Is Lingo worthwhile? US to UK English

[Andrew]

Hello,

We have about 6500 topics (and always growing ), and we are now starting a push to expand into the UK (we are currently US-only). Is Lingo worthwhile for this, or overkill? Obviously, the major issues are spelling/diction, colloquialisms, and some issues of currency/date formats. I've never tried to localize before, so I'm not sure how complicated it is. Any advice is welcome.

Also, quick question: is Lingo tied to particular versions of Flare at all? In other words, if we get Lingo 1.5, will that likely continue to work with Flare 5, 6, etc.?

Thanks,
Andrew

[GregStenhouse]

I think it's overkill. Firstly, look at whether or not it is going overboard to provide separate terms or spellings, non-US tend to not care too much if things are "americanized" we're pretty much used to it by now . If you must have differences, then I'd recommend variables or snippets. Much easier to handle in one project and at build time.

Cheers
Greg

[RamonS]

I wonder if making a copy of the project and running the UK spell checking against it wouldn't already do the trick.....unless you want to get fancy and use terms that are more common in the UK.

[Andrew]

I wonder if making a copy of the project and running the UK spell checking against it wouldn't already do the trick.....unless you want to get fancy and use terms that are more common in the UK.

The big problem with that is there are some UK terms that are very important, but a spellcheck would never catch. We might be able to do that manually, if the list is small enough.

For example, words like check. In the US, a check is the thing you fill out and use to pay your bills. In the UK, as I understand it, that is a cheque, and it is important to our customers that cheque is correctly spelled.

As GregStenhouse mentioned, they don't seem to be as worried about general spelling issues (such as "or" vs "our" or "s" vs "z"), but if it were correct, it would make them feel a bit better (like the product was really designed for them). That's always a nice thing to give your users.

Thanks for the responses. I appreciate your help.

[SteveS]

Could you run the output to Word and use the spelling and grammar checker in Word? If you set the language to English UK and settings to strict you might catch some of the less obvious problems.

I must confess I used the 'check' v 'cheque' example and my 03 box didn't catch it, but I'm sure the 07 box at home uses a better grammar checking algorithm. If I get time over the weekend I'll try it out.

[RamonS]

The problem is that "check" is considered a correctly spelled word, which can be both verb and noun. So from a rather dumb spelling and grammar check (nice example here) the word "check" probably makes perfect sense to the checker even though "cheque" is the correct term. The word "check" being both verb and noun also shows that using a project-wide find and replace most likely will do more harm than good.
I'd run the UK spell check against the project first to get the most of it corrected in a systematic way, then crawl through it topic by topic and edit what is left over. That is tedious work, I know, but I squarely blame the Americans for not being able to spell words correctly.

[forfear]

Hello,

We have about 6500 topics (and always growing ), and we are now starting a push to expand into the UK (we are currently US-only). Is Lingo worthwhile for this, or overkill? Obviously, the major issues are spelling/diction, colloquialisms, and some issues of currency/date formats. I've never tried to localize before, so I'm not sure how complicated it is. Any advice is welcome.

Also, quick question: is Lingo tied to particular versions of Flare at all? In other words, if we get Lingo 1.5, will that likely continue to work with Flare 5, 6, etc.?

Considering the scale of the project, i'd seriously consider Lingo.

If you do have other plans or solutions in the pipeline with opportunities to use Flare, etc, i think preparing for international expansion is to be expected somewhere down the pipeline for most business today unless you're a very country specific contractor of sorts where the solutions won't be sold or used in non-english markets.

[RamonS]

To add to forfear's post, also consider how frequent updates are done (apparently often since it is still growing). Lingo may ease the pain of maintaining the two versions. I'd identify a section of the help and try the Lingo trial version to translate that section. It may give you an idea if Lingo brings any benefits.

[forfear]

To add to forfear's post, also consider how frequent updates are done (apparently often since it is still growing). Lingo may ease the pain of maintaining the two versions. I'd identify a section of the help and try the Lingo trial version to translate that section. It may give you an idea if Lingo brings any benefits.

yup! i'd go with this. BTW..Camtasia 6's been released.

[RamonS]

And OpenOffice 3.0 as well....and a whole bunch of other software, too.

[SteveS]

I tried a phrase with the American spelling of cheque and Word )7 didn't find it (I was a bit dissapointed - it has been quite good on homophones - shows them with a blue underling as opposed to red for spelling and green for gramar.)

[Andrew]

Thanks for the tips, SteveS and forfear. I'm not sure Word can really be a part of our permenant process, given that we output HMTL Help, but I think it may be useful in a few instances. I'll definitely download Lingo's trial and give it a whirl.

<pedantic>

That is tedious work, I know, but I squarely blame the Americans for not being able to spell words correctly.

The formation of the USA predated the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary by 80 years (in fact, Webster's dictionary predated the OED by some 50 years). Even the Johnson dictionary (probably the first influential dictionry of English) was only published in 1755, long after there was a significant geographical division of the language. Up through these times (in fact, extending into the 1800s) spelling was considered a fluid thing: there were no "official" spellings.

In fact, there still aren't any official English spellings; unlike Germany, France, Norway, etc., neither the US nor the UK have created any official standards body with authority over linguistic issues. Conventionally, the UK holds the OED as the de facto standard, whereas in the US some rely on Webster's, and some rely on the American Heritage Dictionary (though I'm unaware of any spelling differences between them).
</pedantic>

Makes our lives as Technical Communicators more interesting.

[RamonS]

Thanks Andrew for this explanation. I wasn't aware that neither the US nor the UK have no interest to bring any organization into their language. Maybe they gave up on mouse/mice vs. house/houses and the fact that recipe doesn't rhyme with pipe. But there are advantages to it, nobody can claim that "da hood", "dude", "dange", "yo man", and "whuzzup" aren't proper English words.