Building A Global Web Presence for EWI Worldwide

Background

Exhibit Works is a market leader in developing exhibit programs, mobile tours, museum exhibits and themed attractions. The company wanted to reach a global audience by translating their website into Chinese, French, German, Hindi and Spanish.

The Challenge

The client was looking to implement a content management system (CMS) so the entire website could be better managed and would allow a large number of content contributors.
We did some research before the project officially kicked off to make sure that the CMS supported all the languages, especially languages such as Hindi. Not all regular Hindi fonts can be displayed correctly online, so we had to make sure that the translators used a Unicode Hindi font. The Unicode font selected was tested on Windows, Mac OS, and different browsers to ensure it displayed properly.
The web developer was still working on the site structure, so the content to be translated was not yet available through CMS. To meet client’s deadline, the files for translation were extracted out of a database into an Excel file to ensure maximum compatibility with translators’ word processing software.
As this kind of extraction is prone to complications, the text was checked by the project manager from wintranslation to make sure there were no missing strings.

The Solution

There were 10 translators involved in the process: 5 to translate and the rest to edit the files. All of them were asked to use a translation memory tool and follow the terminology provided by the client.
The translated files were then imported back into the database without any glitch.
After the CMS structure was finalized, an editor for each language was asked to do a quality check of the website online. The CMS generated pages were accessed and updated via a Web interface by multi-level users, and all the changes were entered and made live instantly by the editors.
Most of the design and consistency details were fixed during the QA process. The French and Spanish text was too long and did not work very well with the initial artwork. The editors addressed these issues by coming up with alternative translations for the source text.
An internal QA was also done by the project manager to assure consistency over all languages. In other words, the imperial system was used rather than the metric system. However, only the United States still uses the imperial system. To make sure audiences from other countries could understand the measurements; translators converted all the numbers into the metric system, but the converted numbers were not consistent.  Some of the translators converted 6.25 inches to 15.87 cm, some to15.875 cm, some used 16 cm whereas others wrote 0.16 m. Revisions were made to make sure all the numbers were consistently written in the same format.

The Benefits

The personalized translation process, cultural expertise and technical knowledge wintranslation.com delivered allowed the client to have the website up and running in time. The translations were accurate and culturally appropriate.