Earlier I posted about Foursquare’s latest app update which brings support to five more languages to the location-based service. Within the apps, it looks like the translation job was pretty spot on. It didn’t trip on the usual pitfalls that tend to catch non-native speakers unawares. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the website.
As I said in the previous post, the apps may well present very little challenge as the scope of the translations was relatively limited and there were no large blocks of text that had to be translated with the majority being just one or two words, the longest being just a sentence or two. The website however, clearly presented a much more challenging task.
Unlike Twitter’s localization efforts, Foursquare hasn’t yet made public how its translation efforts were conducted but based on a number of sections on the website, it looks like whoever is behind the operation didn’t do much more than send the English text into Google Translate, at least for the Indonesian version of it. We at DailySocial know pretty well how accurate Google Translate can be when translating text to Indonesian (that is to say, not very).
Perhaps Foursquare would like to hire actual Indonesians who speak the language to help them with the localization efforts?
If you understand Indonesian, go to Foursquare’s website, switch the language and check out the Privacy and About pages, they also clearly need an editor. Naturally you have to speak Indonesian relatively fluently to understand why some of these don’t work quite well despite using the correct words.
