Apogee Communications Blog » Official

China, Summer 2010

admin — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:17:13 +0000

China. Almost one quarter of the world’s population. Economic engine of the world. About 26% of our current business. We’re there this summer.

I’ve been invited to speak at the LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association) conference in Suzhou, June 28 to June 30. I’ll be the lead speaker in the games track, giving an overview on the rise of the industry, effects of translation/localization and what this means for China. Other speakers are Victor Alonso Lion (Pink Noise) and Rolf Klischewski (gameslocalization.com).

I’ll be sure to leave my impressions here.

Note that contact numbers and email while I am in China will be unchanged. How I so love the digital world!

Off to San Francisco!

Edwin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:52:33 +0000

I’m off to San Francisco and GDC in the morning!

If you’ve come here trying to figure out how to contact me, my cellphone number is 951-240-1762. Feel free to SMS (preferred) or call.

Looking forward to a big time in the city. Many posts will follow the Conference if it’s anything like last year.

Chinese Translations are First

Edwin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:53:53 +0000

I’ve been working on some statistics for the upcoming GDC conference. One of the stats is the popularity of languages in translation. Since no one keeps such statistics, I thought I’d actually generate the ones from my company. This is not automatically done, so it meant about an hour of crunching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet from our accounting program. The numbers below are the top 12 (of 45 languages) from the last two years of work Apogee has done.

There are a few surprises here. Chinese is a full 26% of our workload, by wordcount. One reason for that, as well as Russian’s place in the statistics, is that a couple of clients decided to translate their backlists into these languages. Another reason is that, for several of our clients, we are one of many translation houses working for them. Either our Chinese work was faster, better or they didn’t offer the language at all, as we were receiving quite a few more requests from them for Chinese than any other language.

It may well be that other houses are seeing more work from the standard French, Italian, German and Spanish combination, but here we’re working quite a bit on the expansion languages.

Simplified Chinese	15.88%
Traditional Chinese	10.17%
Spanish	9.96%
Russian	9.38%
Italian	9.31%
German	8.40%
Japanese	8.28%
French	7.70%
Norwegian	3.60%
Latin American Spanish	2.99%
Thai	2.41%
Brazilian Portuguese	2.10%

Apogee at GDC and E3

Edwin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:55:59 +0000

Apogee Communications will once again be attending both E3 and GDC this year. Let us know if you will be there too!

Looking forward to seeing all of our favorite people again.

Happy New Year!

Edwin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:28:43 +0000

From all of us, to all of you: Happy New Year!

See you on the other side.

Company Bank – No Change

Edwin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:01:04 +0000

Over the weekend, Solon Enterprises’ corporate bank was seized by the FDIC. This post is to inform our clients that this DOES NOT CHANGE ANYTHING.

In the 1930′s, this would have been a disaster. Today, it’s simply a news item. US Bank has taken over California National’s operations, and none of the customers will see any changes or notice any difference. This has happened to us in other areas (non-corporate bank accounts and insurance) over the last year or so, and we have every expectation that this will be the same.

Website Update

Edwin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:11:47 +0000

We’ve finally updated the website. Not only is it more active and mobile, it is also more informative. The site had not been updated in some two years, so there are new services (voiceover and testing), as well as updates to the graphics section, language list and projects completed.

Everyone here is proud of our work, and now happy that we have a suitable display for it. We hope you like it too!

E3 Expo

Edwin — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:36:56 +0000

Yes, we will be at E3 this year. Looking forward to a return to the old show! We’ll have some work on display too – look for it here in the next couple of days.

Attending GDC Canada

Edwin — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:48:00 +0000

I’ll be attending GDC Vancouver this year. I will only be in town on Tuesday. This will be the first regional GDC that I have ever been to (I’ve always gone to the ones in San Jose and San Francisco), but I am planning on visiting at least one other this year.

Is That Translator Asking for a Review?

Edwin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:58:16 +0000

We do not offer public reviews of our translators. Ever. It won’t happen. Yes, we do like you (those of you who are good and meet your deadlines). No. No reviews on Proz.com or Translatorscafe.com or Craigslist or anywhere else that is publicly available.

Why?

Imagine a bad translator (who is not aware of quite how bad he is). And he’s awful. He lies about his native language, where he is living, who he has worked for in the past, but THAT SHOULD NOT MATTER. Because he is THE ONE – the great intelligent translator who knows all and sees all. Yes, you’ll get that translation back a week late, but it’s HIS and you should be happy for it. Even though all of the declensions are wrong. After all, this is a minor matter compared to his genius. If you run a translation agency, you can name at least three people whom this describes.

He asks for a review. We have three options:

1) Honesty. We tell the world how bad he is. All agencies have their own way of filtering translators, so this information does not really help them. The information is devastating to the translator, who thought he was simply excellent (why else did he ask for a review?). He writes a bad review right back at us, pretending to be that-big-client-everyone-wants, and gets his slimy bad-translator friends to do the same. Suddenly, we’re in an internet pissing fight which has done no one any good and, here is the key, has done Apogee Communications a world of bad. Let me repeat: no good for anyone, bad for us.

2) Lie. This really bad translator gets a good review from Apogee. He shows it to the world, saying what a great translator he is, and that he’s done a world of good for Apogee, videogames and Mom’s apple pie. Some less-then-careful agency hires him in the future and loses their big client over the bad translator’s work. This less-than-careful agency then goes online to explain his unfortunate demise due to hiring Apogee’s translators. Again, the key here is that it is bad for Apogee.

3) We can refuse to review. This is OK as long as we refuse to review EVERYONE. If the bad translator sees that we’ve reviewed good translators (as he will surely look for, since he’s wondering why no one has reviewed him publicly), he’ll ask WHY THE F**K WE DON’T REVIEW HIM. See possibilities 1 and 2 above. Again, not good for us UNLESS we refuse all public reviews.

We do offer private reviews for our translators if they need a reference. This is a professional courtesy, and it should come naturally to everyone in the industry who struggles with good and bad translators on a daily basis.