Regional and cultural issues

From My Wiki

Acknowledge with cultural differences, translation isn't only part, there are other issues too.

Non tangible things; not the words but the whole settings, the norms and values of a thing. say with software, the "small doggie" avatar in a help interface, that might

colours, in the west red means 'dangerous', but in china it means 'safe'.

icons, a thumbs up or hand-stop signs can be offensive outside the west. so just translating the strings isn't enough; its the "CSS" stuff, colours, images, positions of elements, too. Many CM'S don't cover more than just the strings.

English programs are based on western office life. But in Serbia there is no in-box/outbox or folders in the real world, for the vast vat majority of people. we have a hard time using the metaphors of our own office culture.

In the UK each house has a mail slot, but in Syria they don't exist. this has a huge effect on the interface. or an American mail box has a flag that raises to show there is new mail.

in translations that go through several languages this becomes a real problem, like English to french to Arabic. a tool that marks where you don't do literal translations and you transform it to something similar in the new language, so that further translations can go back to the source for that part.

movie transcripts often include cultural references. eg "i saw it on the David Letterman show" means nothing in Serbia, but we'd use a similar show. something for software would be good.

there are philosophical schools on translation; to "make it new" or to "be faithful to the original" which effects this. being faithful can effect the usefulness, idioms like "break a leg", is a real problem. and this happens on-line a lot and for free software, not just from machine translations, but with humans - because you don't see the context of the sentence in the tool, you just have the strings. English is a highly idiomatic language. here in Serbia we see a lot of subtitled English films, and things like jokes and other highly language dependent things are often totally redone. in films, these are colour coded to show where the subtitles isn't faithful.

in PO files, three sub-sentences that make sense in English when broken apart and when together, but when broken apart and translated, the translated combination doesn't make sense.

also a problem with translation is a political agenda. this is important in this part of the world - Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia - where people obfuscate the translations to make things very specific to their dialect. Macedonia and Albanian is similar. i don't know a solution to this. and nationalist agendas can be enforced by institutions.

also, an American writer can be biased just by the nature of being American, and very different cultures can find it hard to include the culture of the USA in their translations.

translation is always subjective, though.

there usually isn't very high cultural contents - a file is a file.

also the way people speak can be very different to the prescriptive "correct" form.

in central Africa the 24 hour day is strange; the time cycle is based on the crop cycle, the harvest, so one "year" can be 3 years then 5 then 2. also, Jewish calendar is different to western one. concepts of time vary, in general.

there are ethical responsibilities to keep languages alive or let them die... "you shouldn't force things into minority languages" said someone else in the UK, but in the UK welsh has been promoted and conserved and is now quite strong. 

its important to provide the tools, and encourage their use, and let things take their own course, perhaps. mobile phones are very successful because you can always talk in your own language. but speech isn't preserved. while on-line things are saved, but people in Uganda don't speak English much, so using computers is not possible there.

languages where there is no literacy in the first place... you don't have content in the language, or they don't have digital content.

there's a reinforcing cycle; there isn't any content, so they cant see the benefit. but if you produce some content, and provide access to it, then that sparks interest and the cycle goes the tee way.

community radio stations where literacy is high are very successful at starting up these kinds of cultural interests. here in the north, blogging and commenting on news is obviously valuable and so many people do it. but in the south you need a small push before it will grow on its own.

fonts. first problem is "is there a font for this language?" many languages are very small and not big markets for proprietary software vendors. SIL is inventing new scripts, outside Unicode, for example. Cyrillic was invented by 2 men. Cyrill and someone else.

if you have a specific field, chemistry, then you have very reliable translation-memories but they aren't so useful in general use outside their specific contexts.

cultural problems where words don't exist for cultural acceptable reasons; eg "girlfriend" doesn't exist in Arabic and it _cant_ exist because its such an alien social concept.

in a Fox news comedy, a dialog between two characters, a dumb ass and a pole, and there was some comment about poles collaborating with Nazis. and it was a silly throwaway joke

A book titled "bowling alone" about how the USA has lost the social community lifestyle it used to have, and that title meant nothing to me until i finished reading the book. or a "dutch dinner".

cognitive psychology, lackoff and so on. tribes have different words for colour, and people have physiological peaks in colour range perception, but the language colours things, and when talking about these issues, psychology is very important to consider.

in Hindi there are words for different castes; "wife" in different strata are different words. a girlfriend that's public and one that's private, a wife and a mistress, is very common outside. in Arabic there are *20* words for love that all translate into "love" in English. you lose that subtlety. English to Arabic generally has one of the "middle" love words, unless you know the context. there is a third gender in Arabic, for transsexuals, who have an ossified social role that has a name in Arabic.

translation between similar languages - polish to Czech - is easier.

here's a funny cultural different: in polish if you ask "how are you" - yaksamesh - that's an invitation to start "complaining" ;) and in the USA or France is just "Ca va?" "I'm not too bad" and that's it.

translating hypertext, links are a tricky issue. are you changing the text if you link to french versions. if the link is to a NY Times article about something, should the link be changed to Le Monde's article about the same thing?

What is a linkable phrase? in another language the same link word might not make sense in that same place.

inter-species communication; chimps can communicate with sign language. different needs embodied differently. or how do dogs bark in your language "woof woof" in English, "guff guff" in Russian. sheep in Hebrew is "meh"

branding of projects is key too; the branding of a project is very culturally sensitive.