Stay accurate

Don’t modify the sense of the original English message. Always stay as close as possible to the original meaning.

Avoid literal translations

Rythm, tone, word order and grammatical structure can differ dramatically from one language to another. Dont hesitate to change these parameters if the original English structure doesn’t fit to your language. Remember that you translate the whole message, not a collection of words.

Keep it short

Some messages are meant to be displayed inside buttons or text fields of a limited size, therefore, you must use the least number of characters possible otherwise there will be layout issues. Usually, a note will warn you when a message should be translated using a limited amount of characters. Besides this particular issue, it is always best to tend towards short, small messages, using accurate words.

Look out for the language level

Most of our original English messages are written in a politely informal tone. Try to stay close to this level: you should not use familarities or slang, but you shouldn’t use an overly formal language either.

Simple is better

Keep in mind that Netvibes is used by people with very different levels of computer skills and technology knowledge. Therefore, avoid using audience-specific terms and special expressions that only a small fraction of Users will understand.

Re-read yourself

When finished translating, always spend some time to review what you wrote for spellchecking. The use of automatic spellchecker is handy. Also have someone else read over your work. Remember that if you leave a typo or error in a translation and the translation update have just been made, even if you fix the typo it will not appear online until the next update.

Language-specific styleguides

Of course each language has different rules regarding the use of punctuation, capital letters, grammatical structure, active/passive form, gender use, tense, infinite, singular/plural, numbers, dates, etc... For reference, you can have a look at these language-specific guidelines made by Sun: http://developers.sun.com/global/technology/translation/lang-style-guides.html. The advices in these documents can be applied to any software or website translation, including Netvibes.

You can also contribute to this section by writing your own styleguides, advices and recommendations. Create a topic in the forum and we will link it from here!