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A student of mine has just completed a French introduction for me, and I'd be very grateful for any comments on it. The site is the one in my profile, and just add /index-fr.html to visit the French page. The English from which it was translated is at /temp.html (it will be deleted shortly).
I'd be glad to hear about any technical problems in display (I don't think will be any - French is a piece of cake compared to Chinese!), but especially any language problems. It's an academic site, so should sound like what you would find on a university page (i.e., it shouldn't sound promotional or commercial, and not too "slangy").
One thing I have done on my non-English pages that others might like to try is to add TITLE attributes to all the links, so between the link text and the TITLE attribute you should be able to see where you are going in both French and English. Title attributes appear on mouseover in most browsers (though I see that many browsers don't handle HTML entities correctly in TITLE attributes, so the accents are munged).
Many thanks (merci)!
You can congratulate your student. He has been doing a splendid job on that traslation! I read worst French every day from native french speaking people.
The most common mistake I see is noun genders. (yes, believe it or not, in french inanimated objects have a gender) Since there is no logic at all for applying a gender to nouns, it is a very common cause for mistakes for non french speaking people. It is sometimes so for natives also.
Nevertheless, the text is very comprehensible.
I will send you more details soon.
Your student deserve a B++
Moreover, my site is similar to the one above, educationally based. I think the biggest problem with translating will be changing the terminology, like photophosphorylation and decarboxylation ... not easy words to change even someone fluent in a non-english language
slightly OT, but I wonder what languages people think are the primary languages apart from english that a site should be translated to
at present, i know a very cute german girl living in scotland that could do a german version, though my understanding is that many people in Germany can speak good English
what other languages should be a priority? I assume French should be #2 priority after English
But if she is so cute, the German, definetly German. :-)
what other languages should be a priority?
That depends on your target market. In Europe, German probably has more impact than French wrt the first languages of the online population.
However, the next question is whether you're aiming for higher traffic or just a broad reach. While many German-speaking people read English as well, they prefer German. German-language search engines and directories will certainly prefer German-language sites.
My most important advice is to forget about any world-wide strategy if you're talking about adding only one or two languages.
Identify your target markets, and whether you're aiming for reach or traffic.
For Europe, the situation is this: You have Scandinavia and the Netherlands with a high online usage rate plus a high understanding of English. The markets are limited though.
German is the biggest market, lots of sites in native language, so a translation to german should for Europe always be a top priority.
France would be next, not as big in online population figures as Germany and UK, but still a major market. Willingness of reading English: so lala.
Italy: pretty much the same overall picture as France.
You should also consider Spanish: It#s one of the top languages on the web worldwide, you get Spain plus Latin America.
Here's some stats from http://www.glreach.com/globstats/ [glreach.com]:
English 231.2 M (43% of total world online population)
Non-English 306.9 M (57%)
European Languages 174.0 M (32.3%)
Spanish 35.0 M (6.5%)
German 36.8 M (6.8%)
Italian 20.2 M (3.8%)
French 17.9 M (3.3%)
Portuguese 14.1 M (2.6%)
...
Asian Languages 123.8 M (24.7%)
Japanese 47.8 M (8.9%)
Chinese 47.5 M (8.8%)
Korean 24.5 M (4.6%)
Nothe that though this is a great resource regarding first (native) languages it doesn't say anything about second languages.
Here is a link-list to all of them:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum18/272.htm [webmasterworld.com]
Nevertheless some general overview of second languages would be a good thing. It's not always English - in central eastern Europe for example Russian is still in use.
our current list
Spanish
German
French
the first three completed and the most popular...also they are popular second languages...I expect Japanese and Chinese to compete eventually, Japanese has the online population, Chinese is also a common second language
Arabic
because my predeccessor was fluent in Arabic...might as well use it while it's there
Dutch
Simplified Chinese
Danish (we were doing a project in Denmark)
Hungarian
Finnish
Russian
the first two because we have demand for our services in Hungary and Finland...Russian is, again, a common second language
the next set will be
Japanese
Swahili (politically it's nice to have an African language)
Hindi
Bengali (again it's about respect rather than need)
all along we have been influenced by a whole range of factors...who do we have who can check the translation?...how popular is he language?...how well can we cater for demand in that language?...what are the political ramifications of using that language?
I would recommend getting professional translations and then having them checked by people you know...it isn't all that expensive and it is a LOT safer that way
Eric, in practise you are absolutely right. General online population figures are just one starting point for deciding which languages to chose for translation.
If you want to sell arctic wear the fact Spanish [webmasterworld.com] is one of the most used languages online is neglectible.
As hstyri said: "Identify your target markets", or audience.
I also would like to link back to two of the best discussions we've had on translation and localization matters:
Translations will get you top rankings in major engines [webmasterworld.com]
The how, when and where of web translations [webmasterworld.com]
the more languages the better, though I will tend to stick to the most frequently used ones online, i.e. english then spanish then german / french depending on the amount of people who use it as their first language and are online
Good point though, if you have a target market, best sitting down and finding out their language capabilities AND preferences
Many thanks to Macguru for looking at the translation and assuring me it isn't too bad. I'd still be very grateful to any French speakers for specific comments ( /index-fr.html on the site listed in my profile ). An academic colleague who is fluent but not a native speaker has suggested a free translation of my main title, "The Collegiate Way" (which is a quotation) - "La vie en collège: vers une véritable communauté universitaire." This is one of the hardest things to judge in any translation project, because words have connotations in one language that they don't in others. In English there is a subtle difference between "collegiate" and "collegial," and my colleague thought that in French "collegiale" had a strong church connotation that I wouldn't want.
With respect to BoL's questions, I'm in agreement with others that it all depends on the audience you wish to reach. Even a biology site (my field also) that is directed at researchers will do better or worse with translations depending on the research specialty. If you're working on tropical biology, Spanish would be very important; if genetics, then perhaps Japanese. If it is an educational site for teachers, it could be any language after English depending on what group you wish to reach.
Here's another tip for people doing translations on the cheap. I would never rely on automatic translators like Babelfish or Google for serious work, but they are very helpful in one way: feed your foreign text into the translator and check for words it leaves untranslated - that is a good sign that you have something spelled wrong. The translation software can act almost like a spell-checker - I found some missing accents and typos in my student's translation that way.
RJO
Mozzie and another colleague suggested a free translation of the title would be better, and that's what I've now done. This is always one of the hardest things to know, especially if one is quoting from another source. In general I think it is better in a context like this to convey the intention of the original, rather than the exact words. I hope the meaning will be clear.
Thanks again to all. (Now off to hunt for a student who knows Russian....)
RJO
So, from an SEO as well as from a communicational point of view it's almost ever advisable to go for a free translation, or even write a new title.
Of course this new title should by all means be mirrored in the copy.
If anyone can help with Spanish translations, I'd like to hear..
