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.
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6 Responses to “The Quality of Quality Management - In-House Version”
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I have to comment on my own post, I just got a follow-up question, maybe someone can help me to find a good answer.
The question is:
Why would “Standard Name” = “Standardname” in German, but “Sample Name” = “Probenname” in German?
Hi Susanne, thanks for sharing with us your experience as an in-house translator. From what I heard of you on other translation blogs, you have so much to share.
I will be keeping up with new posts via RSS feed and include a link to your blog in my blogroll (http://fidusinterpres.com).
Greetings from the Rheinland,
Fabio
Susanne, Duden has a small green Übungsbuch, and one of the chapters deals with Fugen-s and Fugen-n. Nouns that form their plural with -n or -en often require a Fugen-n or -en in compounds. I am, again, traveling and cannot check if this is a must or a can (I’d suspect it to be a can), but I clearly remember two of the Duden examples because they were kinda bizarre: Kabinenroller and Elefantenhochzeit.
Michael, you are thinking like a German
He does not speak any German, so I believe the question was not about the Fuge but still about why Sample is translated (into Probe) and Standard “stays English” (from an American perspective). It turns out, that that was his actual question, ie. the compound with “Name”. I tried to explain to him that just because he knows the translation for the individual words Sample and Name he still cannot translate “Sample Name”. Once there is the Fugen-N, but also the simple fact that 1 word + 1 word = 1 word. I guess what upsets me is that he believes he is able to “proof” the German translation even though he doesn’t speak any German. I don’t know how to explain to him that he is simply wasting his time. Maybe if I rephrase the question, for example: Why would “Kindergarten” = “Kindergarten” in English, but “Schule” = “School” in English?
But then, I guess now I am the one wasting my time, and in the future I should just answer that the translation is correct as is. After all, it isn’t my problem if he wants to micro manage translation and testing. I talked to the tester too, he wasn’t too happy with this either, because it also shows that the developer doesn’t really trust the testing process either.
Oh…
lol
This post made me laugh out loud.
Thanks for the call-out.
-MT