{"id":24893,"date":"2007-10-04T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/10\/04\/the-perils-of-translating-words-blindly-without-verifying-them-in-context\/"},"modified":"2007-10-04T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T10:00:00","slug":"the-perils-of-translating-words-blindly-without-verifying-them-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20071004-00\/?p=24893","title":{"rendered":"The perils of translating words blindly without verifying them in context"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My fancy new office phone has an option to change the language of its user interface, so naturally I chose Swedish. Once I did that, I saw some obvious translation errors.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The <i>Edit<\/i> command was called <i>Bearb&#8230;<\/i>     instead of <i>Redig&#8230;<\/i>.     Apparently, the Swedish translation was created by starting with     the German version, and they missed a spot and left a word in German     (<i>Bearbeiten<\/i>).     This also illustrates the perils of not leaving enough room for     expansion.     The English word <i>Edit<\/i> is just four letters long, but the German     word is ten letters long (and the Swedish one eight letters),     and the longer German and Swedish words get truncated. <\/li>\n<li>The label <i>First name<\/i> was translated as <i>F&ouml;rsta namn<\/i>.     <i>F&ouml;rsta namn<\/i> does mean <i>first name<\/i>, but in      a literal sense, as in the sentence     &#8220;There are ten names. The first name is Wilson.&#8221;     The correct translation is <i>f&ouml;rnamn<\/i>, which means     <i>given name<\/i>     (in contrast to <i>efternamn<\/i>, or <i>family name<\/i>).     Similarly, the button <i>Forward<\/i> was translated as     <i>Vidare<\/i> (opposite of <i>backward<\/i>)     instead of <i>Vidarekoppla<\/i> (<i>to forward a phone call<\/i>). <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> The first example above is just sloppiness, but the second one illustrates how a simple <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/05\/29\/2955171.aspx#2973687\"> LocalizeString(&#8220;some text&#8221;)<\/a> algorithm doesn&#8217;t work. As Lance Fisher&#8217;s teacher put it, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2006\/10\/30\/903348.aspx#903690\">Russian is not a translation of English<\/a>.&#8221; You can&#8217;t just take words and phrases in one language and put them through a simple mapping table and expect the result to be accurate.<\/p>\n<p> Back in the Windows&nbsp;95 days, the German translation team needed some beta testers, and I volunteered. The most interesting translation bug I reported was one in which an English menu item <i>Sort<\/i> was translated as <i>Art<\/i> (which means <i>class, kind<\/i>) instead of <i>Anordnen<\/i> (which means <i>to arrange<\/i>). The one English word has two different meanings, and a blind dictionary translation won&#8217;t know which one is intended. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My fancy new office phone has an option to change the language of its user interface, so naturally I chose Swedish. Once I did that, I saw some obvious translation errors. The Edit command was called Bearb&#8230; instead of Redig&#8230;. Apparently, the Swedish translation was created by starting with the German version, and they missed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-24893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>My fancy new office phone has an option to change the language of its user interface, so naturally I chose Swedish. Once I did that, I saw some obvious translation errors. The Edit command was called Bearb&#8230; instead of Redig&#8230;. Apparently, the Swedish translation was created by starting with the German version, and they missed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}