[Sigia-l] Re: translating taxonomies - with Google Adwords

[Jorge Serrano Cobos]

Hello Peter et al.:

First, sorry for my english (I´m spanish)

Second, about translating taxonomies, maybe I can contribute with
another point, mentioned here by Richard Wiggins few days ago: search
log analysis.

When translating, if you take into account search engine optimization,
is advisable to check for most common searched expressions related to
your own´s web content (that great Pareto´s law and Zipf changed my
life too, Richard). The best tool for doing so (if you know anything
better tell me please) is Google Adwords, which permits me to facet
the list of most common searched keywords by country and language,
something really important here in this issue.

I´ll use an example:

Let´s see http://www.comunitatvalenciana.com/ , an spanish regional
tourist website. You can see translations on the top with flags (no
need to criticize the site, I can see your hunting expressions, is
just an example ;-)

The question is: when I want this web to be found by spanish users, I
can find lots of really specific expressions, for local or regional
targets, talking about local tourism, because they already know about
the local names: "tourism beaches calpe (calpe is a little town)",
"renting costablanca villas calpe alicante (alicante is a province)"
and things like that.

When I focus on French market, or China, (french or chinese looking
for turism in this part of Spain, Valencia, to the south from
Barcelona) I can see a trend: the further the country is from my web
(Spain), the more general the search keywords are: "beaches Spain",
"tourism spain", not so much about Calpe the village, or Alicante the
province/region/County. People don´t know much about specific
locations, so they look for general locations and more general
keywords.

So in this example, I ask to myself if I have to translate the
taxonomies literally, or put instead (or besides), a more general
keyword, sinonym, whatever. We use these synonims on metatags and
within the text too.

It could be the same for other subjects, so better take a look of
Google Adwords, and then decide. Looks reasonable?

My two cents. Cheers, 

Jorge Serrano Cobos
Information Manager
http://www.masmedios.com
http://trucosdegoogle.blogspot.com


> Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 09:55:49 +0100
> From: Peter Van Dijck <peter at poorbuthappy.com>
> Subject: [Sigia-l] translating taxonomies
> To: sigia l <sigia-l at asis.org>
> Message-ID: <418F3495.50308 at poorbuthappy.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
> 
> Hi all,
> I am looking on the experiences from the LIS folks and others on
> translating taxonomies. I am sure there is a wealth of experience hidden
> with the librarians, who have been translating taxonomies for a long
> time, but the only thing I have been able to find so far is the ISO
> standard: "Guidelines for the establishment and development of
> multilingual thesauri" which is available for 125$.
> 
> Recommendations for places to search (even if they require subscriptions
> or something) are also welcome.
> 
> I am also looking for practical experiences in projects. Feel free to
> contact me personally (peter at piir but happy dit cim - remove spaces
> and replace the i's with o's). I will write up a list of resources at
> the end of this thread.
> 
> Some initial thoughts - please comment:
> 
> - not all categories exist in all languages/countries/cultures. There is
> no English word for the French category "cognac" I believe, for example.
> "SUV" is a category of car only used in the US. (Correct me if I'm wrong
> here.)
> - Langauge is messy and not all labels can be simply translated. (Examples?)
> - what degree of freedom (to re-arrange the taxonomy) should translators
> be given?
> - of course local taxonomies are often different from one another to
> start with.
> - what types of taxonomies *can* be easily translated directly?
> 
> and so on...
> 
> Thanks!
> Peter
> 
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