Aquaticus: Committing multilingual faux pas

Lack of attention to detail weakens a translation programme.

The Site

Aquaticus is a company that organises outdoor activities and trips in Faial, an island of the Azores. The site has information and online booking for activities such as whale watching, windsurfing and diving. It is in Portuguese, but a row of flags along the bottom of the home page leads to pages automatically translated into English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Clicking one of these takes visitors to the Worldlingo site (www.worldlingo.com), where the page is reproduced in the appropriate language. A Worldlingo bar, with a banner advertisement for other companies, runs along the top. Clicking navigation links in Aquaticus brings up further translated pages, although an “object not found” message is shown when the fourth level of links is reached.

The Takeaway

It is easy to mock machine translations such as “Boat strolls the engine” and “Comment of whales and dolphins”. On the other hand, we were able to get a far better idea of what the company did than we could by attempting to decipher the Portuguese ourselves. If the Korean, German and other translations are as good, Aquaticus is on balance doing itself and foreign visitors a favour by offering the Worldlingo service. But only just.

First, a properly translated English version of the home page would surely be worthwhile (there are plenty of anglophone yachties hanging out in Faial who could help out). Second, the translation engine fails after four links. Third, the poor translation matters little in the general areas, but becomes serious in the online booking section, where precise language is important. Fourth, page-loading is painfully slow as pages are translated on the fly.

Handling foreign languages online is always a matter of judgment – both costs and benefits tend to be high – but the “plug it in and let it run” approach taken by Aquaticus has led to weaknesses that could surely be avoided with greater attention to detail.

First published on 02 September, 2003