‘Website Localization’ Archives
Google Translate has great uses, disastrous misuses
Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best. When one online [...]
International symbol, icon blunders can be avoided
Some of my European colleagues still remember when the old Macintosh operating system of the 1980s used a trash icon that Apple’s European users confused for a postal box. Why was the icon confusing? People across the globe have different cultural ideas and assumptions about what things are supposed to look like. In other countries, trash cans [...]
Clinic: How to Create International-Ready Websites and Software
UTC International Clinic: Thurs, April 21st, 2:00 - 4:00 PM Internationalization 101: How to Create International-Ready Websites and Software Without proper preparation, various challenges can arise when localizing websites and software applications into Português, Русский, Français, Italiano, Español, Deutsche, [...]
Export Experts Seminar on eCommerce Effectiveness Highly Useful
The World trade Center of Utah gave Adam Wooten, vice president of Globalization Group, the opportunity to speak at a seminar on global e-commerce, Wednesday, April 13, 2011. Adam has given many presentations on this topic, so the World Trade Center kindly asked him to "pinch hit" the day before after another speaker was forced to cancel. Also [...]
Can Companies Obtain Free Professional Services through Crowdsourcing?
Twitter launched a Twitter Translation Center Monday in an effort to obtain volunteer translation services from users and localize its user interface into other languages. For years, Facebook and other companies have also been turning to users for volunteer translation in what is often called “crowdsourcing.” These high-profile examples have [...]
Color Meanings Can Be Lost and Found in Translation
We often consider only the connotations of colors in our own culture; however, colors carry various different – often strong – connotations in other cultures. What may be neutral in one country could carry sharp political connotations in another. What may be seen as positive in one culture may be negative in a neighboring country. For this [...]
Bing notranslate: Preventing Automatic Translation by Microsoft
If your company website has already been localized or if you plan to localize it into other languages, you will want to ensure that your clients see that high quality human translation, not the machine translation provided by Google... or Microsoft. Likewise, you will want to always prevent translation of certain text, code, product names, [...]
‘English Well Talking’ and Other Ironic Business Claims
Few things are more ironic than signs that use poor grammar and spelling to proudly declare fluency in another language. For example, some U.S. business signs attempting to state "Spanish is spoken here" (se habla espanol), are misspelled as something like "se hablo espanol." Popular English examples include signs reportedly seen on a Majorcan [...]
String Concatenation
String concatenation can be very useful to programmers. However, limiting of concatenation can greatly improve internationalization. Many concatenations can cause problems for translators. Translators often need to restructure sentences or indicate word gender and plurality, but that can be awkward or impossible with many variables. Here [...]
Barf Detergent
Some popular mistranslation anecdotes are actually not translations at all. Some so-called translation bloopers are actually intended for only one language and market where no one would notice any problem. An example of this comes from Iran's Paxan Corp., which created a brand of detergent specifically for Farsi speakers in Iran. The product [...]
