Microsoft Terminology Blog

Danish and Ukrainian Style Guides Recently Updated

The Danish and Ukrainian Style Guides available from the Microsoft Language Portal were updated recently.

In the Danish Style Guide, section 4.1.1.7. Mood has been updated. In Danish some verbs in the imperative form can be mistaken for a noun and therefore we have added an accent acute to the verb in order to distinguish the two. However, the accent is only to be applied in imperative forms that may cause confusion e.g. 'markér' and 'aktivér'. It is not to be introduced as a standard.

The Ukrainian Style Guide was updated with the following:

·         Grammar rules information (interchange of prepositions, conjunctions and prefixes between the words in Ukrainian and English);

·         New entries added to the list of declensional endings;

·         Translation of the Article Names section added;

·         Standard Legal text updated according to the LCA approved terminology;

·         Minor changes to the Specific Localization Guidelines (the structure of system messages while translating into Ukrainian) and Troublesome and Conflictive Words (new entry about the use of the participle added).

Portuguese spelling reform in Brazil

On January 1^st, 2009, Brazil started adopting the new spelling rules, defined in the Spelling Agreement signed in 1990 by seven Portuguese-speaking countries. Grammarians estimate that the spelling reform affects 0.5% of the Portuguese (Brazil) lexicon. In Brazil, there will be a 4-year transition period in which both spellings will be accepted.

As the purpose of the Portuguese spelling reform is to establish a single common orthography for all Portuguese-speaking countries, you may be wondering what is going on in Portugal. Despite the fact that the spelling reform has encountered strong resistance in Portugal, the Portuguese president ratified the Spelling Agreement in July 2008, but the date when the new spelling rules will take effect is still undefined. Once the spelling reform is effective, there will be a 6-year transition period in which both spelling rules will be accepted. It is estimated that the unified spelling will affect 1.6% of the words used in Portugal.

In the Microsoft Portuguese (Brazil) Style Guide, available for download from the Microsoft Language Portal, the topic Portuguese Spelling Reform contains a summary of the main spelling changes, the strategy for implementing the new spelling in Microsoft products, as well as recommendations on how to deal with the controversial cases (points that are still obscure) and special cases regarding Microsoft terminology.

During the 4-year transition period, Microsoft will gradually adopt the new spelling rules in all its products. The upcoming Brazilian Windows and Office versions will already follow the new spelling rules.

What about the Office spell checker?”, users in Brazil have been asking. Microsoft is currently updating the Office 2007 proofing tools (spelling and grammar checker, thesaurus, and hyphenator) with the new spelling rules, and these updates will most likely be released in the second half of 2009. Microsoft also plans to release an adjusted version of the proofing tools, which will include the new spelling rules, in future Office versions.

Context-sensitive speller

Today’s post in the Office Natural Language Team Blog reminds us that a great addition to Office 2007, a context-sensitive spelling checker, is also available for Spanish (as well as English and German).

It is a very useful feature for languages with recurrent homophones, like they’re, their and there in English. It helps users avoid misuse of similarly spelled words by highlighting some contextual spelling errors with a blue squiggle and suggesting the correct alternative: 

The Office 2007 contextual spelling checker looks at surrounding words and flags words that look unusual for the context. This can help you avoid some of the most frequent mistakes like “I’m loosing valuable time.”

Here is the blue squiggle in action:

You can find more information on contextual spelling in the Office Online Help, in the Office Natural Language Team Blog and in Office Hours: The next generation of the spell checker.

Windows 7 Beta in Arabic, German, Hindi and Japanese available on Jan 9

Windows 7 Beta is now ready and in addition to English, it'll also be available in German, Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi on January 9. Each language will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions (except Hindi which will only be available in 32-bit). Read more on the Windows 7 Team blog.

If you read German, check out some first impresssions from Microsoft Austria and Microsoft Germany. 

Free downloads of 26 new Style Guides now available

We have added another 26 Localization/Translation Style Guides that you can download for free from the Microsoft Language Portal. We already provide around 60 downloadable Style Guides and have now added the following languages from the Unlimited Potential Local Language Program: 

• Albanian
• Amharic 
• Armenian
• Assamese
• Azeri
• Gaelic
• Georgian
• Inuktitut
• Icelandic
• Khmer
• Kinyarwanda
• Kiswahili
• Kyrgyz
• Lao
• Luxembourgish
• Maltese
• Nepali
• Oriya
• Pashto
• Persian
• Quechua
• Sinhala
• Tatar
• Uzbek
• Welsh
• Wolof

We are still working one more language which will be added soon:

• Catalan

For most of these languages, you can download the Language Interface Pack version of your language to run on top of an English version of Windows or Office.

Localized Visual Studio 2008 in 9 new languages

Visual Studio 2008 has been localized into Arabic, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Polish, Tamil, Turkish, Malayalam and Oriya as a free "CLIP" download package.

"CLIP" stand for "Captions Language Interface Pack". It's basically an add-on with localized user interface that you install on top of the English version of Visual Studio. The CLIP package allows you to see translations of menus, button and so on as tooltips when running Visual Studio.

It's designed for users who use the English version, but want to see the most common user interface in their own language as well.

The translations in the CLIP package are a joint-effort between Microsoft and local communities.

Here are a couple of screenshots of what this looks like when you are working in the product (apologies in advance for the poor image quality):

When you hover your mouse over a menu or command, a separate box (or a tooltip depending on your setup) will display the translation in the local language. You can also add your own translation for user interface items.

The CLIP packages are available as free downloads from the Local Language Program or directly from these links: 

Cultural awareness and product development/localization

Sarah Dillon in There's something about translation has a very interesting post on multilingualism and cultural identity and their implications for language professionals.

It made me reflect on cultural awareness and the role it plays in the development and localization of Microsoft products. As an Italian terminologist in the Microsoft Language Excellence team, I often take part in reviews aimed at ensuring that specific product features are suitable for a global, yet culturally diverse, audience:

• Globalization reviews analyse unlocalizable (English) product and service names, nonverbal messages and visual representations to determine if they are acceptable in local markets and if they communicate the same or a similar message to a global audience as meant for the source product, without the need for any adaptation or translation.
• Localizability reviews verify that terms, feature names, catchphrases or user-interface solutions can be localized with straightforward translations or with an acceptable amount of rework.

Globalization and localizability reviews require cultural competencies – the ability to recognize any characteristics that are peculiar to the language and culture of the source context (in the Microsoft context, the United States) and to identify any implicit information contained in the source text or visual items, compare them with the cultural framework of the local market and determine if they carry across also into the target culture.

In case they don’t, solutions should be suggested that help convey the same message as meant by the source material, for example by making explicit any subtext or specific connotations that are not implicit also in the target language (alternatively, advice might be given on aspects that are acceptable to lose in translation); it is equally important to provide recommendations on how to avoid unwanted target language connotations that might negatively impact product perception.

Not all multilingual individuals are aware of, and able to identify, cultural implications that might require attention in the development and localization of a software product, but language professionals (terminologists, localizers, translators etc.) are usually well suited to provide meaningful contributions in this area. 

Czech Terminology: changing “klepnout” to “kliknout”

Based on strong feedback from our users, we are changing our Czech translations for click and double-click (verb and noun) to kliknout/kliknutí and dvakrát kliknout/dvojité kliknutí, respectively.

With this change, we are hoping to align these terms with the latest industry standard terminology and meet the preferences of Czech users. Earlier this year, the Czech subsidiary asked users for feedback on this change through a vote at Živě.cz and the message came back very strongly that 94% of users polled are in favour of a new term "kliknout" over the old term "klepnout". We want to ensure that our terminology reflects users preferences and wil therefore consider the old terms Klepnout/klepnutí and poklepat/poklepání obsolete in the future. 

The  implementation will be done for all new products and new versions of existing products. To avoid any compatibility issues with a confusing user experience and consistency in already existing products, such as Windows Vista or Office 2007, we will not be implementing the change in minor updates such as Service Packs to existing products.

This table provides an overview of the change:

The new terms are not yet visible in the Microsoft Language Portal search tool.

We would like to thank all users who gave feedback on this change which will enable us to improve our products and meet the expectations of users.

Windows Live terminology - what users told us

For a couple of months earlier this year, we ran a terminology feedback program to solicit comments and alternative suggestions from our users. This program was specifically aimed at the existing terminology in the Windows Live suite of services (Messenger, Spaces, Hotmail, etc) and in particular on social networking terminology.

The project was live for around 40 languages and the results have been or are being incorporated in new versions of Windows Live – most already implemented in the current language set available at http://download.live.com, for example Brazilian.

This is a small account of some of the more interesting results on a more global basis, pulling in results across a number of languages.

One challenge we have around terminology changes to existing terminology is to strike the right balance between updating outdated terminology and on the other hand maintaining terminological consistency (backward compatibility) for terms may no longer be contemporary, but are widely used. So there’s a difficult trade-off between implementing a community preference and keeping an existing term for usability and backward-compatibility.

This also gets complicated by another consideration: ensuring consistency across different domains for an integrated and seamless user experience, i.e. ensuring that we use the same term for the same concept between consumer products like Windows Live and server products like SQL Server (where this is reasonable for the user, of course).

Another challenge is whether to adopt a prescriptive approach or to follow the terminology actually used in the market, especially where more academically minded users prefer different terms to what’s actually used by a technical community (which often  prefer to use the English terminology). As in most other languages, we have many examples in Danish (my language) where English terms - even where there were originally perfectly good Danish equivalents - have been adopted wholesale: chat, printer, software, hardware, browser, and so on.

For the Windows Live localization team, the aim of the forum was to ensure that user expecta­tions were met and that the product terminology closely reflects the local culture. This is particularly important for social networking applications like Windows Live Messenger and Spaces that are exposed to frequent neologisms in English. 

Here are some more detailed and interesting findings from a cross-language perspective:

Terminology changes over time

Pretty obvious, of course, but still: For both Polish and Danish, our translations of the term “smart phone” had been established several years ago when this technology first appeared in the market, and at a time when no translation had established itself. For Danish, we originally came up with a translation that avoided the “false friend” smart which in English means something like “intelligent” (in this particular sense), but in Danish predominantly means “fashionable” (although it's not that clear-cut either). We therefore originally translated the term “smart phone” as “intelligent telefon” but common usage in Danmark is now a loan word: “smartphone”. Same thing happened for Polish, where our term “Telefon inteligentny” is now obsolete (and was originally a construct) and “smartphone” is used instead. Determining when a particular term is "established" is of course tricky.

Our national languages won’t be replaced by English just yet

In Denmark and undoubtedly in many other languages, there’s the occasional trepidation that English terminology is increasingly creeping in and is impoverishing the language. Although there is of course widespread adoption of English terms, and this seems to be the majority tendency, the forums did not reveal a universal (or irreversible) trend towards English. The picture was mixed depending on the specific term. It seems that some terms in some languages can seamlessly be adopted where the prefernce is for translation for other terms. In  a couple of cases, there even seems to be a shift from English-inspired terms back to the more original local terms:

• German: The community preferred “emoticon” (English spelling) instead of the Germanized equivalent “emotikon”. However, in other cases, users opted for non-English terms; a couple of years ago, anglicisms were still “cooler” than translations, so there seems to be a shift (e.g. users in the forum no longer prefer the English “Tab” in Windows Live but the German “Registerkarte”).
• Brazilian: The community feedback consolidated the decision to leave in English some terms already widely adopted in Brazil, such as ‘pager’, ‘phishing’, ‘emoticon’, ‘feed’, ‘gadget’, ‘pop-up’, ‘smartphone’, 'blog’.
• Russian: Adopted anglicisms were unanimously preferred (e.g.«смайлик», «гаджет»). If the anglicism is not yet widely used, Russian words appear to be fine with the users (e.g. «состояние» for ‘status’ voted ~50/50). The term «мини-приложение» was not adopted by the community who preferred «гаджет». Same for «антифишинг» (Microsoft) vs. «фильтр фишинга» (users)
• Italian: The translation of “newsletter” was changed from “notiziario” to “newsletter” and confirms preference for the English term
• Polish: Smart phone: “Telefon inteligentny” is used by Microsoft only. The most popular name is “smartphone”
• Danish Smart phone: The original translation “intelligent telefon” has not taken off at all in the market. Everybody uses “smartphone” (note that the Danish spelling is ”localized” and drops the space because Danish uses compounding).

Some perfectly valid source terms are tricky across many languages

One case in point was “instant message” or “IM” which seems to work fine in some languages, but for Danish and Dutch, the user preference was for another English term “chat” which has become established in those markets.

• Dutch: "Instant message" did not get a single vote from a participant. We decided to change "Messenger-bericht" to "chatbericht", in other words a more generic translation.
• Danish: The translation of “instant message” was changed to “chatbesked” (chat message) due to user feedback and to better mirror the already popular local translation of “SMS message”. "IM" appears to mean very little to users.

All in all, the forums were extremely valuable in pointing out and indicating particular user preferences. All results mentioned here are gradually being changed not just in Windows Live, but in other Microsoft products as well.

We are currently running a Windows Live project for the same number of languages, but for new terms in the latest Windows Live version which just released. If you are interested in taking part, read more details here.

Puget Sound STC meeting on terminology at Microsoft

The Puget Sound chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) invited me and a panel of Microsoft writers, editors, managers, and terminologists to present our view of terminology management best practices at their November meeting in Bellevue, WA.  I have been a member of STC for 20 plus years, during most of that time I was an editor or writer.  Now that I have been doing terminology work at Microsoft for nearly three years, I was excited to be able to share with my fellow STC members how I became engaged with terminology, first as a writer and now as a terminologist.

After giving a glimpse of my journey from technical editing and writing to terminology, I tried to did explain what I do as an English (source language) terminologist.  I touched on the main responsibilities of the Microsoft Language Excellence team and the basic workflow for extracting terms from the user interface or user assistance files and entering them into our multilingual database so that they can be used as a resource during localization.  The best practices that I focused on was 1) making sure that definitions are precise enough, 2) aligning concepts and terms where appropriate, and 3) planning terminology projects, especially allocating enough time for writers and editors to write and vet definitions.

Short presentations from the panelists outlined terminology management theory including concept-centered terminology, how UI text writers create and manage their terminologies, the resources used by user assistance writers, and the importance of posting, and pointing people to, terms with vetted definitions, be they in a simple spreadsheet or in a relational database. Unfortunately time was short, so we could just mention the Microsoft Language Portal.

I think there were about 60 attendees at the meeting, and about 30% said they were involved in some way with glossaries or terms or localization. But judging from what I could see during the meeting, the attendees were all very interested in what each of the panelists had to say about their experiences with terminology at Microsoft.

All in all, I think the presentation and discussion raised the awareness of terminology and got people to think about it in a different way.

Thanks goes to the Puget Sound STC volunteers who made the meeting possible. And also to our panelists: Lisa Andrews, Lola Jacobsen, Barbara Inge Karsch, Robin Lombard, and Jim Purcell.

Tia Johnson, English terminologist

Latin terms and software terminology

Until the 18th century Latin used to be the lingua franca of scholars and scientists. Nowadays the role belongs to English, the recognized global language of business, science and technology.

Predictably, quite a few English IT terms have been taken into other languages as loanwords (e.g. software, blog, cookie, OK, etc.) and are instantly recognizable in different countries across the world. 

Maybe slightly more surprising is the number of Latin terms that are still used in English, with their original spelling, and which have acquired a specific meaning in IT terminology.

A few examples with definitions from the Microsoft terminology database:

English-to-Russian MT added to Windows Live Translator

The Microsoft Research Machine Translation team has added English to Russian to the list of language pairs offered for Windows Live Translator, which can now be reached at http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/ or the new mirror http://microsofttranslator.com/.

Read more on the Microsoft Research MT blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/.

Multilingual documentation: English and localized Help

The Search tool in the Microsoft Language Portal lets you access the Microsoft terminology database, with thousands of English terms, their definitions and their translations in more than 90 languages, and millions of software strings from localized Microsoft products (also known as UI strings, i.e. the text that appears in the User Interface of a product).

The localized Help (the so-called UA or User Assistance, available online for most products) is not part of the search options, but there is an easy way to look up how the topics were translated. Once you have identified the source text you are interested in, you can find the relevant translations by editing the page address:

• In MSDN (Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET Framework, etc.) you need to replace the  en-us part of the address with the appropriate language tag, e.g fr-fr for French:
  English: msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1021kkz0.aspx
  French: msdn2.microsoft.com/fr-fr/library/1021kkz0.aspx
    
• The same approach also works for Technet (e.g. Exchange documentation):
  English: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123979(EXCHG.80).aspx
  German: technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/bb123979(EXCHG.80).aspx
    
• In the Windows Help topics you need to replace both the en-us language tag and the locale code (LCID) at the end of the URL, e.g. 1033 with 1040 for Italian.  
  English: windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/cc452fac-08581033.mspx Italian: windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/it-it/Help/cc452fac-08581040.mspx
    
• Also in Office Online you need to replace both en-us and1033:
  English: office.microsoft.com/en-us/worldwide/HP010713011033.aspx
  Russian: office.microsoft.com/ru-ru/worldwide/HP010713011049.aspx 
    
  A list of language identifiers is available here.

Animals and... IT terminology!

English is a very creative language which often uses semantic neologisms (a new meaning is given to an already existing word) and/or terminologization (a generic word is transformed into a new term in a special language).

Here are a few well-known examples* of terms that originally described only animals but which have taken on new meanings in the IT world:

	bug	An error in coding or logic that causes a program to malfunction or to produce incorrect results. [See Wikipedia for info on the history of this term]
	mouse	An input device with the following features: a flat-bottomed casing designed to be gripped by one hand; one or more buttons on the top; a multidirectional detection device (a ball, laser or optical device) on the bottom; and a cable or wireless connection to the computer.
	spider	An automated program that searches the Internet for new Web documents and places their addresses and content-related information in a database, which can be accessed with a search engine.
	watchdog	A hardware device that monitors system health and functionality through communications with the system software.
	worm	Self-propagating malicious code that can automatically distribute itself from one computer to another through network connections. A worm can take harmful action, such as consuming network or local system resources, possibly causing a denial of service attack.

In localization it is not always easy to find suitable equivalents for English neologisms. There is no rule, and choices are made on a term by term basis for each target language.

In some cases a calque is used, especially if the original metaphor is transparent (a mouse actually looks like a rodent and most languages opted for a literal translation, e.g. souris in French and Maus in German); sometimes the English terms enters the target language as a loanword (in Italian the device is called mouse); in other cases ad hoc solutions are found based on the most relevant features of the concepts represented by the English neologisms.
     

* Examples from Terminologia etc.; definitions from the Microsoft terminology database.
   You can search Microsoft terminology in the Microsoft Language Portal.

Azure, an interesting term

Over the past two weeks there has been a huge interest in Windows Azure, the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.

From a terminological point of view, azure is a very interesting word. Both the noun and the adjective denote the bright blue colour of the sky and have a fascinating etymology:

c.1325, from O.Fr. azur, false separation of Arabic lazaward "lapis lazuli," as though the -l- were the French article l'. The Arabic name is from Persian lajward, from Lajward, a place in Turkestan, mentioned by Marco Polo, where the stone was collected.  [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Pronunciation, however, can be a bit challenging and even native speakers do not seem to agree on what it should be. Several variations are recorded by English dictionaries, with or without final /r/ depending on rhotic or non-rhotic accents:

/'æʒə/

/æ'ʒʊə/

/'æʒjʊə/

/'eɪʒə/

/eɪ'ʒʊə/

The French variation /a'zyr/ is also used by some.

So how should we pronounce azure when it refers to the Microsoft services? You can listen to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect, first announcing Windows Azure here: it's /'æʒər/.