I recently read an article on Computerworld criticising Dutch-language software and found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. Not with objections to its existence, of course, but to the forced way Dutch terms are imposed on users when the benefit or need is not always clear. English is the lingua franca of IT, after all, and even users with little aptitude for languages generally understand words such as ‘options’, ‘image’ and ‘insert’.
The author’s arguments and frustrations are familiar. I mainly find Dutch software terminology frustrating when something goes wrong. The answer is usually easy to find on an English-language website, but locating a particular option or button becomes difficult when it is hidden behind an unfamiliar Dutch term.
Many of our clients develop and implement IT products and solutions. Naturally, they want to communicate this through press releases, media alerts, white papers and other texts that we help distribute. We translate these texts from English, and they are often highly technical. This makes the translation question particularly relevant: which English words and terms should be translated into Dutch? How consistent should you be? And how much prior knowledge can you assume?
Should ‘management’, for example, stay in English or become ‘beheer’? Should you use ‘storage’ or ‘opslag’, ‘recovery’ or ‘herstel’? Should ‘licensing’ retain its verb form and become ‘licentiëren’, or should you take account of the fact that this is not yet an established Dutch verb and use ‘licentieverlening’ instead? What about terms such as ‘granular’ and ‘compliance’, which often need translating even when the result makes the sentence less natural?
This is where a great deal of tailoring comes in, informed by knowledge of the client, the product and the target audience. Deciding in advance what the text should communicate and who will read it takes you a long way towards a good translation. Add a healthy dose of common sense. And, to finish with a deliberately literal Dutch-to-English expression: “That’s exactly where we come looking around the corner!” In other words, that is where we come in.
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