Website translation: choosing languages to go world-wide

Three quarters of internet users don’t speak English as their first language.

That’s the picture according to “best guess” statistics from Internet World Stats (see “Crunching the stats” below). This means a vast amount of potential traffic is being ignored by many site admins and developers.

But how do you get to grips with the “other” three quarters of the planet, and which languages should you choose?

Internet langauges worldwide

(click to enlarge)

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Why flags founder for multilingual website navigation

Flag icons are a bad choice for language navigation within websites. We explain why, and look at some better options, in the first of our series on multilingual website design.

The internet has allowed an explosion in multilingual communication. Previously companies or organisations had to produce printed publications in a limited range of languages and physically get the right language version in the right place. Now a website can easily be translated into several languages, preferably by a professional translator of course.

But what is the best way to show site users how to switch between languages? Continue reading “Why flags founder for multilingual website navigation”

Translation is not always one to one

The So Bad, So Good website has come up with its list of the best 25 non-English words with no counterpart in English: “25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist In English”. This makes for an amusing read, and it would be interesting to hear what speakers of those languages feel.

Translators, of course, are well used to this difficulty. It is all too common to come across a word that has no direct equivalent or requires further elaboration to explain the implied nuances. Even worse is a word in the source text which has more than one meaning and is ambiguous in context. It may even be that the source text knowingly plays on this ambiguity – then the translation must aim to relay this ambiguity by careful choice of words or expansion and explanation.

So, in fact, this list is amusing but also highlights a common misconception about translation. Continue reading “Translation is not always one to one”

Does foreign language have a place in translating literature?

It sounds a mad question, but “Does foreign language have a place in translating literature?” Put differently, when translating literature, how many words should be left in the original language? Should “foreign” words in English-language texts convey a sense of a culture, or be used as a last resort for the “untranslatable”?

These questions are interesting in their right, but are also far from academic considering the recent success of some novels translated into English. After all, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy are predicted by some to become the three top-selling novels of all time in Britain, overtaking Dan Brown’s paperback, The Da Vinci Code, which sold 4.5 million.
Continue reading “Does foreign language have a place in translating literature?”