The GITS Blog

You might get an answer you don't like.

I was recently translating the website of a Japanese company into English. This was one of those semi-convoluted relationships of Company → Web Developer → Translation Agency → Me.

I had a few questions about how to proceed with the translation, which I relayed to the Translation Agency (along with my suggestions).

1. Japanese comments

There were several comments in Japanese on each page, saying things like "stick Google Analytics script here." These were obviously instructions for the Web designers. My recommendation: Leave them as-is.

2. Link to "English" page

Each page I was given to translate had a link to the English version of that page. My recommendation: Batch-convert these to links to the Japanese version.

3. Hidden field for charset detection

Each page had a search form. Inside the search form was a hidden field, with a string in Japanese saying something like "this string is for charset detection." Actually kind of clever in a braindead way, since each page had a charset declaration anyway, but this field would obviously be useless or counterproductive on the English page. My recommendation: Delete this field.

Here were the answers from the agency:

1. Leave the comments as-is
   A sound decision
2. Leave the English links as-is — the designers will change them
   Fair enough, and less work for me
3. Translate the "charset detection" field into English.
   Completely brain dead. You don't need an ASCII string as a hint to the browser that the page is Western/utf-8 encoded!

So, out of three questions, they accepted my suggestion on one, gave me a different but rational instruction on the other, and gave me a completely brain-dead instruction for the third. Even after I told them why answer #3 was "perhaps not the optimal solution," they stuck to their guns. And at that point, all I could do was give them what they were paying for.

But you really can't avoid asking these questions, since as #2 shows, the client could rationally have a different preference in some cases.