Uncovering Great Challenges
Imagine that this is your first day in a new position in the gaming industry. Almost immediately, you are facing with an unexpected amount of unforeseen challenges: things don’t go smooth at all and you have a tight deadline for an astronomical amount of words. Let’s take a look at how Claudia of Funstage saved the day and managed to deliver nearly seven million words on time – and how memoQ staff managed to help her achieve her goals. Claudia Befu is a localization expert at Funstage and has spent over ten years in the online business.
“I love creating localization strategies and solutions for medium and large enterprises, ready to significantly improve the quality of their content” - she explains. “And I have a knack for creative translation, also known as transcreation.”
Claudia is a student of Chado or the way of tea – and she writes articles about localization for The Open Mic, and for her own blog Content Localization. The very first day in her new position as a leader of the localization team, Claudia's challenges started.
“After spending 2 years as an agile project manager at a major online company, in 2015 I decided to return to localization. The new challenge waiting for me was leading a localization team in a multinational company about to relaunch two of their major websites. On a very tight schedule, that is.
I still remember my first day in this new role, when I was greeted by everyone with the alarming remark: Great that you are finally here, memoQ is a mess and no one knows what to do with it. And we have to translate two websites in over 15 languages by October! The bad news was that I also didn't know how to work with memoQ. As a matter of fact, I had left my previous job as a localization manager before any CAT tool was introduced in the company. I only had experience working with a myriad of CMS tools.
The situation got even worse when I realized that the biggest problem was actually of a technical nature: how to integrate memoQ with the newly acquired Web CMS tool on which the two websites were going to be relaunched.
As it happens when you face a challenge bigger than yourself I didn't panic, but methodically looked at every aspect of the problem facing me in my new role, and tried to figure out a solution:
Challenge 1: integrate memoQ with the Web CMS tool using the .xliff format
Challenge 2: Put up a translation team ready to take on 15+ languages and 450,000+ words per languages in under 3 months."
So instead of panicking Claudia organized the work at an impressive pace – trying to obtain as much information as possible with the help of memoQ professionals.
“The clock was ticking, but I didn't waste any time. The first step was to contact the memoQ team and kick-off our memoQ training. The translation tool had been introduced in the company three years prior, but it was integrated only with an in-house CMS tool and was working with .xml file formats. The person who was in charge of the setup of the system at the time no longer worked in the company and nobody else knew how the translation tool worked."
Time to Call the memoQ Team
"In under one week, a memoQ consultant taught us how to use memoQ as project managers, and helped us import and export .xliff files from memoQ, as well as integrate memoQ with our new Web CMS tool. With the help of an app engineer and a senior developer, we created the scripts and filters needed and switched to the latest version of memoQ.”
Of course, learning a system and setting up a complex workflow in just a couple of weeks represents its own peculiar challenges – Claudia had to face some of these too.
“The switch didn't come without trouble: because we were managing large volumes of content in two fixed projects, the tool froze every day, sometimes even for as long as one hour. On top of that, the translators had problems with their licenses, as they were constantly revoked. A month into my new job, I was at the edge of the cliff... The tool wasn't working, the translators didn't have licenses, and, on top of everything, I wasn't getting the source files for translation on time.”
As every good story, Claudia’s also has a happy-end – as memoQ staff helped her team to overcome their initial difficulties:
“After a couple of intense weeks, the memoQ team managed to fix our issues. We shut down some memoQ features and we switched to a fully mobile licensing system. The first milestone in the project was completed. We could now concentrate on translation as best as we could in the given circumstances. I hired a new localization specialist for the languages where we had either resources gaps, or quality gaps, and I mobilized the whole team of freelancers to work for the project full-time until everything was delivered.
Fortunately, the deadlines for the project got moved a bit as well, and we managed to finish all the translations for both websites in the first half of December. We delivered a total of approximately 6,750,000 translated words in under 6 months and none of that would've been possible without the help of the memoQ team.
The technical integration model created for this project is now a standard in the company and we use it for every new project and content management tool. With the help of memoQ technology, we manage content localization for a dozen websites and mobile apps, and we are not worried as our workload increases, because we know that we have the capacity to deliver on time.
The collaboration with the memoQ team didn't stop at these two projects: we recently had a terrific terminology management workshop and we are looking forward to learning more about file formats and localization engineering in an upcoming workshop. Although we've been working with memoQ for 3 years, we still feel like we've only scratched the surface and that there is still so much more to learn and explore.”
About Funstage
Funstage is a multiplatform gaming service provider offering synchronous play on mobile apps, social networks and other web-based technologies to gamers around the world. Funstage is a subsidiary of Greentube Internet Entertainment Solutions GmbH, a leading online gaming company with its headquarters in Vienna.
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