New article on web site localisation

Readers may be interested in a new article I posted a few days on web site localisation. The article explores some of the issues involved the actual translation process, but also some of the technical points that are worth considering.

A broad issue that I repeatedly see in localisation is that developers often don't get the translator involved in the early stages of the project, either because they don't think to do so, or because it's just not practical to do so from the point of view of their project workflow. Broad recommendations I would suggest at a relatively early stage (see the article for more details on some of these) include:

• build into your design some flexibility in terms of field lengths and validation on your DB (such-and-such a field may need to accept a different range of characters and/or length once localised);
• test at an early stage that you can correctly place accented characters in fields (e.g. web forms) and have them safely saved to your database and retrieved again without any corruption; similarly, ensure that accented characters in your copy appear properly;
  
• check that your page layouts and web forms do not depend on the particular length of strings in English;
• try not to share messages/string properties that are superficially similar but have clearly different uses (don't share the same string property for "up" meaning "to the top of the page" and "higher price")-- and as an approximate way of finding these ambiguous cases, one strategy is to have a separate properties file for each major section of your site, even if this means repeating some strings in English (their translations may differ);
• find out what localisation features are present in the programming language you are using, and consider whether you need to use each one (e.g. for sorting data in Java, it is preferable to use a Collator rather than the Collections.sort() call in its raw form).

From a practical viewpoint, you should also allow extra time for the translation and localisation process. Beyond the usual recommended timescale of around 1 day per 2,000 words for the translation itself, bear in mind that there may be extra file conversion/importing/exporting involved that will take extra time.

Dictionary update fixed

In yesterday's update to the French dictionary, a few basic words were temporarily missed out. The error has now been fixed. Apologies to those who were told that some basic words such as habiter could not be found...!

New URL for translation newsletter

The URL for signing up for the translation mailing list has changed. For those interested in signing up, please go to the following address:

http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/translation-service/translation_offers.html

Those signing up will receive e-mail notifications of free and reduced-price translation offers in the future. Providing accurate details will help to make sure that you are informed of offers most appropriate to your needs. When signing up, please take care to enter a correct e-mail address!

For beta testers: corrections to pronunciation section

For beta testers of the French pronunciation section: a few corrections have been made to the pronunciations of words with accents (to correct character encoding problem).

Dictionary entries include present subjunctive

As you have probably noticed, entries for verbs in the French dictionary contain a "mini verb table" listing some of the most common verb forms for that verb. A minor change has been made so that these tables now display the present subjunctive form of the verb.

As explained in more detail in the French grammar section, the subjunctive forms are special forms used to mark a non-assertion. In other words, they're the rough equivalent of English structures such as him coming, for them to help, where the emphasis is not so much on an actual action taking place, but more on a "snapshot" of an envisaged situation.

For most verbs, the subjunctive forms are not so complicated provided you know the "normal" (indicative) present tense plus, for the nous and vous forms, the French imperfect tense. However, for a few verbs, subjunctive forms can look quite different from the normal present tense form. (For example, the present tense of aller is usually je vais etc, but the corresponding subjunctive form is j'aille.)

French 'SMS speak' decode reinstated

On the automatic French translation page, the "Decode SMS speak" function has been reinstanted. This function replaces some common SMS abbreviations used in French text messages so that the machine translator can understand them.

For example, c will be expanded to c'est; chuis to je suis; koi to quoi etc.

Certain more complex forms are also expanded: for example, jmappel will be expanded to je m'appelle. The SMS decoder is in constant development-- watch this space for further improvements!

Please note that the automatic translator is designed for translating whole sentences/paragraphs of text. For single words, it is still recommended that you use the French dictionary.

Today's French dictionary update

A number of new entries and improvements in both the English-French and French-English sides of the dictionaries have been uploaded today.