INK was also one of the first companies to create desktop translation support
tools, called the INK TextTools, the first technology commercially
developed to support translators. As a historical note, the present company
Lionbridge was “spun off from Stream International, which itself had
emerged from R.R. Donnelley’s acquisition of INK,” said Lionbridge CEO
Rory Cowan in 1997.
In 1987, a German translation company called TRADOS was reselling
the INK TextTools and a year later released TED, the Translation Editor
plug-in for TextTools. Shortly thereafter, TRADOS released the first version
of its Translator’s Workbench translation memory (TM) product. TRADOS
continued to establish itself as the industry leader in TM technology
throughout the 1990s, boosted by Microsoft taking a 20% stake in 1997.
Initially, TM technology could only deal with text files. Hardly any
technology was commercially available for the localization of software user
interfaces. Most software publishers built proprietary tools, which were
tailored to their own source code format and standards and used by their
internal teams. Development of these tools was often quite ad hoc and
unstructured. As a result, early generations of software localization tools
were usually quite buggy and unreliable.
1990s: An Industry Established
Throughout the 1990s, a large number of localization service providers were
born, many of which were little more than rebranded translation firms. For
the IT industry, the sky was the limit, the globe was its marketplace, and the
localization industry followed closely in its footsteps.
After the initial pioneering efforts of translation companies adapting to
the new paradigm of localization, the 1990s clearly saw the establishment of
a true localization services industry. Software and hardware publishers
increasingly outsourced translation and localization tasks to focus on their
core competencies. The need for outsourced full-service localization
suppliers was growing rapidly.
Within a localization services company, localization teams would
typically be coordinated by a project manager overseeing schedules and
budgets, a linguist to monitor any linguistic issues, an engineer to compile
and test localized software and on-line help and a desktop publisher to
produce translated printed or on-line manuals. A typical localization project
consisted—and often still consists—of a software component, an on-line
help component and some printed materials such as a getting started guide.
To localize a software application, localization engineers receive a copy
of the software build environment, extract the resource files with translatable
text, prepare translation kits and support the translators during their work.
Post-translation, the engineers merge the translated files with the build
environments and compile localized copies of the software application. This
always requires some level of bug-fixing, user interface resizing and testing.
A similar approach is taken to produce localized versions of on-line help systems.