bernarddesgagne Posted February 18, 2004 Report Share Posted February 18, 2004 Anybody knows when Retrospect 6 for Mac OS will be available in French? Panther has been out for a few months now, but I still cannot install it on our computers until we get Retrospect 6. BTW, 200 US dollars is a big price to pay for a compatibility upgrade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted February 18, 2004 Report Share Posted February 18, 2004 French probably won't hit the streets until some time in April. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bernarddesgagne Posted February 19, 2004 Author Report Share Posted February 19, 2004 What is taking so long? Some software developers can publish software in different languages in very short delays. Apple is a good example. Why is Dantz taking three months to translate a few character strings? It is not as if you had to start from scratch. Unless you deeply change the interface, which is most certainly not the case with Retrospect 6.0. And even then, the terminology will remain the same. What is the reason for such long delays? Can't Dantz reduce them, as well as costs, by sticking to electronic documents. Obviously, printing a 300 page manual in different languages is costly, but putting it online is fast and efficient. The cost of the translation itself is minimal. For example, if you had to change 10 % of the manual and interface strings from the previous version, assuming that a total of approximately 15 000 words actually need to be translated, the cost of translation done by professionals would be about 2 250 US dollars. And I am being generous, because given the minimal number of new functionalities in 6.0, the percentage of new translation to be done is probably closer to 1 % than 10 %. The time taken to translate 15 000 words by two professional translators is no more than 1 week, and translation can be done while beta testing is completed. Why is Dantz uselessly delaying the publication of localized versions of its software? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted February 19, 2004 Report Share Posted February 19, 2004 Unfortunately the size of Dantz does not have the same resources as a company the size of Apple. Retrospect 6.0 has a lot of interface changes that require localization. We also have to Test test and test to make sure you do not run into issues running a french version on an English OS, or on a german OS for that matter. it is much more complex then just typing in a few new phrases and shipping it out. We also have to release in german and Japanese too, not just French Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bernarddesgagne Posted February 20, 2004 Author Report Share Posted February 20, 2004 If it is that complex for Dantz, its engineers need to take a course in software localization. Your application is most certainly not properly internationalized. When the programming is done right, all localizable elements are in resource files (XML) and everybody around the world should get exactly the same bugs. No message, no interface element should be hard coded. The language of the interface should have no impact on the performance of the application. No testing should be required other than to verify the accuracy of the translation. Actually, many software developers on Mac OS X provide with their applications the resource files for all the languages they publish them in. The installer just reads the user's language preference files and chooses the proper resource file. Mac OS X is made for easy localization. Maybe Dantz is lost in the dark confines of the Windoze world and cannot see the obvious proper way of doing things. According to Dantz's own Web site, this company "is one of Soft•letter's 100 largest personal computer software companies and was included on the "Inc. 500", Inc. Magazine's list of fastest growing companies." Millions of computers around the world are backed up with Dantz's products, which makes it, in my view, a wealthy multinational capable of producing localized versions of its products much quicker than it is doing now. Especially given the price its customers have to pay to upgrade the product each time they upgrade to a new version of their operating system. I am one of these customers, and I am starting to be fed up with Dantz's policy toward its foreign language customers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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