Localization Quality Must Focus on Creating Value

Interview with Mika Pehkonen, Documentation and Localization Manager at F-Secure Corporation

Mika Pehkonen is Documentation and Localization Manager at F-Secure Corporation. In this blog interview, Mika shares some of his key insights as a panelist at Welocalize LocLeaders Forum 2016 in Dublin. Mika was a featured guest and participated in discussion, Ensuring Optimum Localization Quality.

You manage global documentation and localization activities at F-Secure. What range of content types are you working with?

We localize everything — software, legal, user documentation, marketing and PR. Any content destined for a global audience. We’re a one-stop localization shop for our internal customers.

How do you define quality as it relates to F-Secure’s localization activities?

Quality is what we do to get content to have the same impact on any localized market as it does in the original language market.

What affects quality?

The quality of the source content can have a big impact, if the source is bad, then it can be a struggle to get good value out of the localized versions. Some source materials are easier to create or some content will work in the source language but can go wrong in localized version. It’s important to get the source right and ideally developed with localization in mind. If the source isn’t meeting its objectives, then localized version won’t. You need happiness on all levels and outputs.

What do you do if your teams have feedback on the source content?

It depends on our internal customer. If it is software, we will go back to the original source creator and tell them that a particular aspect of the new software will not work in different languages. The translation teams have a good idea of what will translate and what won’t. Having a good dialogue between internal customer and the localization teams will prevent quality problems further down the line. The closer you are to the root cause, the more chance you have of fixing any problem. If there are problems at the in-country reviewer stage, then you’re way down the line and too late. Fix quality issues as close to the source as possible.

Sometimes, we’ll be proactive and add another step in the process in between source creation and translation. We’ll make some amendments and simplifications in the source, changing the English, then send it out for translation. We’re experts at localization so we know what will and won’t work in certain target countries.

Who owns quality?

Everyone! But, whoever has the quality measurements in place, ultimately owns quality. The global marketing team may have measures in place for click thru rates on an online campaign. If Spanish is not performing as well as the English, then maybe that is down to the localization process or source content. If you own the measures and objectives, then you own quality.

What’s the key role of the LSP?

They’re part of the team and extension of F-Secure’s localization team. They bring expertise. You have to trust your LSP (language service provider) and give them equal amounts of freedom and confidence in what they do. There’s no point wasting time focusing on one tiny linguistic typo. The whole team must think of localization as a content creation process. We’ve moved away from a cost-per-word pricing to achieve content value, not translation point scoring on errors within rigid quality matrices.

If you have been with your LSP for a time, they will know your products, markets and content and be in a perfect position as expert advisor.

Do rigid quality measures kill creativity?

Absolutely. Specific quality measures can be good at measuring quality on a large scale, for large pieces of content in terms of measuring and scoring typos and punctuation. But for certain types of content and localization activities, “over” quality processes will kill creativity. If you think about different types of music, for classically trained musicians playing a symphony, their range of creativity is less than in an average rock band. The rock band can create something new and cool and maybe improvise but you couldn’t do that if you were playing at a classical concert with a full orchestra. The audience would hate you! It’s the same with quality measures on certain types of content.

How do you implement a good quality system in place to keep everyone happy?

Keeping everyone happy is the ultimate goal, internal and external customers. But it can be hard to achieve all the time. The least stressful way with the best outcome is to build an automatic fix system that will catch errors automatically at the start, such as typos, grammatical and punctuation errors. The more you can remove at the start of the localization process, the more the translators and linguistic copywriters can focus on creating value as opposed to avoiding mistakes. You want to enable extra value and creativity with any localized version. That’s a good start to keeping everyone happy.