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["Bill Geschwind" <geschwin AT email.unc.edu>]

> Absolutely true!  I helped design Whirlpool's European 
> websites a few years 
> back, and it was a completely multi-lingual templating type 
> solution, where 
> the German played complete havoc with all the layouts.  Another major 
> difference is cultural in the sense of text and graphics.  
> Many Americans 
> would be completely turned off by the lingo and pictures that 
> really work in 
> Italy and even Britain.  I mean, do you think Page 3 girls 
> would work here?
> 

If the German played complete havoc with all the layouts, it may not
necessarily be the fault of the German translator. If the project was
internationalized properly, it should have been taken into account, for
example, that noun strings are concatenated in German, which leads to
these sometimes very long words. In any kind of multilingual project it
is very important to allow for text expansion in the target languages,
and the templates really need to be designed to be able to handle target
text strings that can easily be twice as long as the source strings. In
fact, the shorter the text string is, the more important this becomes -
Example: the German word for "No" is "Nein", which is twice as long as
the English word, and unless you want to use one-letter abbreviations
(Y/N -> J/N), there is no way around it. Even with longer text strings,
if not enough space is permitted for text expansion, then the translator
is forced to either use excessive amounts of abbreviations or reword the
strings in a way that sounds very awkward, or worse, leave out parts of
the source string. In my years as a technical German/English translator
I have encountered many localization projects where I was forced to do
just that, and it is very frustrating for a translator to be forced to
compromise the quality of the translation solely because the designer of
the project did not provide an adequate amount of space to allow for a
good translation. 

Moving slightly off topic, an even larger problem that I have
encountered time and time again in localization projects is the issue of
replaceable parameters ("An error in the %s causes effect %s"), where
the programmer did not take into account that foreign languages have
grammatical features that are absent in English, such as noun gender and
noun declination, and due to the way the strings are written, it is
impossible for the translator to provide translations that are
grammatically correct in every possible case. For example, the word
"the" is translated in German, depending on noun and case, as either
"der," "die," "das," "dem," "den," "des" or "dessen."

As mentioned above, taking cultural issues into account is very
important in internationalizing a project, and not only with regard to
material that may be offensive in another culture (like those Page 3
girls). For example, I once had a project which included not only the
software strings and the manual, but also some of the marketing
materials, which were full of baseball metaphors (Using this product you
will score a Home Run every time!). In this example it was not taken
into consideration that baseball is not as popular around the world as
it is here in the US, or that it is even known in every country or
culture. For this to work in German, I had to replace the baseball
metaphors with soccer metaphors, however some translators would argue
that this is an adaptation and no longer a translation and making these
kinds of decisions is not the job of a translator.

- Bill

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