How to Overcome the Challenges of String Translation
by: DylanG.Major |
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Usually, when software developers create messages for end users, they have them assembled at runtime from a set of substrings stored in a library. A truncated string such as the ones used are almost impossible to translate accurately, since there is no way of ensuring that they will be properly combined to be grammar compliant at runtime. Translation vendors will ask programmers in many cases to rewrite all of these strings into messages which make sense to the end user independently.
Beware of Gender
Here's just one example: While they were working to localise a DLL file for a large electronic document management software firm, the developers on the project decided to use a naming feature to allow users to change the names of nouns used in the program, as many companies have preferred terminologies for documents and elements within them.
This seemed like a great idea, since these developers neglected that most languages, unlike English, have genders and other infections for nouns and adverbs. In English, these adverbs do not have an inflection depending on the "gender" of a noun. For example, in English, whatever you are talking about, the word "new" is the same.
This however is not the case in Dutch. A new record is a " een nieuwe record" while a new archive is "een nieuw archief". This is because the word for archive in Dutch and the word for record have different genders, with the adverbs being inflected accordingly.
The entire program was filled with strings along the lines of "new%s", on the assumption that "new" could be replaced easily, no matter what word "%s" represented.
All strings using this method had to be rewritten. Imagine the cost!
Differing keyboards
Keyboards in other countries also differ from the US or English keyboard. Avoid using punctuation character keys as shortcut keys, because they are not always found on other-language keyboards.
In many applications, there are keyboard shortcuts. The standard shortcut for Copy and Paste, for instance is Ctrl C and Ctrl V. Other common shortcuts include F5, Alt F8 and so on.
These keyboard shortcuts are in many cases assigned on a mnemonic basis - Ctrl P for Print, notably. However, this is different in other languiages - in German, for example, the shortcut for print is Strg D.
If a menu lists shortcuts, then this menu command should have corresponding text which also will need to be translated. For instance, Copy: Ctrl C. If any changes are made in the shortcut table, these should also be reflected in the menu definitions.
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About the Author
Author: Dylan G. Major has extensive information about technical translations for multiple languages and he provides high quality, affordable technical translation services.
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