Don’t let your website get “lost in translation”
Web Content July 2nd, 2008One cool thing about the Internet is that anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection can visit your website no matter where they live. However, this worldwide access can be a bit tricky is especially when it comes to language.
It doesn’t even have to be a matter of people who speak or read and entirely different language. It could just be a matter of visitor’s from the UK that understand “British English” as opposed to “American English”. It’s very likely that you’ll have visitors from the UK, Canada, or Australia and you’ll run into that “translation” problem, like the fact that in the UK purses are “handbags” and backpacks are “rucksacks”.
The Storque has a really interesting article on a couple of things that you need to watch out for when tagging some of your items on Etsy for an international audience. Like why you don’t want to talk about “fanny packs” to your UK audience. A lot of these tips will also “translate” to your website, so check out the article on the Storque:
International Tagging, Yeah Baby!
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Great content, Nikki!
July 9th, 2008 at 4:53 am
I see a lot of “Translate this” buttons and things on different sites. But I always think back the days when I would convert something with Babelfish from English to another language, then copy and paste the the result and convert back to English and be really amused by how ‘confused’ the translation became.
July 9th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Yes, that’s very true! Translate buttons usually only do literal translation which may or may not make sense at the very end. If you wanted to translate your site or maybe a part of your site to another language (even from American English to British…or I guess in your case, Aussie English
), it’s usually better to get an actual person to do it instead of relying on one of those quick language conversion programs!