A Notary Site With an Automatic Translation Widget

The site

A notary office in a small strip of storefronts on a suburban arterial road: two notaries, an assistant, and a website with pages for wills, powers of attorney, real estate, affidavits and travel consent letters for children.

In the top corner of every page sits a dropdown labelled Select Language. It lists about forty languages and turns the whole page into any of them in a second or two.

It went in years ago because the office serves clients from many language communities, and the widget was free.

Nobody has checked what it produces since. Nobody in the office reads most of those languages, so nobody could.

The inference a visitor makes

A visitor who reads Korean more easily than English picks Korean from the list and reads about powers of attorney in her own language.

She concludes, reasonably, that the office works in Korean. Businesses do not usually publish pages in languages they cannot use.

She books an appointment for her father and arrives to find that nobody speaks Korean. The appointment needs an interpreter nobody planned for, or another date.

A list of forty languages reads as forty promises. The office meant it as a courtesy; the visitor reads it as a statement about who will be sitting across the desk.

What the widget does to a page

Every problem below follows from how the widget works: after the page loads, it swaps the words for machine translations inside the visitor's browser.

• Legal terms come out as the nearest everyday word.
• Names of people and streets get translated as ordinary words.
• Forms invite messages in languages the office cannot read.
• Search engines never see the translations at all.
• Layouts break when words run longer or text reads right to left.
• Extra code loads on every page, for every visitor.

The first matters most for a notary, because the whole business consists of documents in which one word changes the meaning.

Legal words translated by guesswork

Machine translation tends to pick the most common meaning of a word. Legal English is full of words whose common meaning is the wrong one.

Will is the obvious case: it can come out as the verb for the future, or as willpower. Title can become the name of a book, and executing a will can borrow a far darker everyday sense.

Fixed legal phrases fare no better. Power of attorney, statutory declaration and representation agreement, translated word by word, describe something else or nothing at all.

A reader cannot tell the good sentences from the bad ones. Each wrong one looks as confident as the right ones, on a page about documents people will sign.

Names and addresses

The widget cannot tell names from words. A notary called Rose or Fox may appear under a translated surname, and the visitor asks at the desk for someone who does not exist.

Street names suffer too: Oak Street can become the word for an oak tree in another script, which no map will find.

The form that answers in English

The contact form is translated too, labels and button included. A visitor reading the page in Farsi reasonably writes her message in Farsi.

Nothing behind the page has changed. The message lands in an inbox read only in English, and the automatic reply goes back in English.

The visitor, meanwhile, waits for a reply in the language the site appeared to speak. When it arrives in English, the promise breaks in the first exchange.

A worked example

A notary office with two notaries and an assistant, in a suburb with large Punjabi, Mandarin and Korean speaking communities, had the widget on every page.

The trouble surfaced at the front desk: every so often someone arrived expecting service in a language nobody spoke, and pointed at the website.

The fix started with a list. One notary spoke Punjabi and Hindi, the assistant spoke Mandarin, and nobody spoke Korean.

The widget came off. A line went into the header and onto the contact page naming the languages spoken, each written in its own script, with the days each speaker was in.

The services, fees and what-to-bring pages were translated into Punjabi and Simplified Chinese by professional translators, read by the staff member who spoke each language, and published at their own addresses.

Korean-speaking clients now find a note on the contact page explaining how to arrange an interpreter.

What search engines see

The widget's translations exist only in the visitor's browser, and vanish when the page closes. To a search engine, the site is English and nothing else.

Someone searching in Chinese characters for a notary nearby will not find this office, however many languages the dropdown offers.

A page translated by a person and published at its own address is different. It can be found and shared, and a small tag in the page code tells search engines which language each version uses.

Serving several languages properly

Start with what is true. List the languages someone in the office speaks well enough to explain a document, and the days that person works.

Put that list where people look: the header, the contact page and the Google listing. Write each language name in its own script, since a reader scanning for their language looks for familiar letters.

Translate only the pages that carry the decision: services, fees, what to bring and how to book. A professional translator writes them, and a staff member who speaks the language reads them before they go live.

Keep a short glossary of how the office renders its key terms, so a will on one page is the same word on the next.

The counter-case within the site

Some pages can live with machine translation. Directions, parking and opening hours carry little risk, and a rough version helps more than it harms.

Many visitors already have their own option: Chrome offers to translate pages in other languages, without the site promising anything.

An office whose staff speak only English is better served by saying so politely, with a note about interpreters, than by a list of languages it cannot honour.

Say which languages the office really speaks, and translate properly the few pages that matter.

What to change

1. List the languages your staff actually speak.
2. Remove the translation widget from every page.
3. Name those languages in the header and contact page.
4. Translate the key pages with a professional translator.
5. Have a staff speaker check each translation.
6. Publish each version at its own address.
7. Explain how interpreters work for other languages.

Step one is the one everything else rests on, because the site can only promise what the people at the desk can deliver.

Giving each version a page of its own follows the same logic as a window installer site that is one endless page.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.