Example: modifying a simple document for translatability

Translation-friendly authoring ,
section Automatic translation and HTML

Example: modifying a simple document for translatability

As an example of how modifications to a document can improve translatability, I have taken a short page which tells some numeric and other facts about the university where I work, HUT. Such simple fact pages could be expected to be relatively easily translatable, since they do not contain grammatically complex structures. Moreover, automatic translatability is essential since such pages can be interesting to people speaking different languages, and one hardly wants to allocate resources to maintaining such pages in many languages by hand.

Note: The example document and its modified form and their translations are not embedded into this document. Instead, links to them are provided. In a typical graphical browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, on Windows for example, you can use the rightmost button of the mouse when following a link (instead of the normal use of the leftmost button), then select the alternative Open in New Window in the pulldown menu opened. You can the move window to another position on the screen and resize it suitably, e.g. so that you can view different versions side by side.

The original page is a short fact sheet, Helsinki University of Technology in a Nutshell. In its French translation by Babelfish, there are several obvious failings (most of which you probably notice even if you don't know French):

many texts have not been translated at all
some texts are very confusing in the translation, since Babelfish has taken e.g. the word "Twelwe" as a proper name (kept untranslated), not as a misspelling of "Twelve"
the expression "13 degree programmes" is translated as if "13 degree" were an attribute to "programme"; that is, Babelfish analyzed the structure differently from the intended one
an expression like "under-" has been taken as a preposition (translated into the corresponding French preposition) instead of being part of the expression "under- and postgraduate".

In other translations, there are similar failings but also some different problems. For example:

In the German translation, the word "state" was translated as "Zustand". Obviously, for a noun with so many meanings as "state" has, a translation program is unlikely to pick up a correct equivalent without some help from the content. Changing "state" to "state budget" would improve the situation: it would be translated into the single word "Staatshaushalt". (One should of course be careful with such changes to text which modify the meaning. In this context, the modification would probably be acceptable.)
In the Italian translation, the name "Esa" has been replaced by "SEC". Assumably it was interpreted as some abbreviation and translated using the corresponding Italian abbreviation! And the word "marks" was translated as "contrassegni" instead of being taken as a currency name. This problem can be circumvented by removing the word from the original; it is redundant due to the appearance of the currency abbreviation FIM.
In the Portuguese translation, the word "nutshell" is left untranslated. This is interesting, compared with the fact that in the French translation the phrase "in a nutshell" has been replaced by the idiomatic equivalent "en un mot" (literally, 'in a word').
In the Spanish translation, the name "Räisänen" has been changed to "R5ais5anen", i.e. the letter ä has become 5a. This is obviously an error in the way the translator processes data at the character level and should be fixed there. On the other hand, modifying the document by presenting ä as the entity ä circumvents the problem.

In order to solve some of the problems detected, I constructed an experimental modified page by applying the methods described in the first section (guidelines on natural language usage and guidelines on HTML markup). Its French translation (by Babelfish) is considerably better than that of the original. The remaining flaws (such as "professeurs d'associé" instead of "professeurs associés") are probable things that can be fixed only by improving the translation program.

Notes on the changes:

The original document uses twice an ADDRESS element, which is treated in "don't translate this" mode by Babelfish. The illogical use of ADDRESS for something that really isn't a normal address thus causes unwanted phenomena in automatic translation. In the first of ADDRESS, the tags were simply removed. In the latter case, they were replaced by SMALL tags; it seems natural to suggest that technical information about the maintenance of a document should appear in smaller font than normal.
On the other hand, some other parts of the text, people's names (and one part which was in an ADDRESS element, namely the abbreviation HUT) need to be protected from any attempt to translate them. This was made using the "SAMP hack"; it has the drawback that words so marked are presented in monospaced ("typewriter") font on many browsers by default. Style sheets are used to suggest another rendering, small-caps.
The logo of the university is used in the original page as one image, which contains the logo symbol and the name of the university (in English). Naturally, texts presented in images are not translated by automatic translation programs (although something like that might be done, in principle). Therefore, using an image which contains the logo symbol only and the name as text leads to better translatability.

You may wish to compare the presentation of the modified document (in English) on your browser with a screenshot of what it looks like in one browsing situation viewed on Internet Explorer 4.0 with stylesheet support on. (It isn't quite what it should, due to deficiencies in stylesheet support.)

You may wish to look at the other translations of the modified document:

German translation Italian translation Portuguese translation Spanish translation

The Portuguese translation is the most problematic. In addition to the "nutshell" problem mentioned above, the change of the English spelling "vicerector" to "vice-rector" caused a new problem: it's now translated as "vice-vice-rector"!

Next subsection: Logical markup and translation