Sivano Inc provides an array of services, which can serve your organization as your very own "Globalization Department", without the need of supporting full-time staff. Sivano may coordinate all aspects of internationalization, along with solid project management - without your firm having to drain valuable resources, by working in an area for which they may not have any expertise. As your International Project Manager we can work with your organization to fully integrate all of your international product needs at a fraction of the cost of a fully dedicated department.

It is important for software to conform to a variety of localization coding standards in order to easily translate the software. Some results of software that does not conform to localization coding standards are:

• Some strings will still appear in English.
• The grammatical structure of some sentences may be incorrect.
• The sequence of terms in a sentence may be wrong.
• There may be memory problems due to insufficient string buffers

Sivano's Localization Code reviews can help in determining any errors prior to encountering them during a localization project. Additionally, this will ensure that mistakes are not carried onto future versions of your products.

Some software applications require additional functionality to support specific market needs. This additional functionality will require professional technical writing by people knowledgeable with the functionality. Some markets, such as Japan, often demand more detailed documentation than is necessary in other areas of the world. We can supply technical writing that best suits your documentation style, with the added quality expected in a local market.

Most documentation written in North America is written specifically for North Americans. Consequently, it is commonplace for North American colloquialisms to sneak into the documentation. Sometimes the syntax in some documentation may make sense to most readers, but may be ambiguous enough for a translator to incorrectly translate the meaning of the text. These problems can easily be avoided by having a technical writer who is knowledgeable with regards to localization documentation writing practices to pre-edit a document before translation.

To determine if your product is going to work in international markets, it needs to be tested thoroughly based on international criteria. Before such testing can reliably begin, a thorough test plan, based on your product, must be created. These test plans can be used by your own Quality Assurance testing team, or by our experienced staff.

This facet of product testing involves running your product through a series of tests to check its functionality based on the requirement of international markets. The very core of software globalization is that the original English product can work as any user would expect anywhere in the world. So, even if the product is not yet localized (or may not ever be localized in many markets), it should at least work in English for every user everywhere in the world. For example, globalization would test for date formats, time formats, number formats, currency formats, use of extended characters, double-byte characters, etc. In doing so, your organization may benefit from additional sales into markets around the world; further increasing market share potential, and even reducing Technical Support calls from users who may not be able to use these features internationally.

Localization testing is done following the translation of the product. There are two levels of testing that are generally done at this time.

• Functional Testing: Functionality testing should be done to some extent to verify that the translation of the product did not cause any additional problems.
• User Interface Testing: This type of testing is to ensure that the product has been entirely translated and the translated strings are appearing correctly. This can be broken down into two types of testing:
  • Non-Linguistic User Interface (UI) Testing: This would generally be someone testing who is not familiar with the language. This tester can check that strings are not appearing in English, ensure that "garbage" characters are not being displayed, check for string cut-offs, and get a visual indication by side-by-side comparison with the English product that the content looks generally correct.
  • Linguistic UI Testing: The tester would be able to perform the same testing functions as the non-linguistic tester with the additional ability to actually review the translated terminology in the context of the application.

Localization engineering differs from globalization engineering in scope. Globalization engineering focuses on preparing the product for localization, however Localization Engineering is a set of engineering tasks associated with actual localization of the software into multiple languages. Localization engineering includes the following functions.

• Reviewing product file sets for translatable strings.
• Creating Translation Toolkits (TTKs).
• Answering technical questions from the translators.
• Fixing bugs introduced by translation.
• Leveraging existing terminology into new versions of products.

Sivano offers in-country translations for the following aspects of your product needs:

• Software.
• Web Content.
• Paper Documentation.
• Online Help.
• Marketing Materials.
• Graphics.

We have in-country translation partners across Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East.