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Hi, I’m a Twitter Translator!

by Luca Filigheddu on October 13, 2009



Hi, I’m a Twitter Translator!

One of the main reasons why Facebook experienced the tremendous growth everyone knows is that the localized versions of their popular service attracted an enormous amount of new users. People from other countries started using it and creating their social community within a completely translated version of Facebook. My wife, who cannot speak english (aside from medical books…) started using it as soon as it became more friendly to her and her friends.

All that said, Twitter should have understood that their popular tagline “what are you doing” cannot be well translated by most non-english speaking internet users so the time had arrived to finally localize it.

Where is the news? Well, they are crowdsourcing the translation by giving users the ability to translate their website. You know what? I’m one of the users chosen to make this happen.

It works this way: a new tab appeared on the left of my Twitter page and it adds some options that let me translate everything or just the current page. I can start and stop translating whenever I want and I can also leave comments to my translation. What can I say? Smart!

twittrans

I don’t know how many italian translators have been chosen, but the ability to compare different translations in order to choose the best one is really a wonderful idea. When I say “best” I mean the one that best suits with the habits of any country in terms of internet usage and consumption. For example, in Italy we tend to use the english (now international) word “Home” for the homepage of a website, the real italian translation “Casa” would make italian users laugh. And, for a similar reason, I would keep the word “tweet” without tranlating it. Really, the equivalent italian “cinguettio” would make, again, people laugh loudly :-)

I don’t know how long it will take, but I’m pretty sure many people are enjoying doing that. Despite my time is very limited, I’m dedicating 10 minutes a day to translate Twitter.com. Someone would ask: why? Well, I can just say that I’m happy to be part of the growth of a service that I love and that is giving me a lot: it’s like a way to give them something back (hey guys, think of me when you sell, ah?).

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  • Michael
    Your "casa" example shows very little insight into the professional translation process. If in the context of the Web the Italian term for "Home" remains "Home," then that is the REAL translation. Any other translation would be erroneous. It is not a question of vote by majority or like vs. dislike. In almost all languages many source terms have a number of possible translations, each of which is correct or false depending on the context, not on popular vote. To have a correct and idiomatic outcome you need a professional translator, not a multitude of opinions.
  • Sorry but I disagree with you. I can't remember how many times my company hired pro translators to make translations of internet services / tech documents in various languages and most of the time the result was almost unusable.

    In this case, Twitter made the best possible choice: 25 fluent english speaking italian passionate Twitter users. There is also a forum where we are discussing the best terms to translate some phrases or words. Twitter made a very good move, imho.

    Sent from my BlackBerry®
  • Julienne
    Well, this just shows that your company forgot to check the fields of expertise of the hired translators. I have been working as a professional translator for about 9 years, but I would never dare to translate e.g. legal texts, because I am no expert when it comes to jurisdiction. When it comes to fish keeping though, or virtual worlds and communities and social networking, or market surveys, I am more than experienced. So if your company hired me for a legal text, the result would be unusable as you say - but if it hired me for the translation of the manual of a proteine skimmer, chances are high the result is pretty good. This means, for a good result you do not only need a professional translator, but also one who is familiar with the field the text comes from, [quot] not a multitude of options [quot] ;-)
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    <html>
    <head>
    <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
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    <font face="Lucida Grande">Approve</font>


  • jderidder
    I do like the "casa" example: translating "home" to "home" is not a real translation: it is the addition of a word to the whole Italian vocabulary. Each language in its own culture has different rules/methods for adopting new words and publishing them to dictionaries. English adopts new words according to their usage (and I guess a google search for the number of occurrences of a word would prevail), Japanese uses the Katakana alphabet to accept foreign words, and after proven worthiness, these words get their own Kangi and move to the main alphabet, French and Spanish have an "Academy" made of experienced writers that decide if a word is worthy of entering the dictionary in line with the said Academy rules, etc. This, of course, has an impact on the number of words a language features and on the relationship between different words. English has more than 600,000 words, while French has just a bit more than 100,000 words. The structure of the language and its intuitive understanding are affected by this: in English, if you have a hurting tooth, you go to the dentist. In French, the tooth is called "dent" so it makes it more logical linguistically that you would go to a "dentiste". Funny enough, this came about with the French Revolution and the want to democratize the language: it made sense then that if all related words were build on the same linguistic roots because it would allow the less educated people to decipher unknown words.
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