Contributed by: Linn Hu
Everything started at an event at Google in February. The topic for the International Multilingual User Group (IMUG) event that night was “Global Linguistic Diversity and the Endangered Languages Project.” Shay Boechler, one of the speakers, introduced ELP’s efforts to document, preserve and revive endangered languages in various parts of the world.
At that time, very little content on ELP’s website was available in languages other than English. Even the user interface was only partially translated. After the event, Shay and I discussed a project focusing on user-interface translation to make the website accessible to non-English speakers.
Our team was made up of 13 professional translators and “localizers” from the Translation, Conference Interpreting and Localization programs at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). With excellent linguistic skills and knowledge of the localization workflow, our team was able to deliver translations into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.
Throughout the process, our team worked closely with ELP’s project manager, Stephanie Walla and engineer, Lwin Moe to tackle technical challenges that we encountered in translating the website.
It has been a memorable experience for all of us at MIIS, and an awesome opportunity to apply our translation and localization skills to a great project. We are excited to see our translations go live on the website, and hope more translators and localizers will join our effort.
MIIS Team members:
Linn Hu: Team Lead
Katrin Liebert: German Project Coordinator
Johannes Härtel: German Editor
Verena Ritter: German Translator
Isabelle Setti: Portuguese Project Coordinator
Bruno Rossi: Portuguese Translator & Editor
Olga Melnikoff: Russian Project Coordinator
Penny Le: Chinese Project Coordinator
Tingting Xu: Chinese Translator
Lisa Li: Chinese Translator
Wendy Zhou: Chinese Translator
Sophie Yang: Chinese Translator
Zihan Fan: Chinese Editor
Roberto Koeneke: Spanish Project Coordinator
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MIIS Team |