A Peek Behind the Scenes of a Translation Company
Usually, when software developers create messages for end users, they have them assembled at runtime from a set of substrings stored in a library. A truncated string such as the ones used are almost impossible to translate accurately, since there is no way of ensuring that they will be properly combined to be grammar compliant at runtime. Translation vendors will ask programmers in many cases to rewrite all of these strings into messages which make sense to the end user independently.
Beware of Gender
Here is a recent example: While localising a DLL file for a electronic document management software company, the developers decided to implement a naming feature which would let users rename the nouns used in the interface, since most companies prefer to use their own terminology for document elements.
This looked like a good idea, until the developers realized that unlike English, most languages assign genders to their nouns which alter the adverbs preceding them. In English, of course, nouns are uninflected; but in other languages this is often not the case. Where we would say “new” no matter what the noun we meant to qualify with it, this isn’t applicable worldwide.
But not in Dutch. A “new record” is “nieuwe record”, while a “new archive” is “nieuw archief”. Note that the “e” behind “nieuw” (new) has disappeared. This is simply because the word “archive” has another gender in Dutch than “record”, which is reflected in the adverb preceding it.
The entire program was filled with strings along the lines of “new%s”, on the assumption that “new” could be replaced easily, no matter what word “%s” represented.
This meant that all of these strings had to be rewritten - at a very high cost!
Differing keyboards
The keyboard layouts used for different languages can vary quite a bit from the standard US keyboard layout. Punctuation keys shouldn’t be used as shortcuts - since these keys vary depending in the keyboard layout used in a particular country.
In many applications, there are keyboard shortcuts. The standard shortcut for Copy and Paste, for instance is Ctrl C and Ctrl V. Other common shortcuts include F5, Alt F8 and so on.
These keyboard shortcuts are in many cases assigned on a mnemonic basis - Ctrl P for Print, notably. However, this is different in other languiages - in German, for example, the shortcut for print is Strg D.
Keys on other-language keyboards do not always occupy the same positions as on English keyboards. Even when they do, the interpretation of the unmodified keystroke may be different. For example, when pressing SHIFT 8 on U.S. keyboards this creates an asterisk character. However, on French keyboards, it generates the number 8.