It might not show here, but damn things are moving quickly now. Which is precisely why it doesn't show on here... So precious little time, so many things screaming for my attention. Writing unfortunately has to come on top of everything else.
Yesterday we finalized the first proper translation of our fully internationalized online booking system. Well. Not really true. It did exist in Swedish and English before, but for the first time based on external suppliers and a partner in another country we have successfully added another market to the system. Finland, Finland, Finland. Quite interesting language, Finnish. Based on same language roots as Hungarian, which means it is Greek to me. Worse than Greek. I actually know some Greek. Out of all of the phrases in our system I managed to recognize one word by looking at it: "rekisteröidy". That means "register"...
In the process of doing this we have also built a few quite innovative web based tools to do incremental additions and edits of our language resource files and content. In my opinion, one of the big hurdles of translating a system to another language is context and keeping track of which words and phrases go where so you make sure the translation first of all makes sense and second of all fits on the button, or in the screen real estate area allocated for that text. Next time we will have better visual support in doing this.
Time to get cracking on Denmark, France and Spain then, where we already work with hundreds of restaurants.
This week we also add another person to our team. Finally the much needed partner implementation resource arrives. Will take a few weeks for her to get up to speed but atleast I see the light in the tunnel. What it mainly means is that we will have time to start looking at making the white label booking service and related components more Sony and less Ericsson. We have a very functional system today, but it certainly lacks in features. There is no lack of ideas and vision though. We even have a few interesting blog widget and RSS projects coming up to help network and spread the booking system.
In other news, this just in: Went straight to page 31 in today's Metro to read Marina O'Loughlins cracking review of El Faro, Spanish restaurant at Canary Wharf. Fantastic, fantastic review. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be online yet, so see Time Out or Harden's instead. Made me want to drop everything planned today and go spend the day out there instead. And since the morning is looking up to be nice and bright, the roof terrace overlooking the waters would be so much more appealing than the office at Waterloo... But no rest for the wicked. Mouth watering foodie fantasies will have to wait.
