A Peek Behind the Scenes of a Translation Company
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.
Gender Issues
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.
But not in Dutch. A “new record” is “nieuwe record”, while a “new archive” is “nieuw archief”. Note that the “e” behind “nieuw” (new) has disappeared. This is simply because the word “archive” has another gender in Dutch than “record”, which is reflected in the adverb preceding it.
In fact the whole software was infested with strings like “New %s”, assuming that the word “new” would fit no matter what the user decided to call the word represented by “%s”.
This meant that all of these strings had to be rewritten - at a very high cost!
Different keyboard layouts
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.
If an accelerated command is present in a menu, the text of the menu command must use the correct accelerator, for example: Copy Ctrl C. Therefore, changes in the accelerator table must be reflected in the corresponding menu definition.
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.
