Translation Process of Multilingual Web Sites

Abstract

The main goal for this master’s thesis was to improve Avanade’s capability to manage translation of multilingual web applications. For this purpose I created translation process, synchronization tool, and translation list. The translation process helps Avanade to reduce the time used for managing translation. The synchronization tool automates the process of copying words manually and the translation list provides real time access to all translated items for the customer. The customer can translate and modify existing translations whenever they want.

The translation process of multilingual web applications has been manual work in most cases. There has been several slow and error prone phases in the process. I have studied how we can automated these process phases. I implemented a process and tool that help Avanade to manage translation process and improve the speed of the process and customer satisfaction. We managed to improve process speed 30 times in some work phases of the translation process.

I used following theoretical frameworks as basis of this study. These frameworks allowed me to create improved translation process and synchronization tool. Ikujiro Nonaka’s Knowledge Creation Framework is a theory that defines how we can manage and share tacit knowledge. It describes different means of describing knowledge based processes and what kind of steps there are. Software quality allowed me to measure and study how to improve software development. It provided me the methodology for measuring the impact of the improved process to our daily work.

This thesis concentrated on studying Avanade work. I excluded client side improvements from the study. This is next possible subject that I need to study in the future. I also noticed some changes in developer’s way of working. This could be also be something that needs to be studied in the future.