Friedel en ander frappanthede

I recently had to do a slightly harder bit of translation work for Pidgin. Part of it was an extension for the XMPP protocol to standardise emotions. With this extension different chat programs can exchange information about the user's mood in a standard way. But the text shown to the user should of course be translated, and this ended up not being easy at all.

There are more than 80 emotions described in the specification and it includes a few physical states (such as "cold" and "sick"). I got started to translate but quickly realised that this isn't all that easy. Firstly I don't know all the nuances of all the English terms well enough, but of course I just consulted dictionaries to solve that. Shortly, however, there were terms with multiple translations, some of which overlap with the translations of other terms. Some of these terms that I had some trouble with:

• Amazed, In awe
• Thankful, Grateful
• Amorous, In love, Aroused
• Dismayed, Dejected
• Contented, Satisfied
• Humbled: It is ambiguous, in my opinion. It has meanings in the direction of "modest" and towards the direction of "abased" — quite a big difference. The intended meaning is given in the specification, but how will users know what is intended here?
• Lucky en Happy: These two unfortunately both translate to "Gelukkig" in Afrikaans, and the difference is usually deduced from context. There is likely to be no context where the translations are used; maybe just a list of emotions to choose from.

The goal is of course not just to get some translation, but something that is accurate, distinguishable from the others, and something that conveys the correct message to the person that you chat with — someone who likely uses a different chat program, maybe even in another language. It doesn't help if two terms are translated in the same way and you see something like "Gelukkig" twice in the list.

Although the specification gives the idea that the list of emotions is based on a bunch of good research about emotions (including cross-cultural studies of emotion), I wonder how useful this list is when it has terms that are so close to each other in meaning. Although some of the tricky bits specifically had to do with Afrikaans, it seems as if there are a few terms that can cause confusion for translators, and maybe even for users too.

Later in the same file I encountered stuff from the OSCAR protocol (used in ICQ and AIM) allowing users to indicate what they are busy with. Here are three of the strings: Surfing, Searching the web, Browsing the web — frustration! Then there are also a few in which I would have no interest to know that someone is busy with. Some of these didn't get my attention.

Lessons learnt

• Internationalisation is hard when it deals with emotions.
• Programmers must give comments to explain things to translators in the best possible way.
• These comments must be in the translation file. The link to the specification was only shared with translators later on the mailing list. Someone translating Pidgin in future will likely miss it.
• Good dictionaries are amazing. This work would have taken significantly longer if I didn't get good starting points each time in the dictionaries.
• A second opinion on my translations was a great help.
• These words can't simply be put into a sentence. Different verbs are associated with these emotions. So while you in English might be able to say "I am ...." and fill in any of these emotions, this simply won't work in Afrikaans. (Mens kry warm, maar voel hartseer.) There are probably more reasons in other languages to never even try to squeeze these into a sentence.