The demand for large quantities of software translation from English to other languages emerged spontaneously in the wake of the explosive globalization of the 1990s, and transnational corporations, who had the need to sell in other countries, were not properly prepared for this. They were not ready to such an extent, that veterans still remember stories from the era of localization inception, when the typical response to a request for files was "oh, you need files for translation?".

That is, if one managed to get an answer at all, since the developers of these companies were treated like 'sacred cows', because they were hard at work on the next version or product, which would for sure bring in the millions.

The very idea that programs needed to be translated to be sold in other countries was an unusual one. The assumption was "that all educated people know English!". Nobody at that time had any localization departments or personnel who would be working on the translation/localization aspects client-side. The maximum they'd have is a programmer who could do a conversion of the coding tables.

Back to the localization of the software - is it really such a large task to translate software?

The answer is yes, as in this case it is necessary to solve many auxiliary technical problems.

When translating a book or article, the translator works with the entirety of the text. There's nothing but text; and all the translated text is in front of them.

A program, however, displays text that is stored somewhere in its depths, and this text "crawls" into various elements of the interface - menus, dialogue boxes, messages, fragments of text on the screen, files created by the program, and so forth.

Therefore, the task of translating any program - including websites, which are also the result of a program - is to identify the so-called "resources," i.e. places of the program in which the text displayed on the screen is stored, and determine its correct translation.

Depending on the type of resource, different restrictions are placed on the text, such as restrictions by length, so that there isn’t any overlap, and the menu doesn’t have two identical hotkeys, according to the format of the string, substitutions, and other issues may arise.

Here is just a short list of the additional factors that have to be considered when translating software:

• restrictions on text length
• preservation (and correct modification) of metadata, code, control characters and variables that are not always separate from the translated text
• ensuring the accuracy of multi-level substitutions of text fragments in the form of variables
• resizing (and in the most severe of cases, a complete alteration of appearance) of dialogue boxes
• adaptation of all types of content (numbers, table formats, special signs, terms)
• graphical changes
• consideration of technical traditions and standards of the target country
• accounting for both industry and client requirements

These are only the technical tasks related to software translation, but not all of them - after the software is assembled, it must be tested, errors written down and then corrected, and this must be performed several times to ensure there are no mistakes.

In addition to localizing the software, the documentation also needs to be translated, and this needs to be conducted after all the main elements of the interface have been translated so that you don’t have to rewrite it later.

Of course, when translating both the program and the documentation, it is necessary to solve the linguistic problems of uniformity, adequacy, quality of the language, application to the target audience, and the absence of errors. After translation of the documentation it is necessary to collect it for printing (imposing), with the reference also needing to be collected.

An installer also needs to be implemented.

All this must be conducted within a set frame of time, so as to optimally allocate resources - such an abundance of diverse tasks cannot be performed without proper project management, e.g. in addition to the actual engineering and programming jobs, there is also the task of competent project management.

There arose a division between the engineering and linguistic tasks of localization; engineering tasks meanwhile were increasingly performed on the side of the manufacturer; however, it became increasingly necessary to harmonize these processes, in order for the multilingual translation and engineering tasks to be synchronized and coordinated. And thus, a new level of complexity arose.

Along the way, the technical means of translation began to improve and become more complicated – Word used to be fine for all occasions, then Trados appeared, then Wordfast, then MemoQ, and then numerous cloud-based translation tools.

The number of formats has increased to the point where a single, universal format XLIFF emerged; admittedly, not all of its implementations are compatible, but this was a huge step forward.

At the same time, the Internet appeared, and from being simply a communication medium it turned into an information environment, without which no modern technological process can be imagined.

Glossaries, data repositories, remote work, a distributed production process have been made available, in which, apart from the customer, production is provided by supplier companies and individual freelancers, independently or contracted by suppliers.

Entire ecosystems of suppliers for large companies have been created and developed, with their own software and processes, setting their own requirements and wishing to work with a certain pool of suppliers.

It’s worth mentioning websites separately. A website is the same as a program, or more precisely the result of the interaction of two programs: one of them is a web server that forms web pages, and the other is a browser that displays them for viewing and working with them by a person.

Of course, the localization of websites has its own, additional specifics. For example, one such as SEO – or the optimization of the indexing of a site by search engines or using special formats and metadata. One of the additional difficulties of localizing websites is the use of an incredible amount of so-called CMS (content management systems) - there are more than two thousand (!) in the world and each of them has its own limitations on working with content.

Successfully working with all this allows for experience, technical skills, and the ability to solve unusual problems.

Over the years, the Logrus Global team has translated a huge number of different products from leading software manufacturers – such as Microsoft, Borland, IBM, Oracle, SAP, along with countless games. However, games will be mentioned separately…

It is on these projects that we laid the foundation and established the standard level of quality of translation software for the entire industry for many years to come.

Later we had to solve the problem of multilingual translation at the same level of quality; it can be realized only if there are processes, knowledge, experience, which was acquired on many projects prior.

Now local companies are striving to become transnational. After all, for advanced enterprises the development potential in the home market is limited, while the global market is nearly inexhaustible.

Today, the multinational corporations have the advantage that they can use the services of Logrus Global to enter the world market – a company that has accumulated advanced foreign experience and knowledge in the field of multilingual localization.

Today the setting is more diverse than ever: there are those who still need complete localization of software from scratch, "turnkey", and those who have already built and "granulated" the process to the point that translators are given only text files and instructions, with all technical and related work performed by the customer.

Between these variants there are a huge variety of options.

Any one of them we are ready to shoulder - we are equipped to complete the entire project, as well as to solve various specific problems.

For local companies, we expand their potential to infinity – in the worldwide, global market.

• Long-term and extremely diverse experience with the localization of software products, operating systems, enterprise management systems (ERP) and business applications.
• A large pool of qualified translators, editors, testers, linguist-proofreaders (including native speakers).
• High-quality project management, with work conducted on time and within budget.
• The highest level of communication and service.
• Rich experience with applicable work and terminology.
• Technically competent team and engineering support.
• The presence of a wide range of engineering utilities and in-house development allows for significantly speed up execution of routine work, while at the same time minimizing the negative impact of the human factor.
• Experience with a wide range of systems (both with the most common as well as those developed by our clients, for example, SAP Online); with this in mind, the client’s own systems are, as a rule, very different from those commonly used in the market in regards to most parameters – the organization of the translation process, data formats, methods of processing, etc.
• A dearth of expert experience in translation quality evaluation.
• Extensive knowledge and expertise of software testing for different and rare languages.

• SAP R/3, SAP ERP HCM, Next Campaign, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP NetWeaver, SAP ME, SAP ERP EhP, SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAP Strategy Management, SAP BI Content, SAP FS-PP, SAP Demand Management, SAP BPC, SAP BusinessObjects
• Oracle Applications 10.7
• Oracle CRM 3.1.2 / 3.i
• Oracle OFO 3.0 HTML / 3.0 SW
• Oracle Applications 10.7
• Oracle Applications 11.5.1 iHelp / 11.5.1 Post release testing / 11.5.2 iHelp PostProcessing / 11.5.2 / 11.5.4 iHelp project /Q202 ARU / Q302 ARU / Q402 ARU / R11 HTML Help, software dumps, Software v.1 / R11.0.1 Help, Software / R11.0.2 software, part 1 / R11.0.3 Software - All languages / R11.5.1 SW / R11.5.2 SW /R11i Help - HTML, Software
• MS Windows Vista, Vista LIP (Albanian, American, Bosnian, Galician and more – 47 languages total), MS Windows 98 SE / 95 / Millennium /NT 4.0 / XP / 2003 Server Software, User Assistance & Documentation
• Sun Solaris 7 / 6
• Novell NetWare 5
• MS Office 2007/2003 (Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian) / 2000 / 97 / 95 / XP
• MS Office 12 Software, User Assistance & Documentation (localization into 7 languages, engineering into 7 languages, test / 11 Smart Tag Templates for 32 languages (authoring, engineering & testing)
• Borland Paradox for DOS 4.0
• Borland Paradox 1.0 / 4.5 / 5.0 for Windows
• Lotus Notes 4.01 / 4.5 / 4.52 / 4.6 /5.01, Building & Testing
• Lotus Notes 5.02 / 5.03 / 5.04 / 5.05 /5.06 / 5.07 / 5.08 / 5.09 /5.10, Polish & Slovenian Quarterly Maintenance Release / 6.0 / 6.01