Posts Tagged ‘arabic’
Customer Complaints Lost in Translation
"Customer Complaints Lost in Translation" is an article by Globalization Group vice president Adam Wooten, published in the July 12-18, 2010 issue of The Enterprise, "the premier business paper in the Utah region." Read a PDF copy of the complete article here, or subscribe to The Enterprise here.
Microsoft Language Portal Update Includes Office 2010 International Terminology
The Microsoft Language Portal has recently been updated to include International Terminology from Office 2010 in 90 languages. As mentioned previously, Microsoft has produced great free resources for download and/or search that include all of its style guides and glossaries, which can double as translation memory.
Image Localization
Sometimes localization of text is not enough. We've already pointed out that colors, gestures, symbols, and icons often need localization. The same is often true for other graphic, photographic, and video imagery. It's simply a matter of providing imagery that reflects what exists in a country's context. Regarding the models used in images, [...]
Color Meanings by Culture
Colors have different meanings in international cultures. Are you conveying the right message to your international customers with the appropriate colors on your product, packaging, website, and marketing materials? For example, green packaging may emphasize environmental awareness in the United States, but it is not a good color for packaging [...]
Text Expansion & Contraction in Translation
Letter-for-letter translation appears on kids' cereal boxes, but not in real life. In real life, the word count, character count, length, and sometimes even the height of translated text will differ from the source text. Proper preparation can prevent potential problems with expansion. This preparation can include dynamically resizable [...]
U.S. Presidential Candidate Mistranslations
Just as sitting presidents take a lot of heat for any missteps while in office, U.S. presidential candidates are often under a microscope for any blunders committed before, during, and after their campaigns. Barack Obama Arabic in Afghanistan? - As a candidate, Obama mentioned a need for Arabic linguists in Afghanistan, momentarily forgetting [...]
1st Non-Latin Domains
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently approved the use of non-Latin International Domain Names (IDNs) for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Here is a screen shot of the first IDN with Arabic characters, which only displays correctly in some browsers:
Top Languages by Population
In prioritizing markets to target and languages to translate, should you care which languages are spoken by the largest population? Maybe. Maybe not. Looking at the top 12 languages by percentage of world population, you'll see some languages like Javanese and Lahnda (which includes Panjabi) that are rarely included when a company prioritizes [...]
Top Languages by GDP | Top Countries by GDP
Into which languages should your company translate first? There are many ways to determine the answer, not all of which are mentioned in this tip. An e-commerce business may wish to first prioritize the top 10 internet languages. Other international companies less dependent on the internet for customer transactions may wish to look at the top [...]
Translation & Localization Style Guides: Introduction & Downloads
As listed in the tip on translation glossaries, three tools that help maintain consistency in a company's translation include glossaries, style guides, and translation memory. Glossaries help maintain consistency at the term level, translation memories help maintain consistency at the sentence level, and style guides help fill in the gaps by [...]
