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A Primer for Webmasters, Authors and Owners
Robert Hopkins, Jr., President, Weblations
Copyright © Robert Hopkins, Jr., 1996 - 2002. Permission is granted to copy this article to another website, in its entirety only, provided that you acknowledge its source and provide a link to Weblations. For other uses, please contact the
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Introduction
The world is a small place, and there's nothing better than the Web to prove it. Thanks to the Web, most of the barriers to communication of the past have evaporated. All except one, that is: language. A website that can be viewed from anywhere in the world is hardly understandable to all of its audiences.
Are you a webmaster, a website creator or a marketing executive with responsibility for your organization's on-line presence? Then you should understand the international business opportunities that the Web presents. It is the only publicity medium in which you can gain global reach in an instant, and at least on the face of it, for no additional cost. However, to really speak to a audience you'll need to address them in their own mother tongue.
In this article we discuss the marketing, translation, technical and project management issues which surround the translation of a corporate website:
Why translate?
Not long ago, most content on the Internet was created by and for an elite group of academics and technologists who spoke English as a first or second language. Now, the Web plays to a vastly broader audience than the Internet ever did.
Meanwhile, the content of the Web has changed from technical and research material to entertainment, marketing and general editorial material aimed at a broad audience. To be effective, this new content must be presented in the reader's mother tongue. Only Americans insist that speakers of other languages should decipher or be expected to enjoy an English language website. They don't and they won't! If you're fortunate enough to speak another language, put yourself in their shoes. Given the quantity and quality of material on the Net today, would you surf in a foreign language? Heck no. It's just too tiring.
As the comedian Steve Martin said: "Those French, they have a different word for everything." It's a fact.
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Marketing and business issues
The need for translation of a specific website should arise naturally from the marketing and business goals of the organization that created it. Does your company plan to or already sell its products in global markets? If yes, then your website, translated, can help you to establish a presence, build your brands, and sell and support your products in those markets. You can accomplish most of this astonishingly quickly, simply by translating and localizing your American material.
As with any marketing idea, the marginal costs of translation should weighed against the marginal benefits. Leaving it to you to figure out the dollar value of the benefits, here are some notes on the cost side.
The going rate for a very basic translation of a simple document with no technical complications is 15 to 25 cents per word, but when you factor in the technical difficulties of working with an interactive web site, its data bases, special file formats, scripts and images the cost jumps to 30 to 50 cents per word. The difference between the simple document rate and the web site rate is a measure of the extra engineering time and skill that web site translations require. That works out to $35 - $150 for the average sized HTML file containing 100 - 300 words, and more for the images containing text that will need to be translated and retouched.
One thing to note about the cost of going international on the Web is that it is mostly captured in the translation expense. You already invested in the creative and technical resources to create and maintain your website in English. Those costs, honestly measured both in and out of house, are usually many times the cost of translation.
What companies are good candidates for translation? The answer: every company with potential customers in, or visitors from, foreign markets. The list of candidates includes, for starters, every Fortune 1000 company. (But how many actually have multilingual sites?) Add to that all the small and medium-sized companies with a thin-on-the-ground international distribution system that can be upgraded to domestic market standards through a website. In addition are companies with no international presence to date, but who have a unique product that they can ship directly to the customer, L.L. Bean style. Finally, consider the American destinations -- towns, hotels and resorts, Americana shops, museums -- that depend in some part on foreign tourism to be profitable.
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Translation itself
What is translating? We define it as the process of reading, understanding, interpreting, rephrasing and delivering an original message, while capturing all of its subtlety and impact, to a new audience in its mother tongue, in the context of its indigenous culture. The best translators love words of course, but more importantly they love the life that words depict. They are the connection between the creators of a message and a new audience somewhere that would be incapable of getting that message without their help. Translators, especially of web pages, are experienced specialists whose job challenges them on a daily basis. We've all been amazed at the breadth and depth of human knowledge displayed on the Web. Imagine translating it, not just skimming through it!
A translator's basic responsibility is to be "true" to the original text. If we consider a translation to be a form of inter-cultural message, then we should evaluate its faithfulness to the original on two counts: how the original message is expressed in the target language, and how it is received by the target audience. The translator is responsible for both of these steps in the communications process. The Internet in particular is a meeting point for audience groups who will understand the same message in different ways depending on their cultural backgrounds.
The upshot of all this is that a translation agency must have access to linguists in each source/target language pair that it serves, and they must include experts in a broad range of subject matters. The top agencies maintain large databases of freelance specialists, calling on them when an appropriate job arises.
Key to a high quality website translation is the willing participation of you, the client. If you're translating your website for a market where you already have distributors or representatives, then by all means ask a colleague in that market to be your linguistic contact with the translation agency, to answer questions and to review the completed translation.
Whenever available, you should supply the translator with company literature in the source and target language, and a bilingual glossary of domain-specific terms. A translator cannot be expected to know your product names or the terminology used by your company (as opposed to your competitors) in a given market.
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Technical issues
The text in a web page is encoded in HTML, but to translate it usually requires expertise in many other technologies. The "page" that you see in a browser may be the union of several component files. It may include calls to one or more tables in a database. It may contain scripts or an alphabet soup of new HTML-like technologies, or proprietary technologies unique to that site. All of these complicating factors make life either impossible or very difficult for most translation agencies, even those that claim they can localize web sites. They simply don't have the tools to do the job.
It doesn't have to be so. At Weblations, which was created specifically to localize websites, we use Weblations Cypher® to pre- and post-process your HTML files, other components and databases, deliver them to our translators in the Weblations Workspace® -- our professional translation tool designed to protect your HTML code from damage -- and return the completed work to you via e-mail or FTP.
Of course the graphics at your site that contain text (banners, navigation buttons, titled photographs, etc.) must be translated. Simply deliver to us the native PhotoShop™ files that your designers used to create the GIFs and JPEGs on your site. Our designers will rebuild the PhotoShop layers containing text and merge them with the background layers to make target language GIFs and JPEGs for publication, always respecting your color palettes, transparencies, and so on.
A successful website grows and changes constantly. Maintaining the site in its translated version should not be a burden to you. That's why at Weblations we offer site versioning and maintenance. Periodically, we version the site by comparing the current version to the latest translated version, and report on the differences to you. You can have us translate all the new and modified files automatically, or make the decision on a file-by-file basis. In this manner, you can synchronize the target language versions of your website with the source language version on an ongoing basis. To summarize, we allow you to treat multilingual site maintenance as an outsourced service. But there is an alternative: the new class of content management applications. If you've already implemented versioning and content management through an in-house or third party application, then you should probably use it to manage the translated sections of your site. You can grant read/write access to the translated sections to us, and write business rules to notify us when any source language file is added or modified. In this scheme, the target language files are slaved to the source language files that they mirror, and your content management application is the ever-vigilant webmaster that ensures that your translations remain up to date. The only problem with this approach is cost and convenience: a server-based content management application can cost $100,000 or more. It can conflict with other technologies for e-commerce, databases, site personalization or whatever that you have already implemented. Finally, you may not have enough time on your calendar to research the options, select one and implement while still meeting your launch date. So our outsourced approach mentioned in the paragraph above remains a valid option for many scenarios.
Localization vs. Internationalization Most websites need to be localized (adapted to a new local market) or internationalized (adapted to the global market), tasks that go beyond translation to encompass marketing, cultural and general business issues. For example, for an American company with a typical website advertising its product line, the U.S. market products need to be replaced with the product names, specifications and prices of the target language's market. That's an example of localization.
On the other hand, an American company whose product line is the same worldwide may nevertheless need to modify its American site before translating it. For example, toll free 800 numbers may not be accessible or toll free from outside the United States. Certain shipping and product return policies may not apply. These changes are examples of internationalization.
Remember that some languages, English for example, span many countries and markets. Your website will be available in all of these markets, whether you intended it to be or not. Unless you or your translator is aware of the local meanings of words, people may be laughing at your expense.
For example, the Spanish word coger means "to take" in Spain, while in South America it means "to take," but in the Biblical sense, if you catch our drift. Likewise, Americans who root for their home teams are doing something perfectly innocuous. Not so for Australians! For example, try making making sense of this Australian pun:
Q: What does a Tasmanian devil do in the woods?
A: He eats, roots, shoots and leaves.
In the face of these perils, usually the most economical solution is to translate your website into a neutral international version of each target language, keeping a sharp eye posted for the well-known stumbling blocks. If you -have the resources and on-the-ground presence to back your site up, you can optionally present a localized version of your site for each of several different markets sharing the same root language. By editing a root translation, you can achieve a consistent yet localized language for each market at a cost savings over translating from scratch.
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Case Study: The Iliad (translation aficionados only)
To translate Homer's Iliad is to bridge the cultural gulf between the cradle of western civilization and modern America, 27 centuries later. In this case study we will read three translations of a passage from the Iliad: two by humans and one by computer.
Let's begin with a translation in verse by Robert Fagles of the scene in which Helen apologizes to her brother Hector for having caused the Trojan War
Hector, helmet flashing,
answered nothing. And Helen spoke to him now,
her soft voice welling up: "My dear brother,
dear to me, bitch that I am, vicious, scheming --
horror to freeze the heart! Oh how I wish
that first day my mother brought me into the light
some black whirlwind had rushed me out to the mountains
or into the surf where the roaring breakers crash and drag
and the waves had swept me off before all this had happened!
[VI.405-413]
Iliad's language is poetic. It uses archaic expressions and metric work-arounds that accumulated over the generations of the poem's oral reciting. In his translation, Fagles preserves the majesty (and the difficulty) of Homer's language while playing it against his earthy, American syntax -- much as an oral bard would do. We can hear ourselves speak when Helen changes from the poetic "...dear to me" to the unadorned "...bitch that I am," and again in the way she lurches from the basso profundo of "... the roaring breakers crash and drag" to her flick-off of the first war in recorded history as "... all this." The translator wrote the following about his work:
Obviously at a far remove from Homer, in this translation I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no man's land, if I can help it) between the features of Homer's performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-for-line translation, my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer's language as to cramp and distort my own -- though I want to convey as much of what he says as possible, -- nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drive -- though I want my work to be literate, with any luck. For the more literal approach would seem too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.
[The Iliad, Homer. Robert Fagles, trans., 1990, p. x]
To show how two excellent translations can differ depending upon the reader's culture, let's compare Fagles with Samuel Butler's translation:
Hector made no answer, but Helen tried to soothe him. "Brother," said she, "to my abhorred and sinful self, would that a whirlwind had caught me up on the day my mother brought me forth, and had borne me to some mountain or to the waves of the roaring sea that should have swept me away ere this mischief had come about.
Judging from his syntax, Butler was a 19th century English scholar. He translated the poem into prose, shortening it but losing much of the rhythm that Fagles captured. For example, Butler deleted "helmet flashing" from the first line. He didn't need the epithet to complete any poetic meter, whereas Fagles did find the epithet useful to finish the half-line which opens the passage, just as the ancient oral bards did when they recited the poem.
There is more to it than that. The "helmet flashing" epithet, so famously Hector's, serves the same metaphorical purpose that the Trump Tower does for Donald Trump. In each case the metaphor captures the essence of its man, making his rise to the top all the more incandescent and his fall all the more pathetic. As Fagles wrote of the helmet, "I like to ally its gleaming with his actions, now nodding his head in conversation, now rushing headlong into the front lines...The more the epithet recurs, in short, the more its power can recoil." [Op. cit. p. xi]
A close reading of this passage shows that translators interpret their text not once but twice: first when they read the original, and second when they write the translation. The job of an agency such as Weblations is to select and cultivate a pool of seasoned translators who have the range to create and deliver these intercultural messages on a variety of topics to a variety of audiences, in a variety of languages.
Since this is an article about website translation you might ask: Why not let a computer do the job? Let's be a little unfair and test what we believe is the best machine translation program in the world with our Iliad passage. We submitted a Spanish translation of the passage to Systran, Inc.'s machine translation program at their free demonstration page at http://systranmt.com/. (Systran's machine would not accept the true original version in Ancient Greek.) Following is the "original" we chose:
Dijo. Y Héctor, el del rutilante casco, nada contestó. Fué Helena quien le dirigió estas dulces palabras:
-- ¡Pobre cuñado mio, de esta perra maléfica y abominable! ¡Ah! ¿Por qué en el día que me alumbró mi madre no se apoderó de mí un viento tempestuoso y me llevó sobre una montaña, o por qué una ola del embravecido mar no me arrebatóç antes que tales hechos ocurrieran?
[Montserrat Casamada, 1959.]
And here is the English translation, by Systran's computer:
Dijo. and Héctor, the one of the rutilante helmet, nothing answered. Fué Helena that directed these sweet words to him:
- Poor brother-in-law mio, of this maleficent and abominable dog! Ah! Why in the day that illuminated to me my mother did not seize of me a stormy wind and she took to me on a mountain, or why a wave of the enraged sea did not snatch to me before such facts happened?
[Systran, Inc., 1996.]
While the good people at Systran would never recommend their program for the unsupervised translation of epic poetry, the results are nevertheless fascinating. In fact, we happen to like the program's choice of "enraged" to describe the sea's state when it found the baby Helen bobbing in the surf. But the translation is far from a completed product ready to be published on the Web or anywhere else. True, it can help a non-Spanish speaker understand the gist of a passage, but the passage loses impact and accuracy in the process.
Successful machine translation remains the Holy Grail of the linguistics and computer science fields. It embodies the struggle of man vs. machine, for even bigger stakes than the Kasparov vs. Big Blue chess matches. Developments in the field have led to a deeper understanding of human cognition itself. But in the translation game as opposed to chess, we humans are winning hands down and likely will continue to win for years to come. While machine translation may be appropriate for some uses, the creation of web pages is not yet one of them.
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