I wasn’t planning on doing this one now, but a post I did yesterday put me into this frame of mind.

Everybody has heard of and probably received a “phishing” email. These are emails that are masquerading as actual messages to customers of a business. The emails make up some reason that the victim should immediately send the perpetrator personal information, such as passwords, credit card data and the like. You can guess the result if the victim actually complies.

The problem is that the crooks are getting really good at their job. In the early days it was painfully obvious when an email was fake. Now, the fake emails look almost identical to a valid message. One way of determining if an email is a fake is to pay attention to things like typos, poor English structure, obvious grammatical errors and similar. The assumption is that the REAL company would not have made such an egregious error.

The customer TRUSTS the real company to not let such an obvious error slip through the cracks.

Now, apply that same logic to a website. A potential customer who is visiting a site for the first time and spots these kinds of careless errors immediately loses faith in that company’s professionalism and diligence.

In other words, nobody is going to give you their credit card for an $800 watch is you spell it “timepeace”.

Related to this is the question of correct sentence structure and grammar. This has become more of an issue since DEV has moved offshore and you have non-native speakers providing the content for a site. Being able to speak a language to a good level of understanding does NOT make you able to write content for that site’s home country. Ditto times 20 for using a software package to due the translation.

TIPS

• Have a native speaker of the target language, at a minimum, review all created content if not actually create it.
• See those little red squiggles all over your page? Click them. Spell check is your friend.
• Sometimes your friend isn’t your friend. Industry terms, trade names, “terms of art” and acronyms can be a problem. Take care when blindly accepting spell check’s suggestions.
• Language has a cadence. It is very obvious when a site was written off-shore. Some refer to this as “Engrish”. A visitor that is confronted with stilted language, requiring internal revisions to understand, will typically not stick around.