Finnotype

It is not easy to write text that translates well. We just started translating  Magnolia CMS documentation  into Chinese. Here are five insights we learned on the way that make work easier for authors and translators. 1. Chinese Wikipedia is your friend Many software terms are well known in their original English form and may not need translation. For proprietary and established terms, check if Chinese Wikipedia translated them. If Wikipedia translates the term, you probably should too: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web容器 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_container If Wikipedia does not translate the term, you likely don't need to either. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet Using commonly accepted, established terms avoids a lot of confusion. Users who read general documentation about the Java platform and Web technologies can apply the terms they learned. 2. Lower case and upper case don't exis...

In Magnolia 5 technical documentation we have a page titled  Location, location, location . The page explains how the system identifies where you are with a URL history fragment. Examples: I am in the Pages app , editing a page named  about : #app:pages:detail;/demo-project/about:edit I am in the Contacts app , viewing a contact named ldavinci : #app:contacts:browser;/ldavinci:treeview: Very nifty! This means you can bookmark any location and go back there instantly. The document about location fragments is very technical. But the title is a pun. The phrase "location, location, location" is used in real estate for the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a property. The phrase was coined by Harold Samuel, a British real estate tycoon. This in an example of a safe joke technical text. Native English speakers get the punchline and have a giggle. But even non-native readers get the point. For them, the repetition emphasizes impo...