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Looking at the options below for commenting on token use is an education in itself (the tokens concerned are {number} and {chat-service-name}).

This approach allows users to comment as much on the effectiveness of the internationalization (i18n) practice as on the quality of the translation.

Facebook’s internationalization best practices for developers are here.

But I’m stuck here. Maybe you can help me?

As a user experience (UX) professional, I can see how allowing users to translate their own content can be part of a compelling engagement strategy, and within that context I would have thought the entire user experience should be in the user’s language, not just part of it.

So, then, why is it that when we constantly read that Facebook is available in 65, 70, 80, whatever number of languages, we can find that the Facebook help is available in less than 10? Here is what Irish language (Gaeilge) users see under Help:

Is it because:

a) The Facebook crowdsourcing translation tool doesn’t allow the help strings to be translated?

b) Facebook users don’t want to translate help because they don’t like or need it, or doing so just ain’t cool (or easy) anyway?

or

c) There’s a whole bunch of places out there populated by people way way smarter than others and they don’t need help in their own language?

As a localization professional working according to budget, I was sometimes faced with the prospect of having to preside over a localization plan where help or doc not included and left in English (actually, Facebook doesn’t seem to allow users who switch their language to one where no help translation is available an option to read help in English instead). I wondered: if this approach was acceptable then why the help was written in English in the first place?

For me, partial localization is fine if the market and user experience accepts it, of course, though it’s clear that for some cultures doing so is a negative experience.

But what’s going on with community translation of user assistance like help?

Answers to the organizers of the next localization or UX conference, anywhere, please.

A new application for the iPhone allows you to take a picture of some text and then translate it. Not only that, with text-to-speech technology, it will pronounce the text as well.

With translation capability from English into 16 languages and pronunciation in FIGS plus Portuguese, the Pic Translator seems aimed at the monolingual American who ends up at a restaurant with indecipherable entrees. An interesting app—and at a cost of 99 cents, it seems worth a shot!

(Thanks to Fast Company for this item!

A feature offered by most CAT tools is the possibility of creating project memories from larger memories. Typically, to create a project memory, the PM analyzes the files to translate against a master memory, and the CAT tool includes in the project memory only the segments that would be useful as fuzzy matches. The translator thus receives only the part of the translation memory that provides fuzzy matches and 100% matches.

There are several different reasons to do this: from the need to give the translator smaller files, to the requirement of not sending out a full translation memory because of the risk of disclosing some sensitive or proprietary information.

Whatever the reason for creating limited project memories, end customers, translation companies and project managers often overlook something important: a project memory is, by definition, an incomplete memory. This harms translation by limiting the usefulness of concordance searches. A term already translated in a segment that is not similar enough to other segments as to be a fuzzy match would not be found by a concordance search on a project memory, whereas that very segment would be found if the same search were conducted on the master memory. Not finding an already translated term because of the limitations of project memories affects the quality and consistency of the translation.

The customer or the translation company may still decide that security reasons outweigh the quality disadvantages of using project memories, but the choice should be deliberate, not something arrived at by chance out of not trusting the translator.

The announcement of a free translation tool based on Facebook’s own methods comes as a bit of a surprise on the heels of the hubbub over Facebook’s patent application over its method of crowdsourced translation (which you can read a bit more about in the upcoming issue of MultiLingual magazine… too bad this latest notice arrived just prior to going to print). To top it all off, Google announced it also is offering a free crowdsourcing method to translate websites. Quick thinking, Google.

What this means in the long run remains to be seen, of course.