live the questions now

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Knowing that sites as multilingual as TIG are unusual, it was cool to happen upon a panel at SXSW about website internationalization and localization. While the moderator had a few annoying moments (mostly making a big deal about how many in the audience raised their hands to the question “do you live in a country where English is the primary language?” – this should not be surprising at a conference with mostly American attendees), overall there were quite a few tips that I think we can learn a lot from.

-being bilingual does not make you a translator

-translators are often not technology people, so they don’t know the right technical language to translate interface words (“apply”, “enter”, ‘submit”)

-context is everything — if the translator can’t see the language in context, they will get it wrong

-have a translator on board at the wireframing stage, so that person can point out contextual and cultural issues

-localization isn’t just replacing the words in one language into another, it’s also about giving appropriate cultural and social context

-translation needs to deal not just with literal words, but also with concepts that don’t translate from one culture/language to another

-Social networking sites don’t choose their users, users choose the site — snses grow because users tell their friends, and want to find people like themselves. If a site has a high concentration of users in a particular culture, it sometimes turns users from other countries off because they don’t understand why the site seems so saturated with members and content from another country (this happened with Orkut — Americans complained that it was too Brazilian! So Orkut responded by giving users the option of only connecting with other people who speak the same language as them)

-most sites view internationalization efforts as moving to a language other than English

-Community driven translation is NOT the norm – one of panelists asked if anyone was allowing their online community to do the translation for them — only two of us raised our hands (probably 75-100 in the room)

-use icon based representation with mouse-over where possible, to reduce multilingual formatting issues (words being longer in diff languages) — but beware the problem with an icon/image having different cultural meanings

-sometimes you try to localize so much that you end up with something that is “just ok” in a lot of languages, and “not so great” in a few — instead of trying to rebrand and make the site almost its own stand alone in different locations

Cool sites to check out:
-One of the speakers was from Worldwide Lexicon project — really cool open source translation and localization tools, ability to develop multilingual web apps, Simple Localization System (SLS – php library), and multilingual blogging/publishing tools — with a wiki approach to translating web content.

-dotsub — community subtitling and translation tool