The Cost of Localization

Localization can be a complicated and expensive project. One mention of localization and the immediate reaction from your financial department may be to reach defensively for their wallet. Costs can be unpredictable and can quickly get out of control, particularly if you don't know what to expect. You may choose to manage the translation in-house, or to outsource it to an external company that specializes in localization and translation.

In simple terms, translation is not a cheap task. Let's look at an example to put this in perspective:

The average cost a translator will charge is around 20 cents (US) per word. Take a document with 1000 topics and an average of 200 words per topic. That's 200,000 words so you're quickly looking at $40,000. Now remember that's just for the initial translation. The growing cost comes when you make modifications to the original document and need it retranslated. Most translation agencies use translation memory tools which help reduce the effort involved in retranslating a document, but they still charge for the whole document (albeit at a reduced word rate for the text already translated).

When using translation memory tools, a fuzzy match is returned where a text string is similar but not identical. An exact match (100%) is returned where there is no difference or variation between the two strings.
Translators often charge different rates when text is found as an exact match, as a fuzzy match (with the match falling between a certain percentage), or is a new translation.

Let's get back to our example. You now modify only 5 of these topics. Without allowing for fuzzy matches, the cost of retranslation can quickly climb to $16,120.00 :

And remember that's just to translate 5 modified topics!

Over time, these costs quickly mount up. Our example was just one document into one language. Translate that same document into 10 other languages, and multiply the cost 10 times. Translate a further 10 or 100 documents into multiple languages, and watch your costs skyrocket!

How Author-it Reduces Translation Costs:

Because of the unique way Author-it stores and manages content, savings are quickly realized:

1. You only translate objects that have been modified.

   For example, let's go back to our 1000 topic document which we've now updated. Rather than sending the translator all 1000 topics again, only the 5 modified topics are exported as XML. Using our previous example this would reduce the cost of retranslation from $16120.00 to $200.00!

2. Text is only translated once.

   One of Author-its biggest strengths is reusability. The same topics are reused in multiple documents. For example, the same Copyright Notice (or even an entire Introductory chapter) may be used in many Books. Each topic only requires translation once. Embedded topics take reuse even further, and again are only translated once.

   Cross references and related topic groups don't even require translation. Because these are inserted at publishing time, taking their text from the heading of the topic they reference, they aren't stored in the topic text making less text to translate. Likewise, reference text such as See and on Page are defined by the Hypertext link object template used, so only the template requires translation.

   Our studies have shown an average of a 30% reduction in word count because of reuse.

3. The XML files do not contain formatting.

   When the same text string is found using different character formatting, memory translation tools do not always identify it as an exact match. As the XML files do not contain formatting, this helps to increase the exact matches found.