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donahoed
donahoed

Reputation: 29

Translating and localizing technical words into other languages

I'm currently translating a website from english into other languages but have a problem when it comes to technical terms (non words) like "crontab".

Should I keep the english translation or is there another way to find the equivalent?

These aren't actually english words and when it comes to languages like Japanese, I'm at a loss as to what to do.

Here's an example sentence as an example:

"Use crontab to schedule scripts."

which translated into Japanese via Google Translate becomes:

"スクリプトをスケジュールするcrontabを使用してください。"

You can see how bizarre this looks, and I'm wondering if the sentence could even be understood by a Japanese speaker.

What do I do in these situations?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 118

Answers (1)

naota
naota

Reputation: 4718

Using English words in Japanese

Talking about the word crontab, I think it's not bizarre to write it in English in a Japanese sentence like this:

crotabを使用してください
(please use crontab)

On Japanese wikipedia, you can see how crontab is used without translating into Japanese.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crontab

In Japanese technical writing, especially when you mention name of tools, it is common to use English as it is without translating into Japanese.

Using Katakana

You could also write the sentence like below using Katakana.

クーロンタブを使用してください
(please use crontab).

Japanese usually writes words from English in Katakana. Japanese Katakana is phonetic, in other words each character represents a sound (not meaning). But In this case, it doesn't look natural.

Mistranslation

There is a mistranslation in your Japanese sentence.

 スクリプトをスケジュールするcrontabを使用してください。
 (Please use crontab which scedule a script.)

To correct this, you could go like this:

 スクリプトをスケジュールするには、crontabを使用してください。
 (In order to schedule a script, please use crontab.)

Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 1

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