Product: specialized software for mechanical, electrical, fluid, instrumentation & control engineering.
Type: software (user interface, online help) localization and marketing material translation.
Schedule and scope: 600 000 words in 4 months.
Challenges: project required deep understanding of the sophisticated engineering product, local engineering standards and IT field in general as this was not only documentation, but also user interface localization.
Solution: parallel translation of user interface (UI) and user assistance (UA, online help), complex engineering used to speed up the process.

Specialized software required special attention not only due to specialized subject, but also due to time pressure and complexity of the project. The project portfolio consisted of several different subprojects: researching specialized terminology, making it complying to standard terminology as found in official standards, localizing user interface – menus, dialog windows, buttons, messages, commands, then using the translations of localized interface as exact references in online help subproject. The challenge was the time pressure as localization is a stage of programming workflow and waterfall [link] typically is used which makes the localization process horizontal and with strictly defined priorities – online help cannot be translated without having the exact translation of user interface to which help material refers.  Also repetitive sentences needs to be translated first to have them consistent. Such horizontal organization of processes takes more time and therefore the deadlines might have been unrealistic to comply to. Localization team came with solution of running some processes in parallel: the repetitive sentences were extracted from the whole project, replaced by tags (locked) and translated at the same time as regular text.