29 April 2023
Anna has been working with S7 on a setting up a neural machine translation tool for the website. This can now be accessed from the top right corner of any page and we’d very much welcome feedback from native speakers of the six languages we are featuring: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean. We’re using DeepL, which is the market leader in the field (and much better than Google Translate), but which still has a fair bit to learn about the technical terms by musicians and luthiers when describing violins and bows. On any page, you can toggle back and forward between the English version and translated text, so you can easily see Martin’s original words if you want to check a translation. Please email anna@martinswanviolins.com if you have any suggestions about how to improve translations of specific words or phrases. Any changes we make will not only improve this website but also help other users of DeepL.
You will also see that some elements of the website are never translated – the headline titles of the violins and bows will remain in English, along with some of the technical information about measurements and certificates. This is to avoid mis-translation of the names of makers and places in key text – for instance, we wouldn’t want people to think we were offering a ‘Mountain violin bow’ rather than a ‘Hill violin bow’!