Saturday 28 July 2012

Translating into Italian


Etsy is growing... and learning a new language: Italian.

The project started, and many members of Etsyitaliateam are helping in this great issue of translating etsy into Italian.
I've never translated a web-site before. I am very gratefull to my informatics course at University, otherwise html would be an enormous difficoulty. These codes are everywhere while translating and sometimes they make it difficult to understand the real meaning of a very simple sentence or phrase.
It's tricky, but so far is also interesting.

What is strange about it is that it must be functional, there is very little to "read". What we are translating are basic information to surf the great sea of shops on Etsy. Thus, we need to focus on the very use of words.
Another thing to take into consideration is lenght. Bottons and links are supposed to take the same amount of space of the english ones.

Luckily, we have a thread to compare our doubts and talk with the admin to be sure of doing a good job. Once again, what makes Etsy different from other places on the net, is the main idea of community.

Working (and living) with what has to do with languages, I've been wondering about this project before joining. We are doing it as volunteers, we are just partecipating in what we want to became real. We first wanted this site to speak Italian. But translation is also a serious matter, people do it for a living, so... how fair is it doing it for free?
I hope someone is supposed to revise our whole work, in the end. Someone that do it for a living.
So far, once again I am learning something new!

2 comments:

Lazyfish said...

That is a very interesting point of view...i partecipated in translating the FAQs some time ago,but ended up to be much more time-consuming for me than i thought,and i've seen no reason to volunteer in translating portions of the site,since it was something that would have not brought me a single euro!I appreciate the idea of community myself,but still don't find it fair;my little free time is too precious to be used so :(

Claudia said...

I can see your point. What made me wonder about it is that I would be supposed to do it for a living, so haw fair is it doing it for free? Am I underestimating my peers' job?

I think it is complicated... but finally, I decided to join because of the kind of experience it is.
Hoping not to regret it afterwards!
:)