Favour from my “foreign” language expert readers
Posted on July 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Reviews, Technology.
We’re playing around with some stuff on LouderVoice and we need as many translations as possible for the word “review” in the sense of “a review of a movie” or “a review of a restaurant”.
Ideally it should be a generic word that works in most situations. It would also be better if the words did not have accented characters (I’ll explain that in a later post) and they must be in latin alphabet. We would like to get as many languages as possible but at the very least:
- German (bericht?, meinung?)
- French (revue? critique?)
- Spanish (revision?)
- Italian (rassegna?)
- Portuguese
- Danish
- Dutch
- Swedish
- Norwegian
- Finnish (viesti)
- Estonian
- Russian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Polish
- Hungarian
- Greek
Feel free to suggest others. Just use the comments box on this post to provide the words so that there can be discussion on them.
22 Replies to "Favour from my “foreign” language expert readers"
Jochen Lillich on July 16, 2007
Hi Conor,
in Germany, we’d use the word “Kritik”, too.
“Bericht” and “Meinung” would be more generic terms, meaning “report” and “opinion”, respectively.
Other fitting words would be “Bewertung” (evaluation) or “Rezension”, a foreign word incorporated into German.
Looking forward to LouderVoice in German,
Jochen
conor on July 16, 2007
Thanks Cathy and Jochen, that’s exactly what I need.
Don’t worry, we’re not translating the site one word at a time, this is just to make one aspect of the site easier.
Keep those languages coming folks!
I just spotted a Hungarian shop in Bandon so add that to the list.
Jochen Lillich on July 16, 2007
You’re welcome, Conor. If you need any assistance with German, please tell me. I’ll be glad to help.
Bernie Goldbach on July 16, 2007
Also, Prufung auf Deutsch.
Jochen Lillich on July 16, 2007
@Bernie: your sentence no verb.
BTW: I can be reached via Jabber: jochen.lillich@gmail.com
est on July 16, 2007
Review in Estonian can be either “ülevaade” (more like an overview) or “arvustus” (a bit more critical).
conor on July 16, 2007
Thanks for the Estonian word! How bad would it be to leave out the accent on the u in a username?
Julian on July 19, 2007
It’s beginning to dawn on me, what you already know about the accented characters. If you don’t use the right encoding in your browser, our website in most places looks horrible. But finding the time to go through and neutralize all those lovingly inserted diacritics? Not today or tomorrow, squire. And then if you do do it, you get all the pedants telling you you’re wrong…
conor on July 19, 2007
Our site handles accented characters ok (apart from the odd bug which needs fixing), it was built to be multi-lingual from the start.
The area of difficulty is usernames. On most sites these still have to be a-z 0-9 only.
Sérgio Santos on July 28, 2007
In portuguese you can use ‘Análise’ ou ‘Crítica’. Please do not try direct translation to ‘Revista’ or ‘Revisão’, since they aren’t really related.
About the accents, ´ is a common accent in several latin languages so it’s best to support it. But the above words without them would still be quite understandable.
conor on July 28, 2007
Thanks Sérgio. We have full support for accented characters on our site. This is for related usernames on other sites.
ku mikäki on August 4, 2007
Finnish word viesti means message. Review would be arvostelu.
“a review of a movie” is elokuva-arvostelu.
“a review of a restaurant” is ravintola-arvostelu.
A minor review would be arvio (estimation).
conor on August 4, 2007
Thanks Ku, my mistake. I’d been discussing Jaiku with someone and viesti came up as a possible word for the equivalent of a Twitter “tweet”.
I’ll add your words to the list.
Keep them coming people!
Anna on August 10, 2007
Review in Dutch would be ‘recensie’, to write a review – recensie schrijven. This only applies if you are talking about restaurants, films and so on.
conor on August 10, 2007
Thanks Anna.
aonghus on August 10, 2007
Not a foreign language:
Gaeilge: léirmheas
(And no, you can’t really leave out the accent; but I don’t think leirmheas means antything, so that’s safe enough!)
conor on August 11, 2007
Nice one!
Keola Donaghy on August 13, 2007
If you want the Hawaiian, it would be loiloi (to criticize or critique)
conor on August 13, 2007
awesome Keola thanks! Looking forward to meeting you when you hit Cork.
Amitabh Kumar on December 11, 2007
Hindi
I though I should add here one more language – Hindi.
“Nirikshan” or “Sarvekshan” – in Hindi – we use this word for Review in terms of review of a restaurant.
Visit us on http://www.langjobs.com
Regards,
Amitabh
conor on December 12, 2007
Good one Amitabh, thanks!




cathy on July 15, 2007
In French, I would favour “critique”.