The smallest things can either be unnoticeable or cry for attention. Just like prepositions in a sentence. Take the harmless-looking, tiny little word in, for example. It is so useful and versatile: it can inform you about time, place, direction, condition, logical relationships, and so on. Not to mention idioms. When it comes to the localisation of your content for your Hungarian audience, however, you will see that its simple, straightforward character can turn into something completely different. Let’s say you have the content of your website in a nice Excel sheet. It includes all the text, and you send it as a list (maybe sorted in alphabetical order) to your translator. They start working on it, and probably come back to you with questions.
Depending on how your original text (the source) was divided into small pieces, the list might include lines with only the ominous in in them. What’s more, it can even happen more than once. And they all require attention. Your translator partner should know what these lines refer to – without context, they could not provide a proper translation of them into Hungarian.
Take a look at these examples:
spring / in the spring – tavasz / tavasszal,
garden / in the garden – kert / a kertben,
silence / in silence – csend / csendben,
ten minutes / in ten minutes – tíz perc / tíz perc múlva
As Hungarian uses a different linguistic structure to express the same meaning (and it uses postpositions instead of prepositions), translation of small fragments (like prepositions listed separately) usually is not a good idea. Translation is not only converting the content of one cell from English to Hungarian – the whole sentence (and possibly complete paragraphs) should be handled together, as one coherent unit.
And after the translation process is completed, it is important to run an in-situ check, too, to see how your localised content looks on the Hungarian version of the site. This way you can make sure that you are not in for a surprise.
Angéla Görbe 