Globalization Insider

LISA Announces First Best Practice Guide

Guide Focuses on Client Quality Assurance Practices

Localization solutions providers constantly lament the sorry state of projects they receive from clients, who somehow expect them to work magic. At the same time, purchasers of localization services are often dismayed by the quality of the results they receive from their localization partners and blame the service provider for returning a shoddy product. So where does the truth lie? Whose responsibility is it to produce high-quality localizations? The truth is that the localization process is a partnership between the client and the solutions provider and that both parties bear responsibility for the outcome. If either party fails to live up to its end of the partnership, the results will suffer.

In an effort to address the client side of the equation, LISA has released the first in a series of Best Practice Guides that will examine topics of importance to the GILT industry and promote best practices for dealing with those topics. This first Guide focuses on the steps clients can take to help ensure that they are providing their solutions provider with the necessary materials and information to provide a quality localization. The Guide addresses topics such as selecting an appropriate partner, organizing files, checking source material, resolving problems and planning for localization. While the Guide is aimed primarily at neophytes to localization, it contains the distilled insights of some of the best localization managers on the client side of the business and will be useful even to seasoned veterans.

Available as a free download from the LISA web site, the 39 page document contains a series of questions and answers on topics of fundamental importance, articles from the archives of the Globalization Insider, and the Localization Project Bill of Materials (a checklist of common items that can be used to assure project completeness and the accuracy of the delivered materials).