Success Story: SilentManager
SilentManager Adopts The Amanuens Software Localization Platform
In this case study you will learn about a multinational software startup that has successfully integrated Amanuens, a web-based localization platform, into its localization workflow.
About Amanuens
Amanuens is a web-based platform designed to make software localization extremely easy. By integrating with the tools software developers already use, most importantly source code repositories, it automates all the repetitive, error-prone and valueless operations that are typically performed manually by developers and project managers. When new items to translate are detected, the platform notifies translators so they can start working immediately. Everything is done in a web browser, including translation itself, and the end results are a faster turnaround time, a better quality and much less overhead in the overall process.
About SilentManager
SilentManager, a multinational startup with offices in Sydney, Australia and Brighton, UK, creates a diverse range of “Fantasy” and “Predictor” style sports games for clients as a light-hearted means to engage with their target audience. The games are web-based, database-driven, and powered by Microsoft’s development stack (ASP.NET, C# and SQL Server). The games are white-label templates, which are then customized as required for each client. A few of SilentManager’s current projects:
- Mirror Streak: a Football Streak online game for The Mirror, a national UK tabloid.
- You The Manager: an online game based on the English Premier League for The Mirror.
- Orange Fantasy Football: an online fantasy football for Orange, a mobile telecommunications provider.
- Football Manager 2012 Predictor: a game prediction web application for SEGA, a multinational videogame company.
- Guinness Fantasy Rugby: an online fantasy rugby for Guinness, a brewery.
- MSN Football Predictor: an online football predictions game for MSN, Microsoft’s content portal.
Localization Process Before Using Amanuens
The very minimum sequence of tasks required to allow localizers to do their job generates significant overhead while bringing no additional value to the end result, being merely a mechanical requirement towards the production of the localized software.
Douglas Wadding-Bond, Head of Production Australia, tells us: “Before Amanuens, our localization process was pretty arduous and prone to error. When we needed to translate a game into a new language, we’d have to dump out the appropriate .resx files into an Excel spreadsheet, and provide this to the Project Manager.”
.resx is the standard resource file format used by the .NET platform to store, retrieve and manage localizable strings. It is based on XML and can be edited within Microsoft Visual Studio. Amanuens supports .resx files as well as many other formats used by most software development platforms.
“The Project Manager would then email this over to a translator for editing. The file would invariably come back with broken XML, excess white-space, nodes accidentally deleted and other such issues. We’d then spend more time getting the data back into a useable format, before reinserting the data into the .resx. I’d estimate that a single language might have originally taken around 40 hours.”
It is clear that managing localization for a project including, for example, just five major languages such as Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Russian would have accounted for around 200 hours of overhead, with a high chance of human errors.
Localization Process With Amanuens
SilentManager has started using Amanuens in September 2011. The company is now handling more than 100,000 strings within the platform, and coordinating the work of 6 people.
“Now, whenever we need copy translated, we can just assign the appropriate project directly to the translator, adding relevant instructions as needed. The translations that come back are immediately useful, and already correctly integrated into the appropriate .resx files without additional effort.”
Amanuens allows translators to work directly in a web browser, making file format issues completely transparent for translators and streamlining the entire workflow as much as possible.
Time Saved Using Amanuens
Being designed to reduce the workload of developers, translators and managers, Amanuens takes care of most tedious and error-prone activities that are typically repeated over and over at each localization iteration.
“Over a single language, I suspect we’d save around 15-20 hours for the initial iteration.”
Considering that most web-based applications usually offer multiple languages and are updated frequently, the amount of time saved over subsequent iterations is relevant.
Turnaround Time Reduction and Quality Improvement
After notifying translators, Amanuens makes it easy for them to quickly find strings that have yet to be translated, while allowing managers to always have control on the overall progress. Translation Memory technology automatically suggests possible translations of each string, based on previous data automatically collected during operation, contributing to overall time savings and results’ consistency.
“I’d say Amanuens easily halves the overall turnaround time of some translations, and the resultant quality exceeds our expectations. The whole translation process is much less of a chore.”
Conclusions
SilentManager has been able to streamline and optimize its localization process by using Amanuens, achieving better results in less time, and demonstrating that even small teams can get significant benefits from the platform.
“Before Amanuens, our software localization process was a labor-intensive, tedious administrative challenge. The team at Amanuens have done an impressive job in streamlining this process, negating much of the traditionally associated overhead and allowing us to concentrate on the important stuff: writing code. Our non-technical staff have picked up the system with minimal instruction and now administer the translations themselves. The guys at Amanuens have successfully dealt with any queries we’ve had within a few hours - we’re extremely pleased with the platform.”
Contact Information
Dario Solera — #
Threeplicate (Amanuens), CEO — amanuens.com
Douglas Wadding-Bond — #
SilentManager, Head of Production Australia — silentmanager.com
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