Being Jesuitical About Translation Subjects

Posted on April 29, 2012 by ultan

I recently found out about www.sacredspace.ie, a multilingual, Drupal-based,  prayer website run by the Irish Jesuits (or to be more correct, the religious order of the Society of Jesus). Currently in redesign (the site that is, not the order), it has millions of visitors every year, with over three quarters of a million visitors recorded during Lent in 2011 alone. It’s one of the most successful Irish-run multilingual websites that I can think of, going about its other-worldly business in a quiet way (as I suppose it’s intended to).

Sacred Space: Multilingual Prayer website run by the Irish Jesuits.

This got me thinking. Translation of religious texts (notably the Bible) has been a mainstay of translation activity for centuries, as well as being a textbook case in message globalization. Multilingual translations of religious text provide quality corpus for machine translation (MT) development. Anyone who has that dreaded phrase “lost in translation” as a Google Alert will have been driven crazy in the last year about the number of times the new  translation of the Roman Catholic Church missal turned up (I have to say, having read and used the translation, that I can understand some of the angst, and the debate continues).  I also fondly remember exchanges I had as Gaeilge with linguists of the Church  of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at various localization conferences around the world.

Yet, we rarely hear any organized discussion about religious, spiritual, or other matters of faith when it comes to translation. When was this topic last featured at an industry conference or in a magazine article? And, why is that? Risk of offending the audience? Presenter discomfort? Inappropriate for public discussion? Considered irrelevant? What?

If you think faith translation doesn’t matter, then think again as organized religions of all sorts increase their presence worldwide, in Africa, Asia, South America, and so on, and as millions of people turn to spirituality and other belief systems in these hard economic, soulless, technocratic times. It’s really a global growth area.

Don’t people, globally, have needs for spiritual information in their own language as much as they do for information about health or economic development? So, what’s the translation process? What tools are used? How much is this religious translation business worth? What are the quality standards? Come on, there’s even an MT system called Moses.

Done squirming? Find the comments.

Peace.

Posted in Language in the News, Localization Culture, Translation Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Fake Unicode, Real Smiles

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Donna Parrish

If you are ready for a smile in your day, check out the Fake Unicode Consortium page on Google +. Clever people with great imaginations are taking Unicode characters and giving them a new interpretation. Some of my favorites:

NOW FLIP SNAKE TO COOK OTHER SIDE:
 MONOCLE OF DISAPPROVAL:

And, my favorite:
iPAD vs iPAD3

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Wo Ist Mein Handy? Knowing the German Mobile User

Posted on March 10, 2012 by ultan

Apparently, whether you say cell phone or smart phone is a giveaway about your age in the US (heavens forbid what clipping the thing to your belt says about you). I’ve been spending a lot of time in Germany recently, so I decided to find out what Germans call their mobile phones. Without a doubt, seemingly regardless of age, they call it a handy.

The origin of the term handy is open to debate, though it has been around for a while. Is it Denglish, a loan word, or even Kiezdeutsch? Stephen Fry certainly likes to get a good laugh out of it!

Anyhoo, does it matter what these things are called? Not from from a device usage perspective, though when localizing any message about it you really do need to speak the language of the user, so yes on that score.

For mobile app development though, addressing such local user experience is vital. This goes beyond language. Researching the app’s context of use and taking into account the end users and other stakeholders and their environment is required.

For example, all very well that most German workers are now contactable out of hours on mobile, but there might be labor agreements to be respected about doing so. At Volkswagen‘s six German manufacturing plants, for example, contacting employees out of hours on their BlackBerry devices is no more.

Similarly, any mobile app in Germany that shows comparative employee data and performance cannot be rolled out in a company without agreements with the local works council, the Betriebsrat, and other data protection and privacy requirements may also apply.

In all, the message is clear for mobile apps developers and localizers: know your market!

You may have other insights into handy and the German usage of mobile devices and apps. If so, find the comments.

Posted in Language in Business, Localization Culture, Personalization and Design | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Thumbs Up to International Design Considerations?

Posted on March 10, 2012 by ultan

I’ve been reading Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone. It’s a fine book written by two respected experts and provides more than 100 user experience design patterns, principles and best practices to use when designing social websites. Recommended!

Facebook Like Button. A Thumbs Up to Global Cultural Design Considerations?

Facebook 'Like' Button. A Thumbs Up to Global Cultural Design Considerations?

I was drawn to the “international considerations” section for the Thumbs Up/Down Ratings pattern. This pattern, it says, might present issues for some countries or locales, because:

  • Raised thumbs can be problematic in some cultures. Users may not understand the symbolism, or worse, the gesture may even be offensive.
  • There are cultures that don’t see things in binary terms as a thumbs up or thumbs down response, and may prefer some nuance that’s in between, and less absolute.
  • Some cultures may not like to criticize openly, or maybe only a thumbs-up option is best.

All a bit vague really in terms of identifying cultures might have issues, don’t you think? Plus, I am immediately prompted to ask: what is Facebook doing in such countries or regions? In Thailand, for example?

Plus, I am not sure if such culturally-based recommendations are always as black and white (oh, the irony) as claimed,  given the nature of internet technology, globalization, and especially without any knowledge of the user and context of use. The only way to find out is to do some usability testing, taking into account context of use.

That said, it’s always great to see international considerations included in UX design guidance, and we do with more!

The comments are open if you agree or disagree.

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How to Use the HTML5 Translate Attribute: A Translatability Best Practice

Posted on February 24, 2012 by ultan

HTML5 introduces a translate attribute that allows fine-grained control over what content should be translated, or not. Richard Ishida of the W3C has all the details of the attribute and its applicability, as well as some interesting insights into how Bing Translator and Google Translate deal with the translatability of content issue.

Here’s an example of the translate attribute’s use, taken from Richard’s blog (the HTML5 spec’s global attributes section has another other nice example, see the Bee Game.):

<p>Click the Resume button on the Status Display or the
<span translate="no">CONTINUE</span> button
on the printer panel.</p>

See how the word CONTINUE is made non-translatable using the translate attribute’s value set to “no”? Blimey! However, there are times when CONTINUE might need to be translated. So, flip that puppy to “yes”.

This HTML5 attribute is a very welcome addition to the content creation and translation tools world, sure.  But, it is very welcome for other reasons too.

This is a time of new interactions and emerging platforms that challenge the established desktop and website norms of what should be translated or not. Mobile, augmented reality, gamification, and other trends, all challenge established norms of content rules. So too, is it a time when companies redefine themselves, cross over, and promote their own design guidance as a differentiator in the market. Oracle, for example, likes to say “Software, Hardware. Complete” so content needs to cross-reference many deliverables. SAP, as another example, recently launched an app in the consumer space (available in German and English) that may require a different style of content and translation from the enterprise applications space. Android has released user experience (UX)  guidance of its own, and so on.

I previously raised such translatability issues in my Don’t Translate: Won’t Translate blog post.  I chipped into the [Bug 12417] discussion about the attribute’s development, too.

Using content to convey a translation instruction, by making a piece of text all uppercase for example, is not a best practice. It is a UX failure, makes personalization and customization difficult, and assumes the consumer of the content is a second-class stakeholder. Frankly, it is also very dangerous. Can you imagine if software developers used text that way in their code, rather than relying on the program logic?

As for the time-honored method of writing a translation note, or description, telling a translator that some content should not be translated, or should be, well such approaches just ain’t reliable or scalable, are they?

Now, there is a clear best practice to follow (and adapt for other formats). The HTML5 translate attribute educates content developers that the best practice for indicating whether content should be translated or not is through the use of markup (or metadata), and not through how the content is written. Translation tools should update to the HTML5 spec requirements and process this attribute asap.

Posted in Personalization and Design, Translation Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment