Software localisation for global expansion
Paragon Software Systems develops, implements and supports routing and scheduling software for transport operators. Since the company was established over 25 years ago, the business has grown to become the UK’s leading supplier of routing and scheduling optimisation software. As a result of this growth – Paragon now has over 3,400 systems in use in more than 59 countries around the world, with growing businesses in the USA and China.
The challenge
As Paragon continued to grow on a global scale, one of the challenges in the rapid expansion to new markets was standardising and maintaining the quality of localised software. The language palette for this software company now covers Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese.
Security of content was critical to Paragon, so the task required a secure computer assisted localisation environment to be put into place, with 80,000 words of translatable content in software strings for the main Enterprise level Windows application.
The highly specialised subject matter meant that Paragon needed a language partner who could source linguists with the right technical expertise.
How we helped
With so many languages on Paragon’s remit, Capita Translation & Interpreting (Capita TI) needed to ensure consistency across locales. Capita TI put workflows in place that maintained the specialised information and terminological data in the localisation environments, assisting linguists on all future translations of updates. This allowed Capita TI to consistently translate gems such as the explanation of the term “wiggle factor” (used to increase the length of off-map links to account for bends in the road – a wiggle factor of 1.2, for example, would increase the length of links by 20%).
The fact that Capita TI could find specialist linguists made them the perfect partner for Paragon, as this resolved the many issues that out-of context translation would otherwise bring.
One of the main benefits for Paragon has been the time saved during the review process. The quality of consistent translations for every market significantly reduces the time to market after each update.
The simplification of User Acceptance Testing and new customer on-boarding training has meant that new customers have been able to roll out their Paragon software solutions in record time. Customers of this system include The Linde Group (with 49,100 employees working in more than 100 countries worldwide), DHL (with more than 50 installations globally), and Croatia’s largest food and retail organisation; the Agrokor Group.
Capita TI’s Language Solutions Team will continue to help Paragon to shape the future of its localisation plan as it continues to expand its global footprint.
“Despite the challenges of specialist fleet logistics terminology, Capita TI has always supported our localisation requirements and has helped make our new markets a success.”
Richard Street, Software Development Director