The Quality of Quality Management - In-House Version
A couple of days ago, I read a post on the Masked Translator: The Quality of Quality Management, which made me smile because similar things seem to happen to me constantly. Somehow, some developers seem to believe that they are qualified to question translations into languages they don’t speak. I just received a charming email from one of my developer colleagues asking me:
I have noticed for the DE locale that many strings containing the value “Standard” are the same as their English equivalent, however the string “Sample” has a value different from it’s English value. Is this correct?
Questions like that get me hopping mad. First, this is something that he could easily check by himself, sparing himself the effort of writing and sending an email, waiting for a reply etc. I am not a fan of Babelfish but I believe in cases like this, looking up “Sample” and “Standard” instantly shows that the translation is correct. I don’t believe it should be used to find translations but I think it can be at times OK to verify the occasional translation. Second, the word standard appears 109 times in the string file for this application. If you assume that I could “forget” to translate it 109 times, you certainly do not have much faith in my skills.
He probably meant well and I really appreciate attention to detail and quality especially with regards to localization, but this seems like misguided micro management.
Kölle Alaaf - and I am #43
I am amazed how much traffic I am getting considering that the blog is only up for a couple of days.I guess I owe that to the fact that my fellow translators granted me a spot on their link lists - Thanks!
I admit, I am a stats junky and I have 3 stats plugins installed right now. So, since I already have bots crawling through my website, I did a quick search for Susanne Aldridge and the main page is at #43 (albeit with some old content as the blurb).
I am also at #10, but this is a deep link to a site that I have removed. I had started a couple of weeks ago to refresh my memory of CSS so I can revamp some stuff for work and as I learn best by doing, I experimented with some pages on here first. I assume those will drop off Google pretty soon, so it is the #43 I have to work on. I am not getting into SEO too much for now, but I will keep an eye on it.
Aside from that, today is November 11th, which is 11.11 and it’s a big day in Cologne, Germany. It is the beginning of Karneval.
The “Sitzungen” (shows) with their humorous orators and singers bridged the gap between the opening of the “Carnival Session” on “11.11″ to its climax on Rose Monday. That is still the same today, Now it is bands like the “Bläck Fööss”, “Höhner” and “Paveier” and humorists like “Rumpelstilzchen” or “Werbefachmann” who are the trade marks of Cologne’s “Fifth Season”. World-famous is the “Stippeföttchen-Tanz” of the Rote Funken, a parody on the soldiers’ strict life.
Unfortunately, the only crazy thing that I will do today is translate our website update at work and install SDL Synergy to see if the project management is useful for me.