Quality Web Site LanguageGet Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. Quality Web Site Language topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Euphemisms Review your text for euphemisms and consider rewording them for clearer meanings. A euphemism is a milder or vaguer word or phrase used in place of one that might seem too harsh or embarrassing in a particular context. The commonest subjects for euphemisms are bodily functions (to relieve yourself), sexual activity (to make love), death (to pass away), economics (downsizing), and violence (to do away with). We all need to resort to this kind of language in order to respect people's sensitivities, and our own. But there are two kinds of euphemisms that are questionable: • euphemisms that blur the meaning or cause confusion (e.g. cloakroom for toilet). • euphemisms that attempt to show unpleasant activities in a more positive light (e.g. ethnic cleansing for the wholesale killing of peoples). Some euphemisms have even become official clichés, e.g. helping the Police with their enquiries (= under interrogation and imminent arrest). Readers outside your locality often confuse euphemisms. So check your site carefully for such ambiguities. Confusable Meanings There are many pairs of words, which are similar in form and meaning and are often confused. For example affect and effect are often confused. Affect means to cause a change in, where as effect means to bring about. Always check your site carefully for such words (its/it's and to oo are classics). If you would like a free list of commonly confused pairs of words and their meanings, send me an email at grant.mcnamara@translateme.co.nz. Tautology Tautology is the repetition of the same idea or meaning in a phrase or sentence, as in free gift (all gifts are free), a new innovation, and to return again. Some tautologies are contained within a small group of words based around the noun, for example future prospects, past history, general consensus. We use tautologies mainly in speech, but if we are not careful they creep into our written text. Such words can often be dropped because their meanings are contained in other words within the sentence. Using tautologies in written text is not usually good style and you should avoid it. Formal and Informal Language The different contexts and levels of formality in which English is used are called registers. At a broad level, English, like all languages, varies from the formal and technical to the informal and casual. Register also takes account of the various types of communication, such as conversation, informal writing, journalism and broadcasting (formal writing includes essays, speeches and academic books). In conversation, for example, use of the personal pronouns I and you is relatively high, and contradictions such as I've, you're an don't predominate over the fuller forms. And in conversation slang and colloquial words occur regularly. In more formal writing, colloquialisms are uncommon, the pronoun one is more likely to be used than the you, upon is likely to be used as well as on, and more formal words such as ascertain and desirous are likely to occur. Each mode of writing and speaking calls for its own different kind of language. In its most formal register, a machine might be said to be malfunctioning; in a neutral or everyday register it might be described as not working, and at the informal extreme it will be said to be broken or kaput. Formal words are usual in instructions and notices; alight (from a bus or train), conveyance (for vehicle), enquire (rather than ask), notify (rather than tell), and select (rather than choose). In more general contexts, purchase is more formal than buy, edifice more formal than building, endeavour than try, and purloin than steal. The language of technical writing has its own terminology; for example gravid, meaning pregnant, occurs only in medicine and biology. Most of these formal words can be turned on their heads and made to look silly (Do you really live in this edifice?). Always consider providing your visitor with a glossary of words and phrases. And remember anyone, anywhere in the entire World can and will look at your site. They all need to be able to understand what you mean, and they must feel comfortable reading the words. And if you're considering having your web site translated/presented into one or more foreign languages; reviewing the words on your site takes on a special significance. Poor translations are highly likely to occur if we haven't made a careful review of our text, taking account of the points discussed above. What are the potential pitfalls and what can you do to ensure a trouble free translation project? The first step is to define exactly what you want the translation to achieve; the terms of reference. Think about whom your audience is and what type of language they want to read. There are many ways to write a sentence. As we've discussed, you can use simple language, formal or informal language, technical or difficult. Language translation isn't just taking one language and rewriting it into another language. The translation needs to convey not only the meaning and substance of the source text, but also convey the message in the same theme and at the same reader level. Thus a good translation will be at a level equivalent to the source language in complexity and formality. Put another way, the translation must use the same register. The reading level, for example, can be checked using either the Flesch or Flesch-Kincaid readability measures. These measures can be displayed at the end of a spell check automatically in Microsoft Word. No one style of vocabulary and grammar is superior to another; it is there appropriateness to the occasion that matters. But read the text of your web site carefully, and consider the language you are using. Are you using technical language that only specialists in the field will understand? If your site is aimed to sell goods or inform ordinary people, will they understand the words and is the level of formality appropriate? Are there confusing words? Are you using slang that no one outside your locality would understand? A good quality translation agency will provide a thorough language site review before they perform any translation. Both client and agency benefits because the results of the translation project will be of a far higher quality. I hope this has given you something to consider so that you can ensure your web site is as good as the quality of your products, services and information your organisation provides.
This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portabilityThe blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail. Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:
A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail. Caching is good contingency design practiceAs I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible. A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above. And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. You, too can Have Fun with Sepia Images! If you are one of those who wonder how people come up with the cool looking sepia tone prints that you admire so much. If you are doubling up with jealousy over a sepia tone, here, we will give you tips on how you could achieve this sepia tone, too. Ready up your Photoshop software program, your PC and prepare to have fun with sepia! It’s time that they envy you, too. First of all it is important for you to choose images that have some darks and lights – it doesn’t matter how colorful they are. … 2. Web Design - 7 Key Things to Avoid By Christopher Smith A search for "web design" on Google returns more than 325 million results. So how do we start eliminating all these so called designers? Here are a few of the most common shortcomings.Watch out for: Templates Subdomains DIY Hosting High Renewal Costs Poor Coding Inaccessible Design Advertising / Self Promotion 1. TemplatesWatch out for designers offering you a choice of templates. This not only means that they're doing no new design work for their fee but could also have an affect on your sear… 3. Mobile Accessibility - Your website in the year 2005 Instant Article Submitter. - Amazing Breakthrough Software Stuffs Any Website You Want Full Of Free Targeted Traffic.15,000 Mb Hosting For $4.95/mo. - 4.95 web hosting, Free domain registration! Free setup and online website builder included.… 4. 7 Benefits of HTML Validation By Herman Drost You may not bother with html validation or writing simple and clean code when designing your web site. Later you may find your site is slow loading, appears incorrectly in the main browsers and does not rank well for the major search engines.Now there are sites that still do rank well even though the html code has many errors. This is because most of the current major browsers are still very forgiving of html mistakes, however future browsers will become more html compliant as the Internet adv… |
||||
