Our center had the good fortune to develop a relationship with Worldpoint Interactive, which is heavily involved in localization both of websites and software projects.The company recognized the coming need for localization of e-commerce web sites and developed tools for web site translation/localization, including Passport™. It has supported our translation program by providing us with some workstations, and some of our students volunteered to practice using the software to localize a web site that was provided to us for practice. Passport basically hides the coding/tags so that the translator can view and replace the source text with a translation. It was only later, when various journals such as Language International and Multilingual Computing began writing extensively about the subject that our students became acutely aware of the localization field and the kinds of knowledge and skills that are required to work in it.

Since that time, even while continuing to undergo periodic budget cuts, the Center has at least been able to offer some bare bones courses in translation and interpretation, and to encourage those who show talent to begin working in the field. At this time, the students can take only one course in translation, Principles of Translation, which includes discussion of translation theory applied to business and other nonfiction contexts, and some practice and training in the translation process. They primarily work into their native language, which usually is not English. Most of the students are speakers of Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai). A few students have a European language background (French, Spanish, German, and Romanian). We have offered tutorial seminars for such students and have been able to refer most of them to internships and to working situations in both translation and interpretation. We therefore do not have a full-fledged curriculum in either translation or interpretation, but are responding primarily to immediate and foreseeable needs by including training that will meet these needs.

This fall, I introduced the concept of localization of software and web pages towards the end of the translation course. Several students showed immediate interest and I introduced them to various sites on the Web that deal with the subject. They requested that I offer a course on the subject in the spring. Although it was somewhat like the one eyed man leading the blind, we embarked on a course in web site localization. Obviously, a program could benefit greatly and make greater contributions if it had the kind of curriculum that is offered by Kent State or the University of Maastricht, but with only six courses being offered over two semesters, we have to bootstrap. Nonetheless, the students are talented and enthusiastic, and have shown much insight into the problems they must deal with working in a technological environment.

Required Knowledge

There are three areas that must be addressed in developing translation knowledge and skills for localization. (We’re referring primarily here to web site localization, in which connection the text by Bert Esselink, A Practical Guide to Localization, especially the section on localization of Help programs, is directly applicable). These areas are: translation, linguistics, and technology. In the more conventional translation courses, “technology” refers primarily to computer literacy skills, such as desktop publishing, telecommunications, and use of the Web as a resource.

In the translation area, students must develop basic translation knowledge (theory) and skills, strategies for processing meaning into the target language, developing the ability to produce faithful, idiomatic translations, and to compensate for cultural differences between source and target language. These requirements are especially important when providing translations for a client that is trying to reach a foreign audience In the linguistics area, the students must be sensitive to the structural differences between source and target languages, to anticipate problems stemming from such differences as grammar and word length and semantic differences. They must have some familiarity with computational linguistics: especially the nature of problems in processing natural language, i.e. concordancing, sorting, word counts and so on. In the technology area, students need to develop basic problem solving ability in dealing with formatting the target text by studying and, when necessary, manipulating the source code (when it is available, provided by the client). Since at the moment we operate on a very limited budget, we do not have access to software such as translation memory or other programs that facilitate translation of Web pages without having to work directly with the source code.

Since this author is very much interested in sociocultural learning and sociocognitive approaches to learning, he finds this problem solving approach to be valuable, since in many cases there is no immediate, easy solution to some of the problems that arise—especially in the technology area. The students have sufficient interest and skills to be able most of the time to come up with useful solutions and to share them with others. Since our center at the time was engaged in the translation of a brochure for one of our colleague programs, I offered to translate its web site on an experimental basis if they were interested. Since the program in question advertises for foreign students, it was an ideal opportunity to deal with all of the problems involved in web site localization where the target readership was students from abroad. We decided to create two versions of the web site: one close to the original content and format, while the other takes the necessary liberties to customize the content for the speakers of the target languages, in this case Japanese and French. Since the students were learning web page development at the same time, they expressed an interest in developing their own Web pages and we expect by the end of the semester to have these pages inside of our center web site with links to any of the work that they have placed on the Internet, as a way of advertising our own efforts and their accomplishments.

The project was valuable in raising the consciousness of all of us, as none of us had had any real experience in the field. We encountered the following problems.

Translation

1. Cultural appropriateness. Some of the content needed revision to be intelligible to the target audience and hopefully to increase its appeal to that audience. The Web pages are promotional in nature. They describe the program, its courses, procedures for and enrolling and the like. In particular, the description of the courses includes concepts that are not familiar to some of the students.
2. Ambiguous source text. Some of the source text uses a “pedagogical register” that may be intelligible to colleagues of the writer of the source text, but must be paraphrased considerably to render it understandable to other native speaker readers of the source, let alone readers of the translation. The team decided to paraphrase the ambiguous sections and “massage” it to make it as understandable as possible to the reader.

Linguistics

1. Like most smaller Web sites, this translation is an afterthought. It was originally somewhat “internationalized,” in the sense that it is written in English that would presumably be intelligible to international students and attract them to the program, but suffers from problems mentioned above.

Technology

The site is being translated into Japanese and French, which are the native languages of the participants in the seminar. All students have their own computers (one iMac, five Windows 98 computers) and they expect to be able to work at home. We have encountered the following problems in the technology area:

1. Learning basic web page authoring in HTML and XML, and recognizing other components such as JavaScript and Java applets (the latter two items did not occur in the source web site).
2. Finding ways to edit Japanese HTML on an English Windows 98 system. This occupied a lot of time in the beginning, since the Global IME does not allow the creation of text files in Japanese in Notepad or Wordpad. After consulting with members of the Nihongo Computing listserv, we learned that we could edit and view Japanese in HTML by using Outlook Express. The iMac user, of course, did not experience problems with handling Japanese.
3. Ensuring browser compatibility. We have been testing the results in Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 4.x and 5.x. We’re also testing it in iCab, a German-based Web browser for the Macintosh.

Although this is a modest beginning, it has the potential to grow, as students in the interdisciplinary Communication and Information Science program of which I am an affiliate member, have also begun to show interest in the language aspects of globalization.

Conclusion

Localization of the Web is a new field, a new occupation that is just now attracting the interest of students and potential clients here. By providing“translations” for sister department web sites, both our students of translation as well as client departments are developing awareness of the issues involved in communicating across cultures over the Internet. The field is growing locally, as new translation companies and service providers such as Origin (http://www.origin.to) and Worldpoint establish themselves in our state. Although our efforts are a modest beginning, we have the potential to attract talented students into the localization field to serve both state and international needs.

Dr. David Ashworth
Center for Interpretation and Translation Studies,
University of Hawaii at Manoamoore 106, 1890 East-West Rd.
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822
Tel: +1 808 956 6233;
Fax: +1 808 956 2078
E-mail: ashworth@hawaii.edu