WizArt's Localization Solution

At SD Best Practices in Boston, this morning, Wizart (www.wizart.com) showed me a crisp little product for localizing finished Windows and web applications. There's no machine translation involved -- the core of the product identifies where text (e.g., prompts, user instructions, button labels, etc.) appears, based on its instrumentation of Windows or interpretation of XML, HTML or other web UI representation), and provides a console (WizTom) for translators that lists these items and lets the translator input contextually-appropriate equivalents. These are then maintained in a table accessed by a coresident process (in Windows) or server proxy (for web stuff) and inserted in running applications on the fly. Result: a translator works for a while, and boom, your application is localized.

WizTom supports the Windows default localization library for common menu items and terms (e.g., File, Edit, etc.), so you may not even need a translator (or even access to source code) in some cases. The WizArt folks demoed this by converting Windows NotePad, on the fly, into French, German, Chinese and Arabic. Source code mods are generally unnecessary unless you're retrofitting, for example, an application not intrinsically Unicode compatible.

Very nifty feature in the Windows version: when viewed under control of the translator/developer console, resource properties relevant to localization are given handles and can be manipulated directly (e.g., to expand buttons so their Chinese labels fit). And OS-level localization options are engaged automatically (e.g., flipping editable text direction and scrollabars from left-to-right to right-to-left when translating into Arabic or Hebrew). This data becomes part of the coresident set and governs the appearance of the app in its final, translated form.

Not cheap! But if you need it, much cheaper/faster/better than other alternatives.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 12:24 PM  Permalink