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Step Five: Send out a Request for Proposal to outsourcing candidates
The most important step of all is putting together the Request for Proposal package. The "Suggested Request for Proposal components" sidebar lists some of the items that should be included in this package.

Prior to actually asking candidates to respond to the proposal package, you might want to send out an early release of the package or its outline to candidate outsourcing vendors. Their comments about the proposal structure and format can be useful and speed things along.

Step Six: Select the vendor, and sign the contract
When the proposals come back, rate vendors based on the selection criteria that you specified in your request. Follow up with vendors as necessary to collect information that may be missing or incomplete. By evaluating vendors in this way, you may find that the lowest quoted price is not the best overall bargain.

At this point, if necessary, negotiate with the two or three top-ranked vendors, and then select the vendor that you feel can most competently complete your project, on time and within budget.

Your contract should be written by (or at least reviewed by) a lawyer. Depending on where your outsourcer is located, there may be international law issues to be considered. The contract should include details about technical and managerial expectations, warranties, intellectual property, and contract termination. Make sure terminology and jargon are well defined, and include the technical package as part of the legal documentation.

Step Seven: Manage and monitor the project
The final step, of course, is for the localization outsourcer to complete the project. As the project progresses, you should monitor the schedule of the work by reviewing weekly vendor status reports and statistics. Some of the statistics that should be monitored are the number of bugs reported, fixed, and still outstanding, and the number of lines of code that were changed, added, or deleted. Follow up with your vendor frequently on the project status, especially as major milestones of the project are reached.

If you carefully follow these seven steps for effective localization outsourcing, the probability is high that your project will be successful. Which is not to say that you are done. There are still plenty of marketing, distribution, sales, and support issues that will remain. But with a quality localized product, dealing with these remaining issues will be easier and less stressful.

Dick Weisinger (dickw@tkb.att.ne.jp) is a senior software engineer at Lockheed Martin Global Inc. Based in Tokyo, Weisinger acts as technical liaison between Formtek International (a Lockheed Martin subsidiary that specializes in electronic document management and workflow automation software and services) and the company's distributors in Japan.

For further information on managing outsourced software projects, see McConnell's website (http://www.construx.com/) as well as those of The Outsourcing Institute (http://www.outsourcing.com/) and Everest Software (http://www.outsourcing-mgmt.com/).

An excellent reference for keeping current with the localization industry is MultiLingual Communications and Technology magazine (info@multilingual.com; http://www.multilingual.com/). Published six times a year, it includes current information about the localization and translation services industry. Each issue has a Buyer's Guide of tools and services as well as numerous advertisements by localization outsourcers.

Another trade journal of the localization industry is Language International magazine (http://www.language-international.com/). This is also published six times per year and contains articles about the translation and the localization business.

This year, the Localisation Industry Standards Association Forum (http://www.lisa.unige.ch/japan98.html) will be hosted in Tokyo from May 31 to June 2. The focus will be on "The Japanese Localization Opportunity: Too big to ignore, but hard to get right."

The Silicon Valley Localization Forum (http://www.tgpconsulting.com/) offers extensive links and references to resources for software developers and managers involved with globalization and localization. Of particular interest is the list of localization outsourcing companies.

There are many, many companies that now provide software localization outsourcing services; only a few are noted here. Some are very small, and some, as a result of a recent trend of mergers and acquisitions among localization vendors, very large. Mergers with Los Angeles-based IDOC, Paris-based I&G COM, Munich's GECAP, ME&TA of Madrid, Yokohama's Pacifitech, and others, have made Bowne Global Solutions (http://www.bowneglobal.com/) one of the world's largest localization providers. Microsoft has been a major customer of Bowne.

LioNBRIDGE Technologies Inc. (http://www.lionbridge.com/) recently merged with Massachusetts-based Japanese Language Services (http://www.japanese.com/). See the JLS website for detailed information about localization issues in the Japan market. Two localization vendors with strong software engineering skill levels are Uniscape (http://www.uni-scape.com/), a spin-off of the localization team at Oracle, and International Language Engineering Corporation (http://www.ile.com/).

Other established localization vendors include XA International (http://www.xai.com/), SimulTrans (http://www.simultrans.com/), and International Translation and Publishing (http://www.itp.ie/).

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