Espotting France and French Language

[Aisha]

Hello,

Has anyone else ever had this experience with Espotting.fr?

We spent a lot of money having our website translated into French by a professional, native-speaker, with a Masters degree in French. We also had it reviewed by other French speakers.

Espotting.fr refused to list our site because they say that the French looks like it was translated by computer software!

HELP!

-Aisha Nawaz

[edited by: heini at 7:07 am (utc) on Aug. 15, 2002]
[edit reason] no urls please / thanks [/edit]

[Staffa]

Hello Aisha,

I was going to have a look but your link to the french version redirects back to the english version.
Did you remove the french section ?

BTW you should put the URL in your profile, not in your message.

[Sinner_G]

I get the french version and sorry, but at least the french on the home page (didn't check the rest) is crappy. Doesn't look like a native speaker translated it.

[Rumbas]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Aisha!

Good thing you got your site translated. It should be able to bring you additional traffic once it's out there in the French engines :)

>Doesn't look like a native speaker translated it.

Ouch! That's not good, and I guess you had your first pointer when Espotting refused to list it.

Translation is a picky thing and needs to be done right. Not only so that the directories will list it, but more importantly for your users.

I don't want to sound harsh but go have a talk with that translater! Looks like he/she has not done a good job?

[Aisha]

Urgh! Thanks to everyone for their comments! Its very sad, indeed, to hear that the translation does not sound so good. I have written an email to the translator and, hopefully, things will work out. I'm very surprised that the translation is not good be the translator claims to be a native speaker with a degree in French... Nevertheless, I am a bit surprised that the site was rejested since I've never heard of an American search engine rejesting a site with bad English. I guess the English language is a bit more forgiving.
:-)

Aisha

[heini]

Aisha, welcome to the board.

Yes the French ARE picky about their language..;)

Refusing a site however because of less than perfect language is somewhat odd

Anyhow, if you paid a translator you should get him overwork the site ASAP.
A good thing would be to ask a third party, native speaker about the translation.
Also you should check back, if possible for references for your translator.
It might be someone who is not capable of doing the job. In that case you'd be better off putting a better qualified person on the job.

[Sinner_G]

Yes the French ARE picky about their language

Well it's normal, such a beautiful language has to be protected somehow. For english it's too late, as the yankees already disfigured it ;).

I just checked the conditions for espotting.fr and could find no indication that sites could be refused just because of language issues.

[Aisha]

Hello All,

Just an update. We spoke with our translator again and it looks like **WE** accidentally forgot to remove a computer generated prototype for the front page. So, we fixed it and were immediately accepted to Espotting France.

So, be forewarned - good French IS a condition. :-)

-Aisha

[heini]

> computer generated prototype
Yup, machine translation, even the expensive ones still don't cut the cake.

[Rumbas]

Good for you Aisha :)

Yup, those machine translations wont cut it. Period.