Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Diana Duncan <art2mis AT nc.rr.com>]

On Tuesday 26 March 2002 09:00 am, you wrote:
> > 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.

I completely agree.  As soon as we the techies realized the problem we had, 
we went back to the marketing/art people and had them redesign the art.  We 
had to do that for even the English text -- the marketing "designers" really 
had no clue what amount of text/graphics would fit on a page.  This was still 
in the early days of web design (1998), before that job was done by 
technical-savvy people.  We just had to try to work their art in, then tell 
them "no way" when it just wouldn't work.  We fought with them tooth and 
nail, continually arguing that a good translation will be more important to a 
web viewer than pretty graphics any day.  Eventually, it all fit. :)

And, bizarrely, the sites are still up and working.  Although -- I just 
checked with my Linux browsers (Konquerer, Mozilla, Galeon) and the sites 
didn't work.  I guess they've done some stupid things since 1998 to the code. 
 Works in bloody IE, though!  Grrrrrr.  There's a pet peeve of mine!