Posts Tagged ‘polish’
Localizing Humor
According to the article, "I don't get it: Humor lost in translation," it can be difficult to translate humor from one language or culture to another. Translators can sometimes find equivalent jokes that will be funny in the target language, but here are a few resources to help identify country-specific humor and jokes: Reader's Digest, "The [...]
Language Use by Region
What are the top 10 languages by population in New York and other states? Where are the most Armenian speakers living in the United States? The U.S. Census used to track and report the number of language speakers for virtually every language in every state and county. This data was very useful for companies planning localized multilingual [...]
Language and Country Codes
Many multilingual websites are organized using subdomains and subdirectories based on language codes or country codes. These are usually ISO codes. See the following example that Google gave for a French website in Canada using the alpha-2 code for the French language: French language code subdirectory: www.example.ca/fr French language code [...]
Language and Country Names List
English speakers expect that a link to an English language/country option on a website will be listed in English, not translated into another language. Otherwise, how easily would an English speaker find a link to English content if the language name were written in Asian, Cyrillic, or Middle Eastern characters? Or how easy would it be if the [...]
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, [...]
Bad Photoshop Is Not a Substitute for Localization
Sometimes images need to be localized to reflect the ethnic diversity of a target market, otherwise marketing materials may look too foreign without using Asian models in Asia, Middle eastern models in the Middle East, etc. Unfortunately, Microsoft got a lot of flack for amateurish use of Photoshop in an attempt to localize one image for [...]
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 [...]
Presidential Mistranslations
Whenever a U.S. president commits a translation error, it is likely to make the news. Here are some errors involving sitting U.S. presidents: Barack Obama Cinco de Cuatro? - On May 4th, 2009, President Barack Obama tried his luck at humor in another language. The Washington Times reported: "For scheduling reasons, he planned to observe the [...]
Download Translation Memory
As mentioned in previous tips, three tools that help a company maintain translation consistency at different levels 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 [...]
