Advanced Language Translation Uses MadCap Flare to Cut Localization by Up to 30 Percent

For Advanced Language Translation, Inc. (ALT), technology provides a vital role in delivering best-in-class translation and localization services. That focus on excellence has led ALT to replace its legacy content authoring tools—many of which have been on the market for more than a decade—to MadCap Flare.

Using Flare, ALT has cut project localization time by 30 percent. At the same time, the ability to simplify translation of both European and Asian languages using Flare has expanded the number of ALT staff members who are able to localize Help content.

“We have completed thousands of translation projects since our founding in 1994. For many of those projects, that has meant the need for special programming and workarounds because traditional authoring tools are not truly XML-based and lack full international language support,” said Scott Bass, founder and president of Advanced Language Translation.

“By contrast, Flare worked so easily, it was almost anticlimactic,” said Mr. Bass. “It’s rare that software of any kind lives up to its promises; Flare is one of those rare exceptions. We’ve now decided that even when we have to take projects built in other authoring software, we’ll import these into Flare and then use Flare instead of the other tools.”

The Technology Demands of Translation

The complexity of translation services has grown as clients require both translation into multiple languages and single sourcing across the Web, computer-based content, and print. ALT has addressed these demands by building a staff of project managers, localization specialists, and desktop publishing experts with a distinct focus on information technology. Additionally ALT’s network of linguists has grown to over 1,000, and its list of supported languages has more than doubled.

Despite the strong technical orientation of ALT’s staff, many of them do not have the skill set to handle the coding or other workarounds required by Help authoring tools. For those demands, ALT has a dedicated localization software engineer. However, with a growing customer base, handling the increasing coding demands has stretched the engineer’s bandwidth.

ALT saw Flare as having the potential to simplify the translation of Help content. The company was attracted by Flare’s full Unicode support, making the software inherently designed to handle both single-byte and double-byte languages. Additionally, the ALT team liked Flare’s clean, standards-based, native-XML architecture, which facilitated integration with other software and mitigated a great deal of the effort and risk associated with translation.

Waving Workarounds Goodbye

One of ALT’s first projects using Flare involved a software developer that needed to translate a Help project into Chinese and Korean. The project had several conditional tags to cover a full version and a light version of the developer’s product. Additionally, ALT needed to swap product names for different regions, as well as units of measure to accommodate countries using the metric system.

“Flare worked like a charm on this project, and we didn’t need to do any workarounds. Moreover, the interface is so well designed that we didn’t need much support,” Mr. Bass recalls. “Our localization software engineer, who usually would rather write code himself than use an authoring tool, said Flare’s performance was great. All told, we trimmed at least 30 percent off of our project time.”

Flare, not only is streamlining projects for ALT’s engineer, it also is enabling more of the company’s employees to take on Help compilation functions that were too technically demanding for them to execute using other vendors’ Help authoring tools. As a result, ALT now has more capacity to accept the growing translation requests coming from both new and existing customers.

“I’m impressed with how seriously MadCap is taking localization,” says Mr. Bass. “Flare doesn’t care what language is being used, and that fits with our need to be free of any restraints when it comes to language.”

Mr. Bass added, “MadCap Lingo takes it even further by providing an integrated authoring tool and translation memory system. We expect that Lingo’s functionality will add a new level of simplicity and sophistication to our localization services. With MadCap, we have a vendor that is thinking about our current and future needs.”