Why the Germans & Japaneses get premium service at Microsoft…
Basically, MSFT in Redmond, Washington, selected German and Japanese amongst many languages for their very special common characteristic: both are very tough and hard to both read and write.
In other words, translating a software in German is a good way to test whether the HMI supports long words and explanations; whilst Japanese is Microsoft’s pick in an attempt to test whether Eastern (Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Hebrew, Hindi, etc.) languages were well taken into account during development.
Thanks to Jeremy (another one) by the way, for helping me realize why Germans and Japanese enjoy the privilege of getting to use Microsoft software in their own language first…
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Its true that in Europe, german language is managed as a primary language for the reasons you describe. But as a matter of fact, german and french products are made available simultaneously for customers. Those two languages are branded “tier 1 languages” within Microsoft meaning they deserve the same treatment customer-wise. The difference is in the way internal teams are handling localization. a while ago, only german localization teams were based in Redmond, WA, whereas other european localization teams were based in Dublin, Ireland. Whatever, most of the work is done by third-party localization vendors, some of them sitting next door in Paris…
Thank you for your insight Olivier, it’s always useful to see how things really are in the backstage.
For example IE7’s RC1 was first released English, then “in two to three weeks, we’ll ship the Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish language versions” and then the rest. Earlier Betas lacked French and Spanish, probably because they don’t have such long words and funny characters like umlauts and friends like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengessellschaft, which still is quite short compared to … this: http://users.tkk.fi/~jpakkane/sana.html
As Open source development, created in partnership and worldwide cooperation, internationalization of software is a necessity. This is the natural way of creating in a multicultural life. The .net or peer 2 peer development communities totally modify development, tests and diffusion of software. There is no translation, but worldwide interactive creation. This is certainly a crazy job for global project manager, but very exciting to accelerate realizations. Global New bugs in perspective ….
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Thanks for this precision jeremy, I didn’t know it. I’ve always thought that it was because german people are still european leader in term of high tech products or new technologies.
Bertrand> I totally agree with you. Going international is compulsory for any ambitious software company. Translation has become a job in itself.
Cédric> You’re most welcome. Ahah, I guess the Germans aren’t leading the techo-phile European landscape. In software, the Brits do. And when it comes to technology in general, I bet Scandinavians come first. In the media industry however, the French aren’t too bad. Let’s say that Germany is, as the largest country in the EU in terms of population, a pot pourri of technological habits elsewhere.
Kari> Pretty nice, the “Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengessellschaft”. In French, the longest word is “anticonstitutionnellement”, which adverbially means that something doesn’t abide by the Constitution.