Dropbox Tech Blog

The folks over at Dropbox recently started a new blog, which is focused on the technology that the Dropbox application uses. Their first blog post describes how the Dropbox team translated Dropbox into multiple languages.

It starts by acknowledging the success that Facebook had using community translation to translate their site to French in 2008. Dropbox, however, chose not to use this technique because of the significant effort required to build a framework that not only accepts community translations, but quality-checks them and converts them to the multitude of i18n file formats that Dropbox uses.

Instead, they decided to go with a hybrid approach--professional translators would do the bulk of the translation, while users would have the ability to make corrections. The idea being that since users are the ones using the application, they have a much better idea of the context in which a particular word or phrase is being used. Professional translators on the other hand, have likely never even heard of Dropbox, so may produce translations which don't quite capture the true meaning of a word or phrase.