Free white paper: Maximizing Visibility for Multilingual Web SitesChinese New Year and Valentine’s day are around the corner. Have you send out greeting cards to your friends? Check our free ecard collection into different languages. You can now send wishes to your friends into their own language: http://www.wintranslation.com/sendcard/
|
|||||
|
Vampires are all the rage these days: movies, books, TV series, even Halloween costumes… vampires seem to be the perfect subject. Of course the most famous vampire of all time is someone from Transylvania, Romania. While everyone knows him as Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, to me he is one of the greatest Romanian leaders in history. Different stories describe him as a vampire, or a sadist tyrant, but in my culture he is recognized as a great warrior and a firm leader who fought for his people. People see things differently depending on their culture. One nation’s hero could be the destroyer of another one. This is something you might want to pay attention to when localizing your products for foreign markets. Just the other day a well-known game was pulled from the German market because of its use of the Nazi symbol which is forbidden in that market. This week’s quiz is about historic people who changed a part of the world’s history. I had a very interesting experience the last time I visited my parents in Romania. I was so close to losing my licence because I turned right on a red. I completely forgot that this rule doesn’t apply everywhere. Driving rules and regulations differ from one country to another, and sometimes it might be easier just to pay for a local cab to reach your destination when visiting other countries. So, it’s not enough to know how to drive; it’s also important to follow each country’s regulations. The same rule might also apply when advertising to foreign markets: it’s not enough to translate your materials, it is also important to culturally adapt them. Numbers – they’re everywhere! Even a minor activity like preparing dinner involves numbers sometimes. I wanted to cook a Romanian dish the other night and I used one of my mother’s old recipes. I had to use 175 grams of butter, 250 grams of flour, 500 ml of milk and a few other ingredients. But I realized I had a problem. I didn’t know how to measure 175 grams of butter. My butter stick was nicely labeled with measurements in cups, tbsp, and fluid ounces… nothing about grams. So, I just used the entire stick – what could go wrong, butter is yummy! And yes, if you are wondering, last night we ordered pizza because of this. Different cultures use different measurement systems, different ways of writing numbers or even different ways of interpreting numbers. The normal human body temperature is 37.0 °C in some countries and in others it’s 98.6 °F. A shoe size of 7 in North America will be a size 37 in some European countries. A lucky number in one culture may be considered unlucky in another. Test your knowledge about numbers by taking this quiz about numbers. Google has just released a new feature for Google Docs (docs.google.com) – you can now upload and translate the documents into 42 languages. “All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it’s in — translations aren’t perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.” Source: The official Google blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/translate-documents-sharing-across.html |
|||||
|
Copyright © wintranslation Translation services - All Rights Reserved |
|||||