That 'international' aimeemann.com site I was talking about

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/07/28 03:05 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/07/28/444224.aspx

A while back I mentioned how I was once involved a little bit with Aimee Mann's web site. I mentioned it some people at work who did not even believe me until it finally went live -- when I showed them the local version I had running they thought I just needed to get a life. Which was true, but the work was still for the official site. :-)

You can even see a credit that then webmaster Russ Nordmeyer put in to the links page (see the end of the Links page on the old site for the proof that this happened). Now this was back in late 2001, and as soon as the at-the-time new album (Lost in Space) was put out, and it was Flash based so these three minutes in my 15 minutes of fame came to an end. And it was a real end -- although the credit still exists, the actual site was archived and moved off of a Microsoft server and over to one that did not understand ASP.

Ah well, there was not too much there, just localized versions of a list of tour dates and a bio page that were both translated into several other languages (Matt would have loved it, since the links were region-based!). It was fun to do and fun to work with both professional localizers and fans into what proved to be a fairly challenging localization project, given the nature of the biography.

And the European tour dates were postponed until late 2002 after all that happened on September 11th, 2001, which of course made some of the project's urgency and interest get lost (since the upcoming European tour seemed like a great reason to get many different languages posted).

Now that the site is now three years archived, it occurred to a few people that the whole thing might make an interesting comparative localization project. :-)

Now this particular localization was more difficult than usual for a software project for several reasons:

• There were not a huge number of localizers who were Aimee Mann fans;
• There were not a huge number of Aimee Mann fans who understood the principles that guide good localization;
• Merely speaking a language well enough to localize professional software was not enough -- one would have to also have a good command of both the source and target languages to not just know what words to use in the target langauge but to be able to understand all of the slang, idiom, and allusions of the original source;
• The project was an all-volunteer effort -- there was no money being offered at all (this was not as much of a problem as you might guess);
• Fans have a hard time being corrected, even when other fans are certain that there are errors in translation.

But it was nevertheless a fun project for a many different people, and it was live for a little while, and excited fans were asking to add their own translations right up until the day that the new site was put up. Anyway, here are the languages that various volunteers submitted and/or commented on and/or edited over those months (items in bold are countries that were a part of both the earlier planned European tour and the one that happened the next year).

United States      Germany      Japan      Greece      Sweden      France      Portugal      Georgia      Thailand      Great Britain

If you speak any of these languages, enjoy the issues in the above bullet list! :-)

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