I interviewed Maria and Aaron Contente, who are both native Spanish speakers from Mexico, educated, and are successful professionals in Silicon Valley. Maria Contente manages many of the relationships with our clients at Forrester in Silicon Valley and Aaron is an engineer at a large industrial company.
After enjoying a home cooked Mexican meal (and a spicy cocktail), I asked them for their honest feedback on Facebook’s recent Spanish release. Watch the video to find out that the new version reads awkward.
Apparently, Facebook outsourced some of the translations to the members, in a crowdsourcing effort of 1500 members, but in some cases there’s no substitute for having a professional translator. Apparently, a French version will soon be released, let’s hope the translation fares better than this Spanish one.
Hi Jeremiah,
About me: I am also a native Spanish speaker who is originally from Honduras. I moved to the US to get a B.Sc. (1996) when I was 18 and then went to grad school in Canada and have lived here ever since. I speak both languages at home, 100% Spanish with my son, and 100% English with my husband.
I don’t agree with Maria’s comments made regarding the use of the word “herramienta” it translates literally to the word “tool” and that’s what it is. I think the issue is that probably in Mexico it is used in a more industrial setting, but for the most part it simply means a tool which can be used in either context. Changing it to “medio social” changes the message to “social medium” which is still not social utility as Facebook originally wrote in English.
There are however several of the feature descriptions in the next paragraph that don’t make any sense like “sube fotos”, which is their translation for upload images but really is read more like “lift images”. The translation for “tag your friends” which they used “etiqueta a tus amigos” is also quite poor and makes no sense to me. The word tag is literally translated to etiqueta, but in my opinion doesn’t flow as well to mean an internet tag. I actually couldn’t come up with a better word off the top of my head, and this is why my suggestion would be that Facebook get someone with perhaps a marketing background, who speaks both languages and who can convey messaging in both. I think Facebook has translated all the words of the site, but not the message. No need to review the entire site, but at the very least the homepage and some of the pod headers.
I don’t agree with using Spanish from Spain, to me that would be like getting someone from the UK to translate Facebook in English. While the UK English might be the proper one, it only appeals to a small percentage of the users. There is a slang free version, of proper Spanish, which is used in most textbooks and leaves little room for interpretation. Same as English, when yuo read a good translation, you can’t tell where the person is from.
Crowdsourcing in a language like Spanish works for sections in which the literal transalation is good enough, but not where the message is key.
I’m sure you’ll get an opinion for every country in Latin America, so I’m looking forward to reading them all.
Thanks to you and your friends for starting the conversation.
Veronica
Hi Alex,
I agree about the different translations for different countries, Yahoo does the same. My comment about the Spanish from Spain was to Maria’s suggestion, not your own. And I completely agree with you and the term “muro” it’s awkward and a big part of the site which needs a catchy name like “wall”.
I think it’s not a bad start, just not sure the translation offers any real value.
Veronica
Yes, I agree that there is no real substitute for a professional translator, however that doesn’t mean that the way Facebook translates it is wrong. It should be common sense that “Media Social is the same as “Social Media”. Also, herramienta which they use for “tool” makes perfect sense, Facebook is a Social Tool that connects you to your friends on cyberspace. Facebook does not target one specific group to market. (If they did, it would probably be to the English speakers due to the fact that it is an English based company).
…funny that I ran into this that has been posted for such a long time, it was precisely one of my -localization- vendors that pointed me to this today, while we were discussing Facebook and MySpace attempts to localize their portals. He asked me if I had ever used the local versions and I said no, personally, simply because Facebook was/is developed in English and I want to get the best experience, I appreciate slang and funny terms, and know that not everything will translate well so I prefer English and getting everything firsthand.
also, I’m posting my comment because:
1. I’ve known the guy in the video for a long time, but haven’t seen him for a long time too and was surprised by his statements!
2. I work for an IT-Silicon-Valley-based-recently-bought-by-Oracle company; I deal with lots of localization issues, one thing I do is manage online marketing strategy for LATAM, and it would be unacceptable to say the least to send out ‘Spanish from Spain’ emails to our customers in Latin America or to point them to the Spain sites, in any event we have to use Colombian Spanish as the “neutral version”, and not always; just to give you an idea, lets play with a phrase:
– turn on your computer – English
– prende la computadora – Spanish (Mexico and most of LATAM)
– enciende el ordenador – Spanish (Spain)
maybe Aaron even though mexican, says “ordenador” nowadays? not sure why he didn’t agree with Formacion then, being a very Spanish-from-Spain word, and pretty accurate I might add. Herramienta is a perfectly accepted term in the IT word within the region, as well as media social.
Anyway, I never used the Spanish version so I can’t say for a fact if it was good or poor, I do not think FB didn’t have the budget to invest in professional localization, they probably did, but trying to come up with a single Spanish version for such a diverse community, probably not the best shot.
Are they working on it still…?
I teach translation classes at the university, and I show my students this clip when the start out learning about translation. Mainly, this is to show them the problems translators face when taking on projects. Also, I do this to show them that you always have to deal with people who think they’re experts, like these two. Much of what they’re claiming is inaccurate, something that has been borne out in the two years since this video came out. For example, the word “herramienta” as used here was a perfectly fine word and is a commonly accepted in this context. Many of the terms to be translated were new concepts that needed new words, so you can’t really use the same norms when judging how the translation was done. Just because you speak a language, doesn’t mean you know how to translate a language.
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