Feedback Wanted: Careers in German

Question

Careers 2.0 is now in German (and localized for the UK). What have we messed up?

We’ve been hard at work localizing Careers 2.0 for the German and UK markets. UK users won’t see much difference other than currency updates to allow employers to pay in GBP. German users will see a straight translation of the site, and currency updates to allow employers to pay in EUROS.

Our team would love help finding bugs as we put the final touches on both new sites. Specifically, we can anticipate problems related to:

German Speakers (http://careers.stackoverflow.com/de)

• Are any of the translations inappropriate? Are any of the translations misleading?
• Do the URLs on /de all continue to /de endpoints, or are you getting thrown off to another site by mistake?
• Do you see any English hanging around? (We are aware of some instances that will be fixed by Thursday afternoon, but let us know anyway.)
• Are you seeing any pricing information not denominated in EUROS?
• Have crazy-long German words caused awkward wrapping issues or overlapping text? (We’re aware of some wrapping issues where we’re getting alternative translations shortly, but again, let us know anyway.)

UK users (or any other English speakers) (http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk)

• Do the URLs on /uk all continue to /uk endpoints, or are you getting thrown off to another site by mistake?
• Are you seeing any pricing information not denominated in GBP?

We’d really appreciate any feedback you have, and will be working the next couple of weeks to fix the issues you bring to us.

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Please note:

• It helps us locate the text if you give us the url where your examples show up.
• Strike through text means we have completed it, but it is not necessiarily live.

Answer 1

• "Besonders hervorgehobene Stellen" sounds way too posh. Consider changing it to "Top Stellenangebote".

• "Jobbezeichnung, Keyword oder Fir…" in the search box is cut off and contains "Keyword", which seems misplaced here. Maybe consider removing "Keyword" altogether or replacing it with "Tag". I'm sure most German speaking people would know what a tag is.

• I'd write "Toptalente" as "Top-Talente".

• "Company Spotlight" seems misplaced; maybe there's a better German term for this. "Unternehmen im Fokus" for example.

• "Importieren Sie Ihren Daten problemlos von LinkedIn" should be "Importieren Sie Ihre Daten problemlos von LinkedIn"

• "Verlinken Sie Ihr Profil mit Stack Overflow, GitHub, CodePlex und weiteren" is missing something after "weiteren". Consider adding "Seiten".

• "450 € per 30-day programmer job listing (or less)" on /de/employer, as well as "Subscriptions start at 1.000 € for a 1-month subscription".

• "Durchsuchen Sie von über 83.000+ Profilen von Top-Entwicklern […]" should be "Durchsuchen Sie über 83.000+ Profile von Top-Entwicklern […]"

• "Uns liegt uns nichts an Ihrem Geld" sounds way off here. It's quite negative in my opinion. Consider replacing with "Wir möchten Ihr Geld nicht".

Answer 2

Login page

• The English version says "Don’t have an account yet? Create a new account", the German one says "Haben Sie schon ein Konto? Neues Konto erstellen". That makes no sense, it means "Do you have an account already? Create a new one". Correction "Haben Sie noch kein Konto?"

• The snippet "Ihre OpenID-Angaben vergessen?" below the login buttons sounds a bit strange. I would either make it shorter to be "OpenID-Angaben vergessen?", or turn in into an actual sentence with "Haben Sie Ihre OpenID-Angaben vergessen?"

CV

• Unfortunatly "bearbeiten" is longer than "edit", causing the section editing links to overlap with the content (screenshot)

• My header says "Derzeit Software Engineer in Stack Exchange Inc.." (emph. mine). That's an incorrect translation of "at" in this context; it should be "Derzeit Software Engineer bei Stack Exchange Inc.."

• Some missing translations in the sidebar

/de/employer

• The section "Haben Sie Fragen?" bottom isn't translated (except for CET -> MEZ).

Terms of service

• Both in the footer and on the actual page, "Terms of service" has been translated as "Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen". Most websites would call this "Nutzungsbedingungen". IANAL, but I think there may actual be legal implications from calling it "Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen", and since this page is obviously a direct translation of the English version of the general Stack Exchange TOS, and not a rewrite into Germany-specific legalese, this may not be intentional. Maybe get some legal advice on this.

• In the second paragraph ("Akzeptieren …"): I would change "Durch die Nutzung von oder den Zugriff auf die Services" -> "Durch die Nutzung der oder den Zugriff auf die Services".

• Section 1, paragraph 2: "… ist oder Inhalte außerdem der USA heruntergeladen werden dürfen." -> "… ist oder Inhalte außerhalb der USA heruntergeladen werden dürfen."

• Section 2, paragraph 6: "… zur Verfügung (der „Creative Commons-Datensammlung“)." -> "… zur Verfügung (die „Creative Commons-Datensammlung“)."

• Section 4, paragraph 1: "Der Abonnent darf keine Informationen oder Ausschreibungen veröffentlichen …" (emph. mine) – that's an entirely wrong translation of "solicitation" in this context. Maybe "Aufforderungen" instead?

• Section 4, paragraph 2, sentence 1: Everything in this sentence relates to "Die Verwendung", so the verbs have to be singular (e.g. "gefährdet" instead of "gefährden"). To capture the meaning of the original English sentence however, I would actually go with this instead:

  Eine Verwendung des Netzwerks oder der Services mit dem Zweck, die die Sicherheit eines Computernetzwerks zu gefährden, Passwörter oder Sicherheitscodes zu entschlüsseln, illegales Material zu übertragen und aufzubewahren, einschließlich bedrohlicher oder obszöner Materialien oder solcher, die mit einer illegalen Aktivität in Verbindung stehen, ist ausdrücklich verboten.

• Section 5, paragraph 3, sentence 1: The translator seems to not have understood this sentence; as is, the translation isn't even an actual sentence. My suggestion:

  Die Services, Inhalte, das Netzwerk und alle Software werden im vorliegenden Zustand bereitgestellt, und zwar ohne jegliche Garantien, weder ausdrücklich noch impliziert, einschließlich, aber …

• Section 5, paragraph 4: OH NOEZ, the Stack has overflown! At least it's missing. "Durch die Verwendung des Netzwerks erkennen Sie an, dass Stack Exchange nicht verantwortlich oder haftbar für Schäden ist, …"

• Section 6, start: "Die Benutzer des Netzwerks erhalten u. U. aus dem Netzwerk"

• Section 6: "… und machen keine Werbung für die auf solchen Websites angebotenen Produkte oder Services." – "Werbung machen" seems like a very inappropriate translation of "endorse" in this case. Suggestion: "… und geben keine Empfehlung für die auf solchen Websites angebotenen Produkte oder Services ab."

• Section 7, last sentence: "… Sicherheitsvorkehrungen für die Nutzung … Haftung für den Zugriff auf diese Daten durch unbefugten Personen …" -> "… Sicherheitsvorkehrungen bei der Nutzung … Haftung für den Zugriff auf diese Daten durch unbefugte Personen …"

• Section 10, both in the English and the German version, sais "All fees are stated in U.S. dollars." – I guess that needs an update now.

• Section 13: A stray word cheated its way into this sentence. "Die Nichtausübung eines hierin festgelegten Rechts durch eine Partei darf dies nicht als Verzicht auf weitere hierin festgelegte Rechte ausgelegt werden."

• Section 13: The translator apparently didn't understand what conflict of laws provisions are. My suggestion:

  Diese Vereinbarung unterliegt den Gesetzen des US-Bundesstaates Delaware mit Ausnahme der danach geltenden Bestimmungen zu Gesetzeskollisionen.

• Section "Melden von Copyright-Verletzungen": "Wenn Sie der Ansicht sind, dass im Netzwerk befindliche …"

• ibid., point 2: the word "unter" seems misplaced here and should be removed

Links

• Clicking "Einladungen" (invitations) in the header takes me to the English version (the original link has a /de, but then comes a redirect to the non-/de page).

Answer 3

Someone pointed out on Google Plus that the location search isn't optimized for German speakers yet. It seems like there are two main problems:

1. Location names that have umlauts in them (like "Köln" or "Würzbug") are not recognized as valid locations.

   In this example, Würzburg is interpreted by the Careers search as "Rosenburg, OR".

   When searching for "Köln", one gets a message that it is an unknown location - but if the search term is "Cologne" (the English name), there are 4 results for "Köln, Deutschland"!

2. German postal codes do not yield job listings in German cities; rather, Careers assumes it's a US zip code. (See the example of 10969, which is one of Berlin's postal codes, but the search results are for Orange, NY.)

Answer 4

This doesn't really work in German. The English version says "< 1 hour ago" which works okay, but in German this is just "one hour ago" with a weird angle bracket stuck in front.

Some alternatives would be "vor weniger als einer Stunde", "vor nicht mal einer Stunde", or maybe just "vor kurzem" as a shorter string (which would lose some precision though).

And while we're on that screenshot, "Sortieren nach: Geschaltet am" sounds a bit weird. Not wrong per se, but weird. Maybe just make it "Datum"?

Answer 5

(I'd really love to print out the pages, scribble in them with a red pen and scan them back in, but you'd probably butcher me for that. Also the margins tend to be too small for elaborate proofs notes. This might come across as overly picky and it probably is as I tend to concern myself not just with spelling but also consistency and typographical problems. But you asked :-))

Front page

• I'd call “Keywords” “Stichworte” instead. There is no reason to use the English term here.

• “Treffer durchsuchen” is just plain wrong. It's a valid, but contextually wrong translation for “Search hits”. Although I'm not really sure of a proper translation right now. Maybe something along the lines of “Durch Suchanfragen gefunden” – still sounds icky, but at least describes what is meant.

Search jobs

• No translation of recent searches, even though those should be easy to translate as they are not exactly free-form strings:

  

• When searching for jobs from a particular company (e.g. by following a link from the front page) the number of jobs isn't quite right. It says “«num» «company name» Stellen” which works out ok in English but is downright horrible in German, introducing several Deppenleerzeichen due to differences in how compund words are constructed in the two languages. Technically correct would be “«num» «company-name»-Stellen” which is likely unfeasible for a number of reasons (since it requires a hyphen between every word of the company name). Better yet (and easier to implement) would be “«num» Stellen bei «company name»” which side-steps the issue by not replicating the exact template from the English version. Yes, i18n is fun sometimes :-)

Edit my profile

• “Derzeit «position» in «employer».” sounds quite wrong. At least for my case. I certainly don't work in a company, I work bei a company. In would be more appropriate for actual geographic places, not abstract entities you happen to be a part of.

• Some labels are just way too long in German, e.g. under Zertifizierung. Adding soft hyphens can help, although I'm not sure about the browser compatibility implications.

  

• Stack Exchange section, you choose not just one site, you can choose multiple, but the wording specifically refers to just one site:

  

• Date ranges are written with an en dash (U+2013) in German, e.g. “2006–2011” (not “2006 - 2011”). Since this obviously doesn't really work for dates in standard (ISO 8601) format or written dates, e.g. “September 2011” the usual solution is to use “bis” between them: “September 2009 bis Januar 2010” (instead of “September 2009 - Januar 2010 ”).

• Similarly, “März 2012 - Aktuell” sounds stupid, as “Aktuell” isn't exactly a date. Better would be “seit März 2011” (a change that would be quite nice in English as well where the current construct doesn't read as nice as it could too). This could be changed on the CV view as well.

• “Pdf erstellen” → “PDF erstellen”. It's an acronym, after all, not a normal noun. The English version side-steps the issue by just lower-casing everything.

• The visibility and privacy settings in the right sidebar seem to cope poorly with the longer words:

  

  Looks a little strange that “öffentlich” appears above “Datenschutzeinstellungen”.

  Technically it's not really a “Datenschutzeinstellung” anyway. It's visibility, so “Sichtbarkeit” might fit better.

• The hint under textarea: “Dieses Textfeld unterstützt die Formatierung Markdown.” might be better to change into “Dieses Textfeld unterstützt Markdown-Formatierung.” (which is also a more direct translation from the original text).

• “Eine Anwendung hinzufügen...” is missing a space before the ellipsis.

• Adding books: “Buch nach Titel, Autor oder ISBN suchen...” is missing a space before the ellipsis.

CV view

• “Profil aktualisiert heute” uses English word order. The German variant would be “Profil heute aktualisiert”. Better yet, because we like being wordy and include lots of words for no apparent reason at all: “Das Profil wurde heute zuletzt aktualisiert.”. It's just a small note in the border that doesn't clash with anything, so being wordy doesn't hurt here (although it might introduce problems with longer words since the line length isn't that long).

  • Works also with “gestern”, “vor 2 Wochen”, “irgendwann letztes Jahr” and “im Mittelalter”.

• Same issue in the Stack Exchange section: “Zuletzt angeschaut heute” should be “Heute zuletzt angeschaut”.

Messages

• “«name» hat geantwortet: «answer» und geschrieben”. Since the two possible «answer»s are interessiert and nicht interessiert this could be solved more elegantly as “«name» ist «answer» und hat geschrieben:”. Note also that the employer's template has a trailing colon while the user's does not. This should probably also be consistent.

Invitations

• “Zeigen Sie uns, dass andere Leute von Ihrer Arbeit begeistert sind, indem Sie Ihre GitHub- der *CodePlex-*Projekte verlinken. Mehr Follower = mehr Einladungen.”

  • Fallen into your own trap of strange markdown quirks? It's also missing a letter because I guess it should be “GitHub- o der CodePlex-Projekte”.

• “Einige der Optionen auf Ihrem Profil ausprobieren Eine Vollständigkeitspunktzahl von 150 erreichen. Dann bekommen Sie von uns ein ganzes Bündel Einladungen.” – This sentence makes no sense as it is. It looks like two sentences mashed together without reason. Go poke the translator (and the reviewer [if there was any]) with a stick.

• “• Zeigen, wie begeistert andere von Ihrer Arbeit sind” should probably read “uns zeigen, wie ...”, for consistency with the first bullet point and because it looks/sounds strange there. I know it's a continuation of the text part before the list, but still.

• “• Nutzen Sie die Einladungen, die Sie haben!”. Did I say continuation of the text before the list? Oh, that was only for two of the three bullet points. Eek! Please, a little more consistency.

• “Wir wollen verhindern, dass Leute sich alsJohn Resig ausgeben” lacks a space.

• “Ihre Einladungen sharen” – sharen isn't a German word. Did you mean scharen?. Honestly, though, what's wrong with teilen? Do we really need a neologism meaning specifically “auf sozialen Netzwerken und sonstigem neumodischen Krams teilen”?

  • Extra strangeness: The button below reads “Teilbare Verlinkung erstellen”. Probably because “sharebar” looks even less like a word. Except maybe as a brand name for chocolate bars intended to be shared. Or something.

• “Sie können Ihre Einladungen mit Ihren Twitter-Followern und Facebook-Freunden sharen Sie bekommen von uns einen Link ...” – Missing a full-stop somewhere.

• “wer zuerst kommt, malt zuerst” – it's “mahlt”. The early bird gets the worm, not the paint.

Employer page

• “Durchsuchen Sie über 85.000+ Profilen von Top-Entwicklern” – apart from the error already noted “über 85.000 +“ is redundant. Get rid of the +.

• Mix of passive and active in both headings (“Stellenanzeige schalten” vs. “Durchsuchen unserer Kandidaten-Datenbank”) and bullet points (“Durchsuchen Sie über 85.000 Profile ...” vs. “Filtern nach Ort, Technologie ...” and “Prüfen der Arbeitserfahrung, Ausbildung, Projekte, Antworten und mehr”).

Candidate search – About

• Mixture of passive and active in the first list again.

Candidate search

• The legend for the top technologies graph isn't translated

General

• Kudos for (mostly) using ellipses properly. Not a complaint, not a correction, just being happy about a rare case of people knowing how to use spaces around an ellipsis :-).

  • Likewise for using a space in abbreviations such as “z. B.”. Typographically it should be a half space, but a non-breaking one is much better than none at all (which, interestingly, seems to be the default in English).

• It would be nice if you could translate your profile on your own, too. Currently I have a German UI with my complete profile written in English. Which doesn't matter so much for fields that have a easily-definable semantic like dates that thus can be translated too. But for free-form text it's a little weird. In fact, I would now have to consider whether I want to be found only by people in Germany who don't speak English or by everyone else. I wouldn't really want to give up either group of potential employers, to be honest. (Gebt mir den kleinen Finger und ich will die ganze Hand ... :-Þ)

• Regarding “Top-Stellenangebote” and other “top” things: I don't particularly care about how you decide, but make it consistent throughout the site. A major problem I tend to see with translations, especially when made by different persons or even though crowdsourcing (which this here amounts to, in a way) is inconsistency in the terms used. The profile page has a section “Spitzenantworten” which should be changed to the same usage of “top” like in the rest of the site.

• Inconsistent usage of “Stellen” and “Jobs”. E.g. “Jobs durchsuchen”, “Jobbezeichnung”, but “743 Stellen”, “Nur Stellen mit Umzugspaket” (on the search page). Choose one or the other, but not both in various different places.

Answer 6

The distance slider switches to "kilometers" but seems to use the same measurement like when it's labeled miles.

"Verwenden Sie Brauchbarkeitstests?" - I don't think "Usability tests" should be translated.

Answer 7

UK translations:

• Email inquiries from employers" on the candidate home page just sounds wrong. An inquiry is normally a formal (judicial for example) investigation. I would write enquiry, i.e. a question.

• In the FAQ, What is a Careers 2.0 Profile? section "favorite" should be favourite (and the spell-checker on MSO says so too!)

• We would normally use CV or curriculum vitae instead of "resume". This is at the top and in the What is a Careers... section

• On the bottom of the employer pages "Our business hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. GMT." The UK is currently on GMT but will move to BST (GMT +1) at the end of March; no one will pay the slightest attention to the timezone so I would remove it.

Very minor gripes:

• On the My invitations tab, invitations is capitalised in the "Share your Invitations" section and nowhere else.
• In /uk/employer/about-listings The price table has listing capitalised differently "# of Listings" and "Price per listing".
• Lastly, and to be utterly pathetic, there's (probably) a missing a comma in "The largest, most active community of professional software developers on the internet" in /about-listings...

Can I just add thanks for formatting the London phone number correctly!

Answer 8

On http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk

Clicking on a tag in jobs-per-tag listing breaks out of /uk.

The sample profile (from here) includes i8nCulture=ok in the url, but the one from the homepage doesn't.

About page : favorite.

PS. Do I get a badge for having subsidised the launch of Careers 1.0? :)

Answer 9

MAJOR translation error found on Completeness Report!

'Mit einem Stack Exchange-Netzwerkkonto mit über 200 Mitgliedern verknüpft'

Hah no! This would translate to English as "Linked to a SE network account with more than 200 members". In the English original, it's about a link to a SE network account with more than 200 reputation. Plus, I think there are only a handful of sites belonging to the SE network that only have less or equal than 200 members! ;) So please fix this, thank you.

Answer 10

Login Page

in the 'Ihr Profil' section:

• 'Öffentliche Ansichten' ==> 'Profil-Besucher' / 'Besucher Ihres Profiles' / 'Seitenaufrufe' (the last one is in use by XING)
• 'Arbeitgeber-Ansichten' ==> 'davon (durch) Arbeitgeber' (I would probably leave out 'durch')
• 'Treffer durchsuchen' ==> 'In Suchergebnissen angezeigt'

Answer 11

When I visit the link "http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk" from germany I the message at the top of the screen, if I want to visit the german version.

Now, I would expect the same behavior visiting the url "http://careers.stackoverflow.com" - or an automatic redirect to the german version, but you just the the english version without a notification about the existence of the german version.

Answer 12

UPDATE: As of 9/1/2015 I can confirm everything (as suggested below) has been corrected. Thank you for fixing this!

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German Careers Site: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/de

Do you see any English hanging around?

I found the following few places where it's still displayed partly in German and English.

'My Profile' (Mein Profil) page:

'why stack?' page:

Answer 13

German Careers Site: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/de

Do you see any English hanging around?

Yes, the field-help box that appears on the right when you go to fill out the 'Persönliches Statement' information on the 'Mein Profil' page still displays the text partly in German and English.

Here is the screenshot of the same:

Another place is the 'Open Source' (Click on the Mein Profil's Sonstige... link under the OPEN SOURCE section) page where it's still displayed partly in German and English.

Here is the screenshot of the same:

Answer 14

For the UK site (and I'd imagine any other country-specific localized version), I'd love to see the "Only Telecommute Jobs?" option be restricted to the country in question (i.e. on the UK site, checking the "Only Telecommute Jobs" would show only telecommute jobs that are from UK employers).

This should, however, come with the option of widening the restriction to other countries, or the entire world.