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Pottery by Osa

If you speak or I need your help. I’m trying to make my website more internationally accessible. I’ve begun by adding German and Japanese translations and I would like your feedback on the quality of translation and how it looks on your end. As I understand it, you’ll only be able to see these translated pages in Germany or Japan, so if you speak these languages in the US, you can’t help with this task. Thank you! potterybyosa.com

Osa AtoePottery by Osa | Florida Ceramic ArtistOsa Atoe creates handmade pottery at her home studio in Sarasota, inspired by the natural landscape of Florida and her Nigerian heritage. She uses red stoneware clay as well as wild clay from Florida to create her unique vessels.

@potterybyosa i don't speak 日本語 fluently , more an intermediate level but did a quick look and it was generally good. I think a native Japanese speaker would be able to fairly understand and navigate your site.

@potterybyosa I assume it's machine translated? MT is pretty good with complete sentences, but the main links, About, Shop, Reviews, FAQ - actually it might be better to leave them in English because we're so used to marketing speech, except for Classes, that'd be Kurse (or Kurse & Events)

Seconds is Zweite Wahl

@potterybyosa

Only took a very quick glance so far, but "About" in the menu should be "Über" not "Um" and for Collections, I would use "Kollektionen" instead of "Sammlungen".

@potterybyosa

Oh and "Press" should definitely not be "Drücken". "Presse" or maybe "In der Presse" could work

@potterybyosa From Germany: it doesn't switch to German automatically.

The language switch button should be on top, not hidden at the bottom.

The translation is not good at all, I'm sorry.

@slowtiger @potterybyosa

Hi Osa, native german speaker here, confirming what others have already said - this will require quite a bit of work. There s many things that dont work like this in german.

@slowtiger Agree about the language switch. If you can, place it at the top. Also, don’t try to enforce an automatic language switch, but leave it up to the users. Languages and countries are poorly correlated.

The translations of longer texts (e.g., FAQ) to German are okayish (i.e., not too idiomatic, but few glaring mistakes). But as soon as words appear out of context, such as the title of a page, things tend to go wrong. I’ll give a few pointers in the next post.
@potterybyosa

@slowtiger
About > Über
Shop > Bestellen (maybe irrelevant for European customers if you don’t do international shipping?)
Classes > Kurse
Reviews > Bewertungen
FAQ > Häufige Fragen

‘Press’ at the bottom of the page should be ‘In der Presse’.

‘Seconds!’ on the shop page should be ‘Zweite Wahl’ (I’d skip the exclamation mark in German).

There’s a bit of a mix between formal and informal pronouns. Which of the two would you prefer? Neither would be weird.

@potterybyosa

@isoglosse @potterybyosa For the main menu I'd suggest:
Über (or "Über mich") - Shop - Workshops - Bewertungen - FAQ (or "Häufige Fragen")

In case you're wondering: yes, we Germans replace one english word with another, which may have a different meaning in German. We're used to it, this wording is pretty standard.

(Disclaimer: I'm a web designer myself.)

@slowtiger Yeah, these options would work as well, of course.

I feel that your writing, @potterybyosa, is quite thoughtful and delicate, so automatic translation does not really do it justice. A sensitive reader will notice that the translation was not made by a human. But human translation is expensive, so I understand if that is not an option. It is still a nice touch to offer a German version.

@slowtiger Thank you for taking a look. I use a Google Chrome browser that allows me to translate any website. Do you think it's a better option to allow my website visitors to create their own translations using their own web browsers?

@potterybyosa I haven't used any of those so I can't vouch for their quality. On Mastodon this feature seems to work reasonably well.

I'd offer to help you out with a translation, unfortunately I'm drowning in work right now - call me again in April?

@potterybyosa
Hi Osa, I tried the firefox translater. I guess, the translation is similar to what the Chrome Translater did. Unfortunately the *About* button turns invisible :(
For me the english version works very well.

@potterybyosa there's a language select box in the bottom. So anyone knowing these languages could help.

Some things I noticed about the German translation:

About -> Über (not Um)
Seconds -> zweite Wahl ("Sekunden" means seconds as in time.)
press -> Presse (Drücken ist pressing something)

@potterybyosa

(German) we use a formal and informal way to talk to someone. The page mixes it. So "go to card" (or sth like that) is informal "das könnte Ihnen gefallen" formal. The second sounds weird.
The informal usage should be fine in a shop like this. (Not a company that really wants to be serious )

@potterybyosa German translation looks good to me. But had to scroll down to the bottom to switch the language. However I can also see the Japanese translation but can not help with that. Learned a lot about clay. Many thanks!

@potterybyosa i can see the german by appending “/de” to the url. I’ll take a look!

@potterybyosa Just had a quick look and agree with @frog_reborn about the „about“ = „über“ or even „über mich“ (about me -> more personal).
Then „join the e-mail-list“ is still English but I guess 90% of the visitors will understand it anyway.
Then you have „Classes“ / „Klassen“ in the drop-down-menu. That should rather be „Kurse“ as it‘s already in the text when you click „Classes“.
There‘s also a typo in the headline: „Kurse & Veranstaltungen“. (picture)
In general I think it‘s quite well translated and understandable. Didn‘t read the long texts though. 🙂👍👋

@potterybyosa Hi, I bookmarked your post to be able to answer when I have time to take a deeper look (native German speaker here). As the others already mentioned, the translation is of mixed quality with a even a few glaring outliers. I would also strongly suggest to move the language selection button to the top right next to the cart and login buttons, where it would be most helpful and accessible.
I would like to volunteer helping in the translation of your site - there are a few tools to crowdsource such an endeavor like crowdin or transifex, not sure if you can use them with a shopify app (which seems to be the technology behind your site) or if it this is supported there natively. Or does the site support a bi-lingual export file format of some kind, which could be used to provide translations in a structured manner?