Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

My series of posts on international information architecture:

1. Translating taxonomies and categories
2. Translating categories, translating terms (this post)
3. Translating the Dewey Decimal Classification system
4. Designing the relationship between content and locales
5. Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
6. The Maori versus Dewey, and why limiting access can be culturally appropriate.

In the previous post, I talked about the various types of problems with translating categories:

1. Culture-specificity: not all categories exist in all cultures. For example: “chowder” soup is a typical american category.
2. Semantic overlap: a lot of categories don’t mean exactly the same in different languages. “Fille” (French) and “girl” (English) don’t mean 100% the same.
3. Differences in granularity: Germans don’t have a word for skidding, but they do have two words, Rutschen and Schleudern, for skidding forwards and skidding sideways.

I’d like to explore those problems a bit further today, and talk about the seemingly different positions on this in the library science world.

First, a lot of work on translating terms has been done by the thesaurus people. The International Standard Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri - ISO 5964, 1985 (and paralleled in the British Standard BS 6723, 1985) talks about the problems I mentioned above. (You can buy the standard for a few 100$.)

In the UK, they are in the process of revising the two BS Standards on mono- and multi-lingual thesauri as one work under the title Structured vocabularies. They regard translating thesauri, in a way, as a special case of mapping thesauri. Here are some examples of translation problems they address:

English: clocks
French: horloge et pendule
En French, you need two words to include the different types of clocks that the English word “clocks” describes.

French hierarchy: Betail > gros betail > boeuf
English hierarchy: livestock > — > cattle
In other words, English doesn’t have a category for “gros betail” (which means something like large livestock).

Another example:
German hierarchy: Gastropode > Schnecke > Gehauseschnecke
English hierarchy: Gasropods > — > snails

I will talk more about their excellent work in future posts. But what matters for today’s post is that the library science folks are well aware of the problems with translating categories.

Meanwhile, I was emailing with David Weinberger and he mentioned how the people of the Dewey Decimal Classification System explained him that it is based on a “concept tree” and therefore can be easily translated. It seems like the Dewey people believe that, because of the fact that they created a “concept tree”, that translation is just an implementation detail. And indeed, Dewey has been translated into over 30 languages.

So my question is: are these two separate movements in the library science world? Do they know of each others’ work?

My second question is: do Dewey translators have the kinds of translations problems spelled out in my last post? If not, is it because Dewey has been carefully constructed as a concept list? Or is it for some other reason? I am having a hard time finding stuff about this on the web, so pointers related to Dewey translation are welcome.

Next, let’s look a bit at how different types of categories may pose different translation challenges.

Top level categories. Somehow, I just don’t think “About Us”, “Products & Services” or “News” would be hard to translate into any popular language. What is different about these categories?

Basic level categories. “Cat” is a basic-level category, whereas “feline” isn’t. Are basic-level categories easier to translate? You’d think that they would.

Ad-hoc categories. An as-hoc category is something like: “Things you have eaten today”, or “Books other people have also bought when looking at this book”. It’s a category that is created at the moment of using it (something like that). I would expect these would be easy to translate.

Ambiguity: the strongest predictor of how easy a category is to translate, is, as far as I’ve figured it out, how easy it was to create in the first place. In other words, if you have to do user research and such to create a category, you’ll have to put in some work to translate it as well. And it seems that, the more ambigous the category is (the more discussion possible about what goes in it and what doesn’t), the more work it is to create it.

Thoughts?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2004 at 11:11 am and is filed under Information architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.