Despite the floods, your Thai-language projects are safe with Admerix

Considering the serious flooding in Thailand, Admerix wanted to provide an update on the situation for Thai-language projects.

With large areas of central Thailand under pressure from evacuations, power outages, and conflicting statements from authorities, you can rest assured that Admerix can run Thai projects without a hitch.

Located in Singapore and with a large base of local resources, Admerix can apply industry standard management and quality assurance to Thai language work. Even when Thai-based companies are struggling with communication and delivery difficulties, Admerix can deliver corporate-grade localization work no matter what the conditions are within Thailand.

Admerix Thai Expertise

Availability of qualified subject specialist teams

While there are many Thais willing to give general translation a try, finding professionals with relevant experience and tools can be difficult--particularly on large-scale projects. Admerix has qualified teams of tested resources for even the largest and most challenging projects. Our large Thai team of linguists is expert in many subject specialties--medical, automotive, ERP/CRM, gaming, and elearning.

Terminology specialists

The Thai language is fraught with terminology issues. Even companies selling identical products frequently adopt different (and often confusing) terminology for seemingly commonplace terms. Admerix's knowledge of the Thai market ensures your projects will employ the most appropriate terminology.

DTP and formatting issues

Thai still remains one of the trickiest languages to deal with because of line-break issues, stacked tones and font size problems. Admerix has extensive experience in handling these types of issues in ERP/CRM, online software, and mobile devices.

If you are anxious about trusting your project to a Thailand-based company at this time, Admerix can give you peace of mind in stable and transparent Singapore.

We would be happy to answer any questions about our solutions for Thai and other Asian languages, so please don't hesitate to contact us. Email: John.Wyatt@Admerix.com

3 Questions to Ask Before Adopting that Best Practice

Thought-provoking stuff from Harvard Business Review:

Best practices are alluring. If other companies have already determined the best way to do something, why not just do what they did? But before you run off to collect best practices from the leader in your industry, ask these three questions:

    * What are the downsides? Implementing a practice that worked elsewhere isn't necessarily a slam dunk. Think through the potential disadvantages and figure out how to mitigate them.
    * Is success truly attributable to the benchmark practice? There are many reasons a company succeeds. It is unlikely that emulating one practice of an industry leader will give your company the same success.
    * Are the conditions similar at your organization? For best practices to be transferrable, businesses need to have key similarities: strategy, business model, and workforce.

Adapted from Harvard Business Review on Making Smart Decisions

"Crowdsourcing" means translators will work for free

The history of the localization industry in the internet era has been the story of the race to free translation. This may be good for business, but linguists have always been aware that the expensive tools offered to them are designed to reduce what they have to be paid.

This started with expensive TM tools that had the dual effect of costing a fortune up front and then discounting repetitions--the grid of which gets tighter and tighter for the linguist with each year.

Now we have crowdsourcing, the holy grail of the industry, where linguists log on to a system (creating "systems" is another holy grail) and work for a vastly discounted rate--or even for free--to complete work in record time.

There's hardly a localization firm out there that has not contemplated a future where it gets to charge big bucks to its clients, but then gets all the work done for practically nothing by Wikipedia-style editors who, for some reason, want to do it for free.

All of this was brought to mind by this interesting thread on Slashdot: Steam Translation Community Slaving Away

It is interesting to note that the open source community supports this sort of model as being compatible with the development of community driven software such as Linux.

Press releases we see too often

Localization press releases and newsletters come fast and furious these days as those in the industry attempt to drum up business in the face of an uncertain future. Most of these efforts have very little to offer to clients or resources and many unintentionally demonstrate the odd thinking that pervades the industry.

Here are a few of types of press releases we have seen that make us smile (and sometimes shake our heads in disbelief):

Localization company congratulates itself for having a blog
(…shares favorite recipes of their accounting staff in an attempt to solve the problems of their clients)

Localization company appears at localization convention
(…where they spend the shareholders’ money speaking to other firms about options for future jobs once their own company goes broke)

Localization company in the U.S. boasts that they have a project manager who lasts more than six months
(…has been driven partially insane by sales though)

Focus on standards dooms LISA – as a result, GALA jumps on board the standards bandwagon
(…everyone know that bureaucracy equals quality, right?)

Localization company revamps its website
(…and it still looks no different than any other localization company site)

Localization company trumpets its new accounting system
(…now promises to pay translators after 6 months—if they complain enough)

We are here in August!

Localization is a strange business. Not many industries can hang up a “gone fishing” sign for a month and expect the clients they serve to simply wait for them to return from their holidays. The Eurozone cultural convention of month-long holidays around this time of year usually causes a dearth of localization resources. No skeleton staff or reduced capacity, just turn on the holiday auto responder messages for all emails and make sure the lights are off on the way out the door!

This trend may be changing though. July-August used to be a slow period for localization, but in the past few years it has been one of Admerix’s busiest times.

Here at Admerix, we remain on call throughout August and maintain a complete selection of subject-specialist resources to cover all requests. Our veteran project managers are standing by to solve your challenging localization problems.