Remember the days when the web was young and people in the Netherlands called a ‘website’ a ‘webstek’?

The word didn’t catch on, but others did, like ‘koekje’ for ‘cookie’, although it’s not very general.

And homepage… That’s an odd one. Often one just writes ‘home’, and in that case almost nobody prefers a Dutch version. ‘Thuispagina’, however, is used, Although a search on Dutch language sites with domain name .nl reveals more than a billion occurrences of the word ‘homepage’, I doubt the validity of those search results. The Netherlands have only approximately 17 million inhabitants. Those figures suggest 75 web pages per inhabitant. Now, that’s not entirely impossible, but it is astonishing.

In general it looks as if Dutch coinages for web terminology didn’t really catch on, but that doesn’t mean you should altogether avoid them when translating, because it’s a way for a company to build its brand and character.

Some words did catch on, like ‘afdrukken’ for ‘to print’.

So it’s not only a matter of looking in a dictionary or putting everything in the hands of some AI. Remember when InterNet was spelled? Which became Internet, and finally plain internet? One has to notice such stuff, and it’s not purely a matter of statistics.

Talk it through with your translator, or make sure you can trust him he chooses what suites your company, personality or target audience.

#translation #motte #TranslationAgency #localization

vrijdag 25 april 2025