by George Alpizar
The New York Times published an article this spring regarding Latin America’s potential for growth over the next decade. The article describes how the current, relatively low usage of cell phones and Internet serves as a huge potential for investment. cPanel has already considered the importance of reaching the Spanish- speaking market by hiring two, full-time bilingual technical writers (myself included), assigned exclusively to translate the online user documentation.
Pre-Translation Work
Before we started the actual translation process, we needed to complete some prep work. It was crucial for us to create and implement a style guide, term base, and glossary. These guides are useful to tackle everyday problems and avoid certain delays during the translation. For example, we stated how to write dates and times in our style guide; therefore, when we had to translate that information, we could easily reference the style guide and translate without delay.
The term base is a fantastic way to list and maintain commonly used words in our project. In order to avoid a stop-and-go work flow, we reviewed the current English glossary and translated those terms in order to have a general understanding of the content to be translated. Likewise, this was the appropriate time to discuss any pertinent issues. For example, while email is understood by many native Spanish speakers, correo electrónico is the Spanish equivalent. First, we decided to use the Spanish term, but it seemed overly long, so we changed our translation to email. Later on, we reverted back to the Spanish term where we decided that if an acceptable Spanish term exists, it should be utilized.
With the English language virtually dominating the ever-emerging computer terminology, various cultures have adopted their own ways to describe these web terms. In Spain, a computer is called ordenador while other Spanish-speaking countries utilize computadora. In some cases, the English word is maintained by the other culture. Software is used throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and there is no Spanish equivalent.
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