Multimedia Flash
Flash has gained much popularity because of its rich content that incorporates animations, graphics, voiceover and interactivity to provide the user with an engaging and compelling experience. Companies today use Flash to create a variety of content to reach their customers and employees alike with such applications as interactive tutorials, virtual tours and even online help.
Although interactive lessons and virtual tours all benefit from the ease and functionality of Flash, these same features that make Flash such an overwhelming success, also make localization a bit challenging.
Some common problems with localizing Flash websites, help files, and interactive presentations include:
- Bitmapped text - Because it is not possible to edit bitmapped text, translation professionals potentially have to recreate complex effects resulting in increase time and cost.
- Scripting - Very few designers provide an explanation of the script and even less anticipate different character sets for text entry and text expansion within the field size.
- Inflexible design - Perhaps a Flash stage will be large enough to accommodate for the English text. However, very frequently, it will not be large enough to accommodate for the text swell of other foreign languages during localization.
- Animation: Designers frequently do not anticipate that their flash animation will be localized into different languages, thus they do not account for foreign language text swell or differences in grammar and usage. Synchronizing images or scenes with the appropriate content becomes an issue during localization.
Additionally, Flash files are not directly compatible with L10N industry tools. Therefore, file preparation for Flash and parsing text strings for translation requires the localization supplier to go through each Flash file manually to copy/paste all translatable strings which is not only time consuming but also error prone leading to longer project cycle and missing translations. Furthermore, using this approach also forces post-translation processing to be performed manually as well, resulting in further lost efficiency and increased total project cost.
With a strong background in L10N engineering and customized application development, CSOFT has developed a Flash Parser that automatically processes Flash files to consistently capture all translatable strings for translation as long as the text strings are defined as editable text within Flash. More importantly, the same tool can also put localized text strings back into Flash automatically, eliminating the need to copy/paste manually.
Using this technology, CSOFT is able to help our clients:
- Reduce file prep time
- Iincrease consistency and quality by eliminating missing translation within a single pass
- Reduce cost
Combined with our text extractor for Photoshop files, we can dramatically improve the efficiency for pre- and post-processing for Flash based localization. CSOFT's multimedia localization experience is not just limited to Flash files. Among others, CSOFT has extensive experience with Director, Authorware, PowerPoint and even multilingual Voiceover in 70+ languages.
For more information about CSOFT's Multimedia solutions using Flash, please click here. |
