Comments on: Google Groups translations not passing even the simplest spell check test

By: anca.popa

anca.popa — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:47:07 +0000

Let’s be fair… Google made at least a tiny effort that Yahoo and others never attempt to undertake it by now.

By: sorin

sorin — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:05:43 +0000

Considering the number of Google users, they could come up with alternate solution for these kind of issues: like adding a report bad translation button.

Using this approach they could switch the testing to the end users. I’m sure that in less than a month they would have reports for 99% of their translation errors.

By: William Gill

William Gill — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:49:08 +0000

The problem here, I think, comes down to the cost/effort tradeoff that Google have made when deciding how much money to invest in localisation testing.

With the project I am working on at the moment, I have found that it is impossible to ensure perfect quality translations in the translation phase itself, because the context is often either missing or unclear. That’s why we rely on the localisation testing phase to catch these kinds of errors.

But the problem is, when the product supports, say, 50 languages – how much money and time can you afford to invest to test it completely, in every single language?

Then add the fact that this is web software, for which an update might be released every month or two. Can you afford to perform that complete localisation testing for every single release?