Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications is a global provider of mobile multimedia devices, including feature-rich phones and accessories, PC cards and M2M solutions. Customers of Sony Ericsson products include Vodafone, Orange & T-Mobile
Approximately 85% of all Sony Ericsson’s sales are outside of English speaking countries. My role is to ensure the quality of some 20,000 strings (words or sentences) across 40 – 50 languages which will be included in handsets sold to these non English speaking markets. This is known as Localisation Engineering.
Sony Ericsson uses 3rd parties to translate the English into the required languages. These translations are returned to Localisation and handled in a database tool called ‘LabelTool’. Essential planning is required to ensure the translations are returned in time to be included a release of the Localisation component.
Half of the role included compiling all the translations into a component to be released onto a Sony Ericsson handset. There are approximately 288 components released across multiple sites within the organization. These components were dependent on the Localisation component as they would have been impacted if it was delayed or incorrect. There are also 3rd party components which would have been impacted by a flawed Localisation component. Component versioning was handled in ClearCase.
The other half of the role included testing the quality of the returned translations. This was largely achieved by manual navigation through the handset using tests created in Quality Center, but also running automated scripts (created in Quality Center) on in-house automated testing software. Defects are managed in ClearQuest.
Products worked on included the ‘G700/G900’, ‘P1’ & ‘Satio’ amongst others, with the ‘G700’, ‘G900’ selling around half a million units each. These products are classed as high-end phones and they are developed on Symbian OS, UIQ & now Nokias S60 technologies.
