Problems with language translation.

Hi!

A colleague is experiencing problems with JotForm's Portuguese interface. The problem seems to lie in how you apply the preferred language to the UI - precisely, the moment you apply it.

Instead of bringing the text in the preferred language upfront, your backend loads it in English and the browser parses it using front end trickery. This brings about a few issues.

First, having notions of linguistics, I know word-to-word translations do not work - I know you guys are probably using Google's Translation engine or something and it's quite smart, but it is bound to fail miserably at some point when it doesn't have enough context to tell what that word means at that point. Second, it's not very elegant - we're pretty much able to see what's going on, we have the UI in English for one split second and suddenly everything's seemingly okay. Except they aren't. Your parser seems to be selecting text elements that are part of the form.

My colleague tried countless times to write the word "a" (definitely a valid word in Portuguese - feminine definite article) and your parser persistently replaced it with "uma" (translation from the English indefinite article "a" to Portuguese indefinite article "uma"). She nudged me and I took minutes until I finally realized what was going on.

The replacement seems to happen only at the Form Edition dashboard, fortunately not visible to our end users. I ended up setting her language as English (which is terrible, since it's not very common for Brazilian people to have a decent grasp of this language).

So my suggestion would be not to just load things in English first and then translate it, but load it in the preferred language. Also, you'd be better off with a professional translator to validate the translations.

I know that's a lot of work and I'm really not expecting you to solve it anytime soon, but squeaky wheels get the grease, you know.

Thanks!

Dan.

We appreciate your feedback. Is this issue happening when you attempt to translate the form as shown on this guide? https://www.jotform.com/help/298-How-to-Make-Your-Forms-Multilingual 

Or, does this happen when you try to put the JotForm site in a different language?

We would appreciate if you could record the issue, and upload it to your drive to share the link to the video with us, so we can have a better understanding of the issue and escalate it our back-end team.