[thelist] Designing in other languages (German/Japanese)

Edwin Martin e.j.martin at chello.nl
Thu Jul 5 13:26:09 CDT 2001


At 19:52 5-7-2001 +0200, you wrote:
>Shaun M. Anderson wrote:
>
>>Does anybody have any advice on creating a site in another language?

Being Dutch and seeing some badly translated sites, I can
share some tips:

1) Let the translation be done by somebody who speaks
the target language natively.

2) Don't translate one to one. I mean, sometimes it's not good
to do a correct translation of a word because that word might be
used very rarely. In some translated HTML-books the chapter
"impressive designs" is translated in Dutch "imponerende
ontwerpen". This is really correct, but the word "imponerend"
is a bit strange. (I now see the Dutch spelling checker of Eudora
doesn't even recognize the word!) Sometimes I and my girlfriend
make jokes about it when we try to make an nice HTML-page.

3) Formats might be different. In (I think most countries of) Europe
a date is written as 5 juli 2001. In numbers it even becomes ambiguous:
is 7-8-2001 July 8 of August 7?

4) Standards. I know what a mile and a inch is. I really don't know what
'lbs' or a gallon is. No country except the US is using these units
anymore.

5) Be careful with icons. The icon for e-mail is often a typical American
mailbox. This mailbox.is, well... typical American. I've never seen one before
I went to the US for a holiday.

I hope to see better translated web sites from now on :-)

Edwin Martin.

--
Surf Edwin Martin's brainwaves: http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/ 





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