Case Study

North Ostrobothnia Regional Environment Centre

Business Solution: Oil Transport Prediction System

"Localizing our software was a decisive prerequisite for exporting it to our Russian and Swedish colleagues. Besides of the obvious benefits of working with your native language, at stressing rescue operations where decisions has to made in minutes, can't think of anything else" - Heimo Vepsä, North Ostrobothnia Regional Environment Centre

Background

North Ostrobothnia Regional Environment Centre is a governmental hi-tech research center situated in Northern Finland. There is a lot of co-operation with the neighboring countries Russia and Sweden. In addition to monitoring environmental changes, the Centre has been developing their own software for predicting transport of oil during accidents. It has been used at sea areas surrounding Finland. End users of the software are mainly governmental personnel in charge of oil combating and sea rescue.

Decision to internationalize the software

At the time when Russian authorities showed interest in obtaining the software, the Centre began to think about localizing the software into Russian. In addition there was an immediate need for getting it functioning in Swedish, as well. It showed up that the software should run in any of the languages needed - Instead of making several exe-files it seen more sensible to stick to one file only.

Mr. Heimo Vepsä, the project leader for the software development at North Ostrobothnia Regional Environment Centre tells: "Localizing our software was a decisive prerequisite for exporting it to our Russian and Swedish colleagues. Besides of the obvious benefits of working with your native language, at stressing rescue operations where decisions has to made in minutes, can't think of anything else."

Evaluation of commercial localization tools

Mr. Vepsä adds: "MULTILIZER was among other tools evaluated. We downloaded the free evaluation file and after the evaluations it turned to be the tool we needed: easy to take in use and superb easiness of working with translations".

Implementation of MULTILIZER

MULTILIZER was easily taken in use in the existing project. One of the best features of the software was, that the software development could proceed simultaneously with the localization process. Since the languages were maintained apart from the programming, the work could be shared. This benefit helped to complete the project in two months.

Future

Future versions of the software will be developed all after the upcoming needs. No additional localization related programming has to be done although the software is multilingual. The accumulative Master Dictionary of Language Manager has put the time-consuming translation work into a minimum. Most of the GUI elements and the branch-specific terminology are translated automatically.