefully there are smarter (or better, more business-savvy) people solving this issue.
I know that a lot of freelancers deal with that uncertainty every day even if they have a little cushion to rest on - but to be honest, that is one of the reasons why I prefer employment. I am just a little chicken.
Now, the news are on to us, starting with the the local NBC station WoodTV and our local paper the Grand Rapids Press - actually, my “Google Alert” for X-Rite was longer than I have ever seen it before. I remember, after the last lay-offs in April, I left the building only to see the news crew outside. Let’s see if that happens again - in about an hour. I am almost sick to my stomach.
Oh well, before I start to sound like a teenager who got dumped, I better sign off. Thanks for listening!
New semester and how to hide posts in Wordpress
As I mentioned below, I am not too busy right now but luckily my class has started, and I am really excited. In case I haven’t mentioned it, I am going to Davenport University part time for a BS in Computer Science. Davenport offers a couple of different specializations in the CS area, and I chose Web Development. With a little luck (well, it’s more about being able to pay for classes), I will graduate in April 2010.
Currently, I am taking CISP238 (Server Side Scripting I) and I am really interested to learn more about this. I have dabbled a little bit with Javascript, PHP and Perl, but never enough to really be able to code.
I assume by now, half of my translator colleagues fell asleep but I really want to write a little bit about school stuff here but straying to far off-topic and boring the non-geeks. Searching around, I found out that you can set up Wordpress so that certain categories don’t show up on the main page. The topic exists, you can select the category and see it, it just won’t get into your main page or in your feed. I really like that and I think it may be of interest for other people too. I got the instructions from Jangro 2.0. I had a hard time finding the category ID but it is explained on the Wordpress Support Forum.
Now, I just created a category called Davenport University and selected that to be hidden from main page and feed. I did a quick test and that actually worked, you may still see the first test topic since I created it first and then added the code to hide the category.