Opening the Black Box, Part II: Demystifying the Costs of Localization and Translation

Opening the Black Box, Part II

Demystifying the Costs of Localization and Translation

Introduction

"Why is localization so expensive and time-consuming?!"

As described in Part I, we hear this question a lot from our clients. Try as we may, however, we find that there’s just no getting around our somewhat ironical answer. Even when we’ve explained internationalization, translation memory and the processes that localization companies apply, as we did in Part I, we’re still left with:

Words.

Now, in Part II, we'll explain why.

Too Many Words

This dimension is not hard to understand, though it's usually hard for most clients to believe.

"How could there possibly be so many words in the product?" they ask. "And even if there are that many, why should it add up to so much time and money?"

In the same way that "feature-creep" - small, incremental changes and product requirements - can suddenly add up to delays and cost overruns, word-creep can plague software and technical publications, even when the developers and writers work with the best of intentions for making the product easier to use and understand.

In the original English, of course, it looks as though these additional sentences and paragraphs cost nothing: The developers and writers do not charge extra for each additional word, and clever formatting can prevent additional words from boosting the page count in printed material. Furthermore, nobody ever got promoted for releasing a version of the product with the lowest wordcount in company history, because it seems such an irrelevant metric.

However, wordcount is the cornerstone metric used by localization vendors, it is the one which usually figures most prominently in the cost of taking a localized product to market, and it is the one that first induces sticker-shock.

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