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Do you know your way around language variants?
Variants aren’t the same thing as dialects, though we’ve talked about those before, and it’s always an interesting topic; if you’d like a thorough look at dialects and pronunciation in North American English, you can find one here. What’s the difference? A large part of it is official recognition, and identification with a set of political boundaries. Tidewater, Texan and Californian are not recognized as language variants… though you could surely find people who think they ought to be! However, they all exist within a variant, US English. When a body in power settles on a set of standards that constitute “proper” language within its borders, you have a variant. And for translations to be correct and effective, you’ve got to know your variants!
We’ve said it often, and it bears frequent repeating: the key element of localization is “local”, and the surest way to lose that is to translate into the wrong variant. Your audience in Indiana would have no problem understanding a brochure localized for the United Kingdom, but would they be able to relate to it? Probably not as well as you’d like them to, with all those subtly different spellings, and the greatly different terms that may arise. Ask your average American what a zebra crossing is – do you know?
So, which variants do you need to be concerned about?
– If you’re only taking English-language content into other anglophone markets, you’ve got to contend with four major variants: US, UK, Canadian, and Australian. Among these, US English is sort of the odd man out. Brits, Aussies and Canadians all speak with quite different accents, compared to each other and within their own countries, but they have more in common regarding spelling and vocabulary than they do with us in the US. Red, green and blue are colors here, but out there in the Commonwealth, they’re colours. How do they feel about the way we spell things here? Well, your blogger was once (playfully) criticized by an Irish colleague with, “Why can’t you spell?” and then defended by an Englishman thus: “At least they use all the letters. Look at ‘z’. We never use it. They use it all the time!”
– What about French? As with English, the major difference there is across the Atlantic. The French of Canada, called québécois, is as distinct from the European variant as American English is from the British kind. And, speaking as a francophone: no matter how much French you may have learned in high school and college, no matter how fluently you can converse in Paris, do not assume you’ll be able to communicate so easily in Montréal. There is a definite period of adjustment!
– As one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, Spanish has quite a range of variants. It’s tempting to make the divide between Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, but that’s papering over variants on both sides of the ocean. Latin American Spanish… have you seen the size of Latin America, and how many countries there are? It’s possible to get very granular indeed, when you start delving down into Spanish variants, and when done to a reasonable extent, that’s a good thing. Are you releasing marketing materials in Venezuela? A Venezuelan translator should work on them. Printing manuals for the Dominican Republic? A Dominican resource will be your best resource.
– The same goes for Portuguese, which has several minor variants in Africa and Asia (Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Macau), and one very, very, very big variant (Brazil). Brazilian Portuguese is one of the fastest-rising languages in the global economy, as well as the translation industry; immigrants from all over the world, making their homes in Brazil for a great many years, have done much to distinguish the language from its mother variant in Portugal.
– German doesn’t have quite the global reach of English, French and Spanish, but it’s still a powerful language in the world economy, and it has its variants. The main concern here is with spelling. In recent years, German underwent an official spelling reform, but not all German-speaking countries have adopted it. You’ll also find notable spelling differences between the language as written in Germany and Switzerland. For example, have you seen the ß character before? It represents a double s, and its use in Germany is frequent; the Swiss, however, never use it at all. If you’re localizing in German, make sure you know which spelling conventions your audience is expecting – is a street a Straße, or is it a Strasse?
– Now, Chinese… this is a study in itself, really. China is home to two wider standards, Mandarin and Cantonese, and multiple dialects (like Shanghainese) that are confined to certain regions, and only slightly mutually intelligible, if at all. If you’re translating into Chinese, the one you want is probably Mandarin – however, that distinction is only half the story, and your translation team needs to know the other half, which is the writing system. We’ve covered this in our FAQ section, but in case you weren’t aware, Chinese comes with two possible writing systems, Simplified and Traditional. Which one should your Mandarin Chinese translation use? That depends on where your Chinese readers are. Simplified Chinese is the standard for mainland China, while Traditional is still used in sinophone areas outside the People’s Republic. In Chinese communities throughout the US, both Simplified and Traditional systems are used. In short: location, location, location!
