“Traduttore, traditore”. It’s Italian, and it can be translated into English as “translator, betrayer” – but it loses the pun, which is the whole point of its meaning.

As you all know by now, I am French, and I have lived in France all my life, except for a few forays into foreign countries, for vacations or for work. Unlike most inhabitants of the USA, Europeans are familiar with the presence of foreign languages.

In France, for example, you’re never more than 600 kilometers (380 miles) away from a land border. In Switzerland, that distance is reduced to 200 km, and there are 4 official languages within the country itself (French, German, Italian, Romance).

Most software is written in English. Most Europeans, despite their familiarity with foreign languages, are quite unable to speak or read English fluently, the main exceptions being the UK, of course – that’s where English came from originally, after all – and me
This is even truer where it comes to technical terms.

This means that, in order to be sold, software needs to be translated into whatever language is prevalent where it’s sold. This is not true only for software, of course: movies, books and, most importantly, manuals (and labels), need to be translated.

In France you can’t sell any end-user item without a manual in French, by law. Some (many) of the translations are made by automatic systems, with often incomprehensible, and sometimes hilarious, results. Professional items are exempted.

One consequence of the need for translation is cost: translation takes time and resources, and the manufacturers need to provide for “foreign” inventory. As a result for example, a PC game that sells for $30 in the USA typically sells for 40 € (about $55 US) in Europe – even in the UK, because no software (or hardware, for that matter) manufacturer will refuse an opportunity to make a little extra money.
In order to sell a software item in the USA, a programmer only needs to write it. In order to sell it in Europe, he’ll have to translate it into as many as 20 languages in addition.

Windows gets translated into about 60 different languages. As far as I can tell, these translations are rather well done, even though some equivalences can be puzzling when you’re familiar with both languages. Unfortunately, US English is a very concise language, and French often isn’t. This is also true for German and others. As an example, the French language pack for Windows 7 is 280 MB in size, when the English language pack is “only” 230 MB.

Then there are languages that use different alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, etc…), plus languages that go right-to-left instead of left-to-right (Arabic, Hebrew). And there are the Far East languages, which do not use a proper alphabet (Chinese and Japanese, even though the Japanese do have an alphabet, mostly used for writing foreign names).

While this isn’t vital where free text is concerned (such as help files), it can disrupt the look of a window when menu items have to be accommodated for, or when the window has been designed with a fixed size, such as error message pop-ups. And believe me, if you haven’t seen an error pop-up in German, you haven’t seen an error pop-up

Fortunately for me, I started working with computers before there were personal computers, even in the wildest dreams, and translation wasn’t an issue. Neither was the GUI, for that matter. As a former colleague (hi, Bill!) once put it, the typical user interface was the “delightful user-friendliness of the 3270^™ with all its gorgeous shades of black and green”. As a result, I’m very familiar with the computing technical terms – in English.

Unfortunately for me, I did not participate in the translation of Windows, and as a result some of the translated terms puzzle me, especially when it comes to delving into the more advanced settings of the system. Believe it or not, being fluent in English can be a hindrance sometimes.

So, if you’re ever to write software, please think of the translations to come. It’ll make your market that much wider. And you won’t have to rely on translators who may not even understand just what they’re translating.

The champion in this domain is Disney: all the songs in their movies are written with translation in mind from the start, and they can be translated fairly faithfully in several languages in the same, or a very close, number of syllables.