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Website Translation Service  (View post)

RC [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, February 13, 2007
17 years ago4,402 views

So where's sketchswap.jp ??

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I wanted to put it on sketchswap.com, same location, using content negotiation... coming soon hopefully!

David [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Click2Translate is an SDL company. SDL is the largest translation company in the world and does a "pretty" decent job of translations from a language perspective. I have a very technical site and they did blow it on several terms used within my site. Many of my foreign customers and affiliates likened the translation to "Engrish" translations.

If you're going to translate technical terms it's probably best to provide a glossary for the translators explaining exactly what various terms mean. PPC is also a great way to see how often one version of a term is used over another in various languages. SDL translated several terms which ended up having no traffic through PPC. The original English version was used much more often than the translation. This can obviously cause havoc when trying to optimize a page.

Many translation projects require code filtering (filtering out code so only text is translated). On this front I found SDL to be quite poor. My engineers spent the better part of a month fixing broken code and decrypting code which was translated.

For plain jane text translations Click2Translate is probably okay, but double and triple check your keywords to make sure their translation is what your customers are looking for.

My 2 cents.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

(Obviously, the following comments are my own and should not be interpreted as being "official" in any way whatsoever...)

David, you've got some good points and some good advice there too. Technical translations obviously need more time and research than a "plain jane text translation" and specialist translators who understand the subject should always be used. A glossary does indeed help translators to understand specialist terms and translate them in the most appropriate way. In fact, the more information you can give to a translator, the better job they will do. I think that's true for almost any service industry – but everything comes at a price, of course.

After the comments about "Engrish" translations, I think it's worth pointing out that we always use native speaking, professionally qualified translators. But remember, there's always more than one way of writing something. If I gave this text I'm writing now to another English person to review, they would probably make many changes; it's often very difficult for people to distinguish between "mistakes" and "stylistic differences".

With regards to code filtering, even though SDL uses the leading software available on the market to do this (which we also own and develop) best practice would recommend separating all translatable content from any code for this very reason. Of course, the more complex the code is, the more difficult it is for software to automatically extract the translatable text – and having an engineer to do this manually could eat away at your budget.

Finally, with regards to keywords/phrases, optimizing text in your own language is difficult enough. So, asking a translator to maintain this level of optimization whilst achieving a high quality, meaningful translation requires a lot of time and effort and would be much more expensive than a standard translation that simply maintains the original meaning of the text. I've personally battled with translators about this myself. Unfortunately, you can't just expect translators to do this without explaining to them what is required – after all, they're used to writing for humans and not search engines!

The bottom line is that some of world's largest companies use SDL services and technology to translate and localize their products, websites, documentation, etc. and they're obviously very happy with the results.

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