Global Perspective

Capitalization & Styling

Some languages don’t support capitalization, Title Case, or ALL CAPS. From a grammar perspective, they may only support Sentence Case capitalization. SAP Translation deals with this as appropriate when translating our content, so no action should be needed when using Sentence Case for (English) copy.

ALL CAPS text should be avoided. This causes special characters such as umlauts and accented characters to become corrupted in the translation process. Exceptions include well-known abbreviations and the word "OK."

Composite Strings & Variables

As a general rule for translation purposes, words or phrases should NOT be concatenated together (linked in a series) to form other phrases or sentences. This often results in grammatical issues in other languages. Keep in mind that both gender and plurals may impact not only the word being inserted but also the surrounding verbs and articles.

An example would be static text + dynamic text:

Message for <FirstName> <Last Name> In English we would show: Message for Joe Smith

Other languages might show: Smith Joe for message

Variables can also be problematic and can cause confusion for translation.

An example would be: The <CauseOfError> is unavailable.

This sentence works in English, but the French translation will cause problems. The word "server" is masculine and the word "connection" is feminine. The translator will not know how to correctly translate the string. In cases like this, the entire error string should be translated individually, without breaking it apart into variables: "The server is unavailable," and "The connection is unavailable."

Text Expansion

Allow for sufficient text expansion in messages. Text can also become shorter. The UI should always allow for variations in length. Here are some examples:

Apply the following expansion rules to estimate the length required for other languages. When the source text is:

But keep the string length well below your limit (usually 254 characters) to account for the extra characters needed.

Place UI labels above components or controls, not beside them. The expansion of a label can increase the width of the form more than expected, which can cause unintentional wrapping or horizontal scroll bars, or truncation. This also simplifies localizing applications required into bidirectional languages (languages that are read from different directions [Right-To-Left or Left-To-Right], such as Arabic and Hebrew).

Using the Term "Country"

There are geopolitical implications with the term “country” and territory names. One of the top issues is that China has a “One China” principle, meaning Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are not separate “countries.” The Chinese government considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province and considers Hong Kong and Macau to be special administrative regions. Improper treatment leads to customer escalations.

The correct way to resolve this is to use a combination of “country and/or region,” instead of only “country.” Solutions in UI copy are to use terms such as “country or region” or “country/region.”

Additional country and region-specific guidance can be found in the SAP WIKI, Product Standard Globalization (SAP Internal Resource).