How to translate correctly HTML files. How HTML works, basic tags, style sheets, what are the issues a translator should be aware of, how to prepare (tag) an HTML file for translation, what to watch for when translating a website,…

Translating Web Sites

Today, being able to translate HTML is crucial, for obvious reasons, and about every translator will accept HTML files. Yet, although it’s not politically correct to mention this here, truth is that many translators don’t know enough about HTML and websites to do a professional job.

There are LOTS of good HTML tutorials around, but they are all intended for webmasters wannabes or even professional webmasters, and skip important issues a translator should be aware of. I hope this fills in the gap and helps you do a better job.

If you are already well familiar with HTML, Keywords handling and style sheets, go straight to “How to translate HTML” for more on preparing an HTML file for translation and doing the translation itself.

HTML issues

(Basic and not so basic)

What is HTML and how does it work? HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Hypertext is text characterized by the presence of links. Take a book. You read from the beginning and move toward the end. With hypertext, you can have access immediately to the information you are looking for by clicking on links.

An HTML file is a simple text file with an “htm” or “html” extension. Do the following experience: Take a simple text file, “whatever.txt” and rename it to “whatever.htm”. Double click on it and it will display in your default web browser. Now, you will note that there are no links. There are no bold, no underlines, no tables, no pictures and not even paragraph marks.

HTML is the “language” that you use to tell the browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera…) how the page should be displayed and what it should do in different situations (the user click on a link, the navigator finds the page and display it, for instance). To do that, it uses “markups”. A markup – or tag – is a small piece of code that provides this information. In HTML, tags are made of a “<” sign, some code and a “>” sign. Case is not important.

For instance “” tells the browser that whatever information follows that tag should be displayed in bold. Now, unless you want everything to be displayed in bold, there must be another tag to tell the browser where it should stop to display the text in bold. That tag is “”. Note the “/” sign. The tag triggering the bold display () is called an opening tag. The tag canceling the action of the opening tag () is called a closing tag. There are tags for about every formatting option: italics, underline, color, size… You will find them very easily on the net, like here for instance.

There are other types of tags in an HTML document. For instance, there are tags detailing the structure of the page and its general behavior. An HTML page is usually as follow:

(To tell the browser that this page is in HTML)
(Header. Contains information about the page that will not be displayed, but can nevertheless influence the display.)
(Closes the “” tag. Most tags should be opened and closed.)
(The actual page. This is what you see when you open the page in the browser)
(Closing tag for )
(Closing tag for )

You need not change the structure tags when you translate.

Another type of tag is the Meta tag. These are located in the header and give information on the page, used mostly by search engines, like keywords, description of the page, author and copyrights… You will need to translate the contents of some of these tags. Bearing in mind that these tags are mostly intended for search engines, you have to translate the keywords and description using words that people will use to find the web site. It’s not a matter of just translating those.

You have to think a little bit about which terms are applicable to the page and will be the most popular. You are likely to find misspellings in the Meta tags. They are there on purpose, so that people who misspell their search terms in the search engine find the page anyway. If so, misspell too. Google listed the misspellings it found for “Britney Spears”. There are hundreds, and they have been searched for by thousands of people, so misspelling on popular searches could amount to a significant traffic.

If you find well thought of descriptions and several typos in the Meta tags, be extra careful, for this is evidence that your customer has attempted some search engine optimization, and perhaps paid a lot of money to do so. Don’t ruin it.

There is one other important item in the Meta tags: The charset. It tells the browser which character set is used in the page. If you translate from a language with a character encoding different of yours, you may have to change the encoding for the page to display properly. Here is what that Meta tag looks like:

The TITLE tag (in the header. Shows in the title bar of the web browser when you display the page)