{"id":125,"date":"2015-04-11T20:46:46","date_gmt":"2015-04-12T00:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/?p=125"},"modified":"2015-11-02T01:01:40","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T06:01:40","slug":"thorough-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/thorough-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"If you&#8217;re going to translate, translate thoroughly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>If you&#8217;re going to translate a site into another language, make sure the translation is thorough<\/strong>. This is related to one of the first entries here, &#8216;Provide accurate translations&#8217;, but it relates to a specific problem that results in half-translated text, as opposed to translations where all the text is changed to a new language, but the words are simply wrong or the sentence structure is weird.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve noticed this with websites and apps that were originally written in English and later translated to a different language. If you&#8217;ve noticed this with other languages too, you can mention them in the comments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What not to do<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you try to use the FedEx US website in Spanish, <strong>half the text is still in English<\/strong>. That wouldn&#8217;t be as much of a comprehension problem for somebody who&#8217;s fully bilingual in both languages, but it&#8217;s still jarring to see text in two languages:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-05-30-at-13.46.15.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-129 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-05-30-at-13.46.15-300x170.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of the FedEx US website, set to Spanish. Most of the text is translated into Spanish but there are still several information panels written in English.\" width=\"300\" height=\"170\" srcset=\"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-05-30-at-13.46.15-300x170.png 300w, https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-05-30-at-13.46.15-1024x579.png 1024w, https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-05-30-at-13.46.15.png 1965w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Tumblr&#8217;s French translation has a lot of untranslated English text interspersed<\/strong>, including some huge date and time format failures.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-17.47.14.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-127\" src=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-17.47.14-300x70.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2015-01-27 at 17.47.14\" width=\"300\" height=\"70\" srcset=\"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-17.47.14-300x70.png 300w, https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-17.47.14.png 388w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There are three mistakes here:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the (numerical!) date is written in the American &#8216;month\/day&#8217; order, which is always wrong in French &#8211; if you want to say 17 October, it would be 17\/10<\/li>\n<li>there is a 12-hour time stamp of 6:55am &#8211; French uses the 24-hour time format and the time should be written as 6h55<\/li>\n<li>&#8216;ven&#8217; (short for &#8216;vendredi&#8217; or &#8216;Friday&#8217;) is capitalised. Days of the week are not capitalised in French. I&#8217;m surprised <em>Friday<\/em> was even translated to <em>vendredi<\/em>!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure how many people actually use the French translation of Tumblr, but even so, if you&#8217;re going to translate your website, make sure your text is translated. The &#8216;archive&#8217; page on Tumblr has a similar problem, with completely untranslated month names &#8211; it should be &#8216;janvier&#8217;, not &#8216;January&#8217;, and the date format is again wrong for French. (I&#8217;m starting to lean towards recommending against using the US date format at all if you plan on translating a website, instead using the unambiguous ISO date standard, since it seems to be a revealing error in translations.)<\/p>\n<p>Their newest UI change, where recent activity is shown by clicking on a thunderbolt icon in the top bar, has a similar problem with mostly untranslated text. Dates are shown in English (using the Month Day, Year format), as are phrases like &#8216;one week ago&#8217;. Again, the date format is wrong for French.<\/p>\n<p>Mozilla&#8217;s Firefox add-ons page seems to have the same problem as Tumblr:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.01.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-131\" src=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.01-300x125.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a user profile on the Mozilla website. All the text is in German except for the date.\" width=\"300\" height=\"125\" srcset=\"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.01-300x125.png 300w, https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.01-1024x428.png 1024w, https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.01.png 1216w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Most of the text is in German, except for the date, which says &#8216;Benutzer seit <em>[translation: User since]<\/em>: July 9, 2010&#8242;. The date should be translated into &#8216;9. Juli 2010&#8217;. The bottom bar, where the copyright section is located, has more untranslated text:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.06.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-135\" src=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.06-300x56.png\" alt=\"Botton navigation bar on the German Mozilla add-ons site. Copyright notice and 'Report Trademark Abuse' are in English. Text isn't aligned well.\" width=\"300\" height=\"56\" srcset=\"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.06-300x56.png 300w, https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-11-23-at-22.09.06-1024x190.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Report Trademark Abuse&#8217; and the copyright notice have not been translated into German. Not to mention, the assumed word length for some of those words is too short for German.<\/p>\n<p>This is frustrating, because Firefox gets top marks for the sheer amount of localisations available for it; it&#8217;s too bad that Mozilla&#8217;s centralised websites aren&#8217;t up to scratch.<\/p>\n<p>Something similar occurs on Behance, Adobe&#8217;s online portfolio website. If you set your language to French, there&#8217;s still a lot of English text throughout.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If<\/strong> <strong>your translation to another language or language variant is incomplete, then add a warning letting the user know that they may come across text that&#8217;s in a different language<\/strong>. That seems more thoughtful than trying to use a website or application in Chinese, only to have lots of text interspersed throughout in another language. When you change to a language that isn&#8217;t available in OS X, the operating system will warn you that menus and applications won&#8217;t be available in that language. Etsy did something similar with their Russian translation &#8211; if you chose Russian, it told users that it was a beta and that some English text would still be there.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re going to translate a site into another language, make sure the translation is thorough. This is related to one of the first entries here, &#8216;Provide accurate translations&#8217;, but it relates to a specific problem that results in half-translated text, as opposed to translations where all the text is changed to a new language,&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/thorough-translations\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">If you&#8217;re going to translate, translate thoroughly<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}