Designing for localization

[L. A. Marra]

I'm developing online Flash tutorials that are translated into several languages. Up until this point, we have embedded all of the text in a library file called "text". Our translation company is saying that we can save 10% in translation costs by redesigning our tutorials with an external text file that calls in the text.

Now, our issue is that these tutorials are very "text intense". So, I assume this means that we would have to create an external text file, give each major text element a variable name, call it in, and then within the the text file itself make sure we embed the code that will say center text, make it boldface, etc. It seems to me to redo all this will take lots more design time.

I understand why the translation firm wants us to do this. They want to send a text file off to an in-country translator who knows nothing about Flash but can open a text file and translate the words.

Does anyone have any comments on the pros and cons before we the designers spend a whole lot of time (and money) redesigning the programs? Also, does anyone know of any code that might be able to extract our text out of the Flash library file into a raw text file then bring it back in again? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

LAM

[dgrigg]

We do something similiar with some of our sites/products using an xml file for all the text, labels, etc.

Depending on the language used the flash movie pulls all the text from a different xml file. This makes it really easy to quickly put in a new language or even just update content in an existing language.

Probably the trickiest part of the whole operation is making sure anywhere you are putting text it can handle text with varying lengths (ie a phrase in english may be 50 characters long but in french it is 75).

[SJT]

XML is most definitely the way to go with this; it's a classic case of separating the content from the delivery mechanism.