l10n and "double titles" in web pages
Francesco Lodolo
Mobile content), the new trend seems to be splitting titles in two
parts, assigning a different style to each of them (and usually doing a
"text-transform: uppercase" on one part).
Example in the download page for mobile [1]
> <h4>Get <span>Involved</span></h4>
Am I the only one having serious problems with this kind of text? This
assumes that all languages have the same structure of English, which is
not always true.
Take the example code above: "Get Involved" should be translated with a
single word in Italian, now I have to find a different phrase that makes
sense with at least two words, and even more difficult with a word that
makes sense in the second part since it'll be displayed as an
eye-catching uppercase bold text. I can't use a single word because the
result will be ugly with a paragraph looking completely different from
the other two.
I'm aware that the aim is to create pages with an appealing look, but
IMO this breaks quite a few i18n basic rules. Any thought on this?
Francesco
[1] http://www-trunk.stage.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/download/
Eduard Gamonal
The criteria I used for Catalan, which is very similar to Italian, was to
apply the different style to the word with the most important meaning.
For instance, "Get <span>involved</span>" should be translated as a single
word, like in Italian, with some pronouns glued to the end of the word. it's
been translated as "<span>Involucreu-vos-hi</span>".
However... maybe having those <span> tags in a title wasn't the most comfy
way to deal with l10n. it forces us to break the exact meaning of having
<span>involved</span> there. This way, in Catalan, we're highlighting the
pronouns for "you" and "mozilla", which must be present but are not included
in the original meaning.
Edu
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Francesco Lodolo
> For instance, "Get <span>involved</span>" should be translated as a
> single word, like in Italian, with some pronouns glued to the end of
> the word. it's been translated as "<span>Involucreu-vos-hi</span>".
but in this way you end up with a somehow wrong look (two lines, one
line, two lines).
Take the Download page as an example, you have 3 paragraphs: "Take the
Video Tour", "Get Involved" and "Questions? Comments?". While you can
easily find a single word for the first title, so that the first two
paragraphs share the same aspect, you can't do that for the third, since
a "question" is not a "comment" and you should keep them both if you
don't want to change the original meaning.
Or take as another example the features page
(http://www.mozilla-europe.org/it/firefox/features/), I had to reverse
the usual order "noun+adjective" several times to have a good result.
My knowledge of foreign languages is very limited, but I can assume
other romance/latin languages share similar issues, maybe it could be
even worse for other complex languages (eastern Europe or Asia).
Francesco
Γιώργος Φιωτάκης
You are absolutely right Francesco.
We have the same problem with Greek, plus text:transform is a huge
problem for us since the spec does not cover our grammar rules.
It's a real nightmare to maintain the localization of a site with
text-transform in it's CSS, and workarounds are not always possible.
My 2 cents on this:
Localized text should be handled by the localizers alone.
A uniform look and feel is nice, but it's not always possible.
Pascal Chevrel
> You are absolutely right Francesco.
> We have the same problem with Greek, plus text:transform is a huge
> problem for us since the spec does not cover our grammar rules.
> It's a real nightmare to maintain the localization of a site with
> text-transform in it's CSS, and workarounds are not always possible.
>
> My 2 cents on this:
> Localized text should be handled by the localizers alone.
> A uniform look and feel is nice, but it's not always possible.
There are ALWAYS solutions either in html changes or CSS changes
allowing to style or present the information differently, so it's not a
technical problem. The only thing slowing down the application of these
changes is that both Milos and myself have a lot of work to do lately
and cannot always apply visual patches as fast as we should, especially
during releases times.
That said, there are many people in our l10n community with CSS skills
that can propose us patches to speed up the process, you can even insert
a <style> section in your html file for a temporary measure until we
have time to put the more final solution in place, linostar has been
doing that lately for Arabic for example.
Pascal
Anas Husseini
We all, as localizers, face such difficulties now and then. The simplest
solution is that you should not always literally imitate the look of the
original english page(s). Localization is not only about replacing an
english word/sentence by another in your language. It's about making the
context and the look appeals to the eye of the people of your locale, and
surely we all know that. Don't let such limitations restrain you. Use your
css pen, and create whatever you think is necessary to display the page
conveniently in your locale. If you're in doubt, or don't have enough
experience about how to do it, drop by #l10n irc channel and ask for help
from your l10n fellows.
Regards
Anas (aka linostar)
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--
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
Thomas Schwecherl
in the html code:
<h4>Machen Sie <span>mit</span></h4>
is now
<h4><span style="display: inline !important;">Machen</span><br />Sie
<span style="display: inline !important;">mit</span></h4>
"Machen" and "mit" are now in big letters and there are now only 2
lines instead of 3.
Γιώργος Φιωτάκης
> Hi Francesco,
>
> We all, as localizers, face such difficulties now and then. The simplest
> solution is that you should not always literally imitate the look of the
> original english page(s). Localization is not only about replacing an
> english word/sentence by another in your language. It's about making the
> context and the look appeals to the eye of the people of your locale, and
> surely we all know that. Don't let such limitations restrain you. Use your
> css pen, and create whatever you think is necessary to display the page
> conveniently in your locale. If you're in doubt, or don't have enough
> experience about how to do it, drop by #l10n irc channel and ask for help
> from your l10n fellows.
>
> Regards
>
> Anas (aka linostar)
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 14:03, Pascal Chevrel<pascal....@free.fr>wrote:
>
Of course there's always solutions, that's not an issue and has never
been so far.
I guess what Francesco meant in the first post, and what I mean for
sure, is that
we should be able to see the style before it is applied on the public
servers so we
can apply or request modifications.
With all the frenzy before the release, some bits were not visible
during the time we
translated content + nobody had enough time to check every bit of the sites.
And surely there's no magical universal solutions, plus, there's no
doubt that we all
work as hard as we can to have the best possible outcome - nobody blames
someone here.
It's a good think that we can communicate about such issues.
Perhaps the main reason we experience situations like this, is that too
few persons are
taking care of way too much stuff, and maybe we should be more
aggressive on expanding
our communities with new, not necessarily technical, but reliable members.
Francesco Lodolo
> you can even insert a <style> section in your html file for a
> temporary measure until we have time to put the more final solution in
> place, linostar has been doing that lately for Arabic for example.
But the implicit question in my first message is still valid: is it
better to have an inconsistent design through localized pages of the
same site or keep in mind i18n in the design process?
Francesco
Jeff Balogh
<francesc...@mozillaitalia.org> wrote:
> Il 27/03/11 13.03, Pascal Chevrel ha scritto:
>>
>> measure until we have time to put the more final solution in place, linostar
>> has been doing that lately for Arabic for example.
>
>
> to have an inconsistent design through localized pages of the same site or
> keep in mind i18n in the design process?
I don't make the websites in question, but I think a slightly
inconsistent design is ok. We don't expect our sites to look exactly
the same across browsers, so I don't think we should expect that
across locales either.