Bantelmann Translate offers functional localisation services for technical, medicaland and commercial translations.
What is functional localisation of a translation?
The translation of a technical or specialist document is not always limited to the conversion of content into a language other than the original. Very often, in fact, certain information, concepts and data are expressed, codified and described in different ways by the two cultures at hand – the cultural world of the original document and that of the target language.
In such cases, a translation must also include a functional localisation service. Functional localisation of a translation means adapting all necessary concepts to the target language:
date format
time format
units of measurement
currency
telephone numbers
links to web pages
In addition to this, there are particular aspects of functional localisation when translating software, or a website, or even a mobile phone app, that require the adaptation of fields and commands to the conventions of the target language.
It is important to distinguish functional localisation from cultural localisation, which concerns idiomatic, slang or metaphorical expressions that make sense in the source language but not in the target language, and is expressed in the reconstruction of the text so that it also „works” in the second language – a process more often defined as transcreation.