Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) Issue Types

• Most cases of accuracy are addressed by one of the more specific subtypes listed below.
• In Machine Translation literature, this category is typically referred to as “Adequacy”.

• A source segment has no formatting tags, but the target has a set of italic tags.

• A translation includes portions of another translation that were inadvertently pasted into the document.

• An online form translated from English to Hindi requires a street number even though many addresses in India do not include a house number.

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• A form enforces a US model of street addresses that does not apply in many target languages and does not support notation of districts or other important features of addresses in some countries.

• Corresponds to address-format in locale-convention.
• This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A text reads “They was expecting a report.”

• A text reads “I cannot recommend this too highly.” (The meaning can be that the speaker cannot make a good recommendation or that it is highly recommended.)

• This issue is distinguished from ambiguous-translation by its focus on monolingual ambiguity. In cases where the translation process has introduced ambiguity, ambiguous-translation should be used instead, if it is included in a metric. However, any ambiguity in a source text would be classified under this issue.

• A text that means that someone is highly recommended is translated as “I cannot recommend this too highly.” (The meaning can be that the speaker cannot make a good recommendation or that it is highly recommended.)

• This issue is distinct from ambiguity in that it is limited to issues where the translation process has introduced the ambiguity.

• A text is written with many embedded clauses and an excessively wordy style. While the meaning can be understood, the text is very awkward and difficult to follow.

• Text in Arabic is displayed left-to-right rather than right-to-left.

• A book title should have been italicized, but the italics were omitted.

• A task-management system designed in the U.S. displays Sunday as the first day of the week, while many countries list it as the last day of the week.
• A website displays all dates according to the Gregorian calendar, but the target audience in much of the Middle East prefers to use the Islamic calendar.

• This issue does not apply to cases where dates are displayed in the wrong format, but according to the right calendar system.
• Corresponds to calendar-format in locale-convention.
This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A tourism text translated from Arabic English gives a year as 1435, but it should have been converted from the Islamic calendar to the Gregorian calendar year 2014.

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• During localization the location of numbers used for call-outs has been shifted and the call-outs are no longer usable.

• The name John Smith is written as “john smith”

• In Turkish the upper-case form of i is İ and the lower-case form of I is ı. As a result case-changing algorithms that are not internationalized and aware of Turkish will change the case of these characters incorrectly.

• This issue may also impact text-indexing and string-matching if case-insensitive indexing or matching is used.

• A text document in UTF-8 encoding is opened as ISO Latin-1, resulting in all “upper ASCII” characters being garbled.

• A database application cannot process or produce text stored in ISO Latin 6 (Nordic) encoding and so cannot interface with needed legacy systems in Norway.

• While individual sentences of the text are all perfectly fluent, the text as a whole does not make sense and is inconsistent with itself.

• Since coherence applies above the segment level, this issue type would generally be assessed with a holistic metric rather than an analytic one, although any claims that a text is not coherent should be able to point to specific portions and problems. Often these specific problems can be classified as coherence or inconsistency issues in an analytic metric.

• An English text is missing conjunctions and particles (e.g., “thus”, “therefore”, “but”, and “however”) needed for the logic of the text to be clear.

• Cohesion applies at the local level to incorrect or missing elements needed for the intended meaning of the text to be clear. Cohesion problems at the local level may contribute to coherence problems for the text as a whole.

• A UK-based website uses a red, white, and blue color scheme and hard-codes these colors into graphical assets and inline styles. When translated for China, these colors are inappropriate but cannot be changed because of the way they are encoded into the site.

• This issue type does not apply merely to the use of culture-specific colors, but rather to cases where the colors are not made accessible to the localization process and so cannot be changed.

• Headings should be blue but are green instead.

• Company style states that passive sentences may not be used but the text uses passive sentences.

• Company-specific terminology guidelines specify that a product be called the “Acme Turbo2000™”, but the text calls it the “Acme Turbo” or the “Turbo200”.

• Should be used when it is necessary to distinguish company-specific terminology issues from more general termbase issues.

The following issue types (presented without definition) are included in the Compatibility branch:

1. Application compatibility
2. Bill of materials/runlist
3. Book-building sequence
4. Covers
5. Deadline
6. Delivery
7. Does not adhere to specifications
8. Embedded text
9. File format
10. Functional
11. Output device
12. Printing
13. Release guide
14. Spines
15. Style, publishing standards
16. Terminology, contextually inappropriate

• A quality process checks the LISA QA Model issue “Book-building sequence” and it is included for compatibility with legacy processes

• Use of these categories is not recommended and these issue types are to be considered deprecated. They are included only for compatibility with legacy processes.
• Since compatibility is not a coherent category, use of this category itself is not recommended in any circumstance, although the children categories listed above may be used for compatibility purposes.

• A process description leaves out key steps needed to complete the process, resulting in an incomplete description of the process.

• completeness refers to instances in which needed content is missing in the source language. For cases where material present in the source language is not present in a translation, omission should be used instead.

• A user interface developed in Sweden has a minimalist aesthetic, but when localized into China, Chinese users expect to find information in the UI that is normally hidden under various options. As a result they may find it frustrating and difficult to use.

• Solving this problem may involve extensive adaptation of localized versions and may not be solvable by simple internationalization steps.

• A localizable string contains the following: "You have found the ".$item.". Do you wish to pick it up?". When translated this string will cause problems because the article before the item and the equivalent of “it” will both need to be changed to reflect the content of the variable $item.

• Users can select user names with any valid, non-control Unicode characters. As a result a user creates the user name Тоny (with the first two letters in Cyrillic) to impersonate an administrative user with the name Tony (all in Latin script).

• This issue has emerged with the advent of pervasive Unicode support that allows multiple scripts to be combined in input. Solving this problem requires careful parsing of input.

• A text reading “The harbour connected which to printer is busy or configared not properly” is flagged by a language analysis tool as suspect based on its lack of conformance to an existing corpus.

• One example of this issue type might involve output from a quality estimation system that delivers a warning that a text has a very low quality estimation score.

• A graphic depicts a “road trip” by showing sights familiar to a German audience that would be unknown in other locales.

• If graphics can be easily changed in the localization process, this issue does not apply.

• An English text refers to steps in a process as “First base”, “Second base”, and “Third base”, and to successful completion as a “Home run” and uses other metaphors from baseball. These prove difficult to translate and confuse the target audience in Germany.
• An marketing text in Greek includes reference to popular Greek music. When translated into English these references are not understandable to the target audience.

• In the cases of texts that were written with the intention that they be translated, this issue may indicate a broader conceptual or Internationalization problem.

• A text dealing with business transactions from English into Hindi assumes that all currencies will be expressed in simple units, while the convention in India is to give such prices in lakh rupees (100,000 rupees)

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• An online commerce form displays all amounts in euros, but customers use the form in countries that use other currencies.

• Corresponds to currency-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• An English text has “2012-06-07” instead of the expected “06/07/2012.”

• A system displayes all dates as "Dd/Mm/Yy", resulting in dates that cannot be understood correctly in much of the world.

• Corresponds to date-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A German source text provides the date 09.02.09 (=February 9, 2009) but the English target renders it as September 2, 2009.
• An English source text specifies a time of “4:40 PM” but this is rendered as 04:40 (=4:40 AM) in a German translation.

• A document is formatted incorrectly

• Design issues may exist either in documentions in isolation (e.g., a second-level heading is formatted as a first-level heading) or in relationship between source and target (e.g., headings are formatted differently between source and target).

• The Hungarian word bőven (using o with a double acute (˝)) is spelled as bõven, using a tilde (˜), which is not found in Hungarian.

• A link in an HTML document points to a U.S. government URL that has moved and no longer exists.

• An internal link refers to the location “#section5” but there is no anchor “section5” in the document.

• A text reads “The man the man whom she saw…”
• A paragraph appears verbatim twice in a row.

• Error messages for a product are stored as variables directly in the source code of a software product and are therefore not localized when UI strings are sent for translation.

• A service manual contains an image of a mechanical system with part labels stored in the “flattened” graphic. As a result the localization process cannot produce localized versions of the graphic

• Solving this problem generally requires access to original application files used to produce graphics initially rather than to rendered down-stream versions use for web display, display in software UIs, or embedding in word-processing applications.

• The UI of an industrial system includes graphical images of text that cannot be edited as text.

• The subtypes of this issue comprise the most common examples.

• A text describes a process to repair a device, but following the instructions leads to serious damage to the device and potential injury.
• A text assumes that the reader has knowledge of advanced particular physics, but the target audience does not generally have this knowledge.

• If the issue relates to the applicability of the content to users in a particular locale, locale-specific-content should be used instead.
• End-user suitability generally applies to issues present in the source text, regardless of the target locale, but may apply in cases where there are distinct differences in audience or purpose between source and target.

• The source text refers to Dublin, Ohio, but the target incorrectly refers to Dublin, Ireland.

• The Italian word simpatico has been translated as sympathetic in English.

• The sort routine in a spreadsheet does a simple sort by Unicode code-point sequence, and does not support needed collation sequences for various markets.

• Specific results of this problem will often be classified under sorting.

• A section for displaying errors in a UI is limited to 200 pixels in width and cannot expand to accommodate longer error messages in another language.

• Many UI frameworks automatically support dynamic width adjustment. Home-built UIs are particularly prone to this problem.

• A text has errors in it that prevent it from being understood.

• If an issue can be detected only by comparing the source and target, it MUST NOT be categorized as fluency or any of its children.

• Arabic text entered into a system does not display appropriate contextual variations (ligatures) and instead uses only medial character forms, rendering the result unreadable.

• Font-rendering problems are extremely common in software that has not previously been adapted to support “complex” scripts.

• A Japanese text includes カタカナ (full-width kana) when specifications required ｶﾀｶﾅ (half-width kana) instead, due to a limited display size.

• Warning texts are set in sans-serif, but one of them appears in a serif font.
• A portion of Japanese text is set with an obliqued face (corresponding to italics in the source text) when dot accents should have been used with a non-oblique face.

• Specifications state that endnotes should be used with roman numerals but footnotes were used with in-text symbols (*, †, ‡, etc.).

• A text reads “Check the part number as given in the screen” instead of “…on the screen”.
• A text reads “The graphic is then copied into an internal memory” instead of “The graphic is copied to internal memory.”

• The French version of a software package fails to function as expected because it was engineered with assumptions based on American English.

• If child issues are included, most issues in this category would be assigned to them.

• A English source text uses a normal-weight serif font for body text but the Japanese translation uses a heavy-weight “gothic” (roughly, sans-serif) font appropriate for headlines only.

• While this issue may apply to both source and target, it is most likely to apply to the target.

• The grammar checker in a word processor sold in Germany supports English only.

• An English text reads “The man was seeing the his wife.”

• A text used for a highly formal announcement uses the Norwegian du form instead of the expected De.

• For cases of general stylistic formality that do not involve the incorrect use of grammatical markers of formality, register should be used instead.

• A piece of software being localized for the Swedish market contain images of products available only in the U.S. market.

• This issue and its children apply only to cases where cultural aspects of graphics are not accessible to the localization process and so cannot be adapted.

• A graphic is garbled and the wrong version is shown

• A website uses inline base64-encoded representations of some graphics to speed up load times for the page, but these graphics are thus not accessible for localization.

• A vital keyboard in the English version command involves pressing the A key, but when the program is run using a Russian keyboard layout, it is unusable because the program is waiting U#0041 (A) for instead of U#0391 (А).

• Headers should appear on every page but have been omitted on odd-numbered pages.

• A word processor has been set to use German hyphenation for a Hungarian text. As a result the word mennyi is hyphenated as men-nyi instead of the correct meny-nyi.

• A desk-top publishing (DTP) tool has a hyphenation engine that does not support Hungarian.

• A screen shot shows a button with the text “Open other…” but the text referring to the screen shot tells the user to click on the “Open alternative…” button.

• A TM system returns “Press the Start button” as an exact (100%) match, when the proper translation should be “Press the Begin button”.

• This issue type applies only in cases where TM technology is used.

• A list of items included in a retail package omits a crucial component.

• A document describing a procedure to restart a diesel generator omits a crucial step that must be completed prior to performing additional steps.

• In cases where content is missing from the target text that is present in the source text, omission should be used instead

• The text states that bug reports should be submitted to a mailing list in one place and via an online bug tracker tool in another.

• A text uses both “app.” and “approx.” for approximately.

• An HTML file contains numerous links to other HTML files; some have been updated to reflect the appropriate language version while some point to the source language version.

• A target text has a set of tags for bold face in the same location where the source has tags for italics.

• One part of a text is written in a light and “terse” style while other sections are written in a more wordy style.

• Inconsistent style often emerges when multiple translators have worked on a single text. Because Inconsistent style applies to larger portions of texts, it would generally be assessed with a holistic metric rather than an analytic one.

• The text refers to a component as the “brake release lever”, “brake disengagement lever”, “manual brake release”, and “manual disengagement release”.

• This issue and its children are used only to address inconsistent use of terminology. In cases where terminology is incorrect for the domain or termbase termbase or domain-terminology should be used instead. If further detail is needed about whether the source or target text is responsible for the inconsistent use terminology, use one of the daughter issues.

• A financial text is translated using “deduct” instead of “debit”. Although conceptually these could be synonyms in general language, “deduct” violated domain conventions.

• This issue is used for cases where no term-base is specified yet common domain conventions about terminology use are violated. If a termbase was specified and that term in question violates it, termbase should be used instead, if it is included in the metric (otherwise terminology would be used).

• Translation specifications state that quotes in a text must match the 1957 edition of a book, but the translator used the 1943 edition, which was substantially different.

• For inconsistent terminology, options in the Terminology branch should be used instead.

• A termbase specifies that the term USB memory stick shold be used, but the text uses USB flash drive.

• For obvious reasons, this issue type applies only in cases where a term is specified in a termbase that was specified for use. If general domain conventions for terminology are violated instead, then domain-terminology should be used instead, if it is included in a metric.

• A Table of Content should be formatted with variable (hierarchical) indenting and tab leader characters, but is instead displayed as a “run-in” list.

• A Table of Contents is missing items that should be included.

• A form validates names against a regular expression, [A-Za-z']+, but fails when a Japanese user enters a name that does includes characters other than standard Roman characters

• A document assumes that all addresses use postal codes conforming to the U.S. “zip+four” convention and includes a verification step for postal codes that does not allow for non-U.S. codes.
• A computer program is localized but some content remains untranslated because it was embedded in the program code and not made accessible to the translator.

• While internationaliztion errors are generally detected in the target content, they refer to problems in the source that cause problems with translated/localized content. Even in cases where internationalization is not being specifically checked, if problems related to internationalization are encountered, they should generally be reported to the content creators.
• As of August 2014, the intention is to expand this branch in the future with more specific issue types.

• The letters T and A in the word TAMPA are spaced too close together and collide.

• A computer program provides support only for American English keyboards and so does not work properly in Icelandic since users cannot enter text with Icelandic-specific characters.

• A technical text uses a “deductive” reasoning style that cannot be easily adapted to areas expecting an “inductive” reasoning style.

• This issue type is common when going between European and Asian markets. In some cases texts that are perfectly clear in one market may be difficult to follow in another due to culture-specific differences in logic.

• A word processor is released for Kazakhstan but does not contain tools needed to fully support the Kazakh language.

• A translated Japanese text has set lines too close together, making the text difficult to read.

• Specifications stated that FCC regulatory notices be replaced by CE notices rather than translated, but they were translated instead, rendering the text legally problematic for use in Europe.

• Generally used in cases where the translation does not meet requirements. Cases in which the source text does not meet legal requirements are generally critical errors that will require rewriting the source text.

• An English sentence is 253 characters long but its German translation is 51 characters long.

• An HTML document has an href that points to a file that does not exist.

A portion of the text displays a (non-systematic) formatting problem (e.g., a single heading is formatted incorrectly, even though other headings appear properly).

• An incorrect format for currency is used for a German text, with a period (.) instead of a comma (,) as a thousands separator.
• A text translated into Japanese uses Western quote marks to indicate titles rather than the appropriate Japanese quote marks (「 and 」). (Note: this example would be categorized as quote-mark-type if the metric includes it.)

• This issue type is distinguished from locale-specific-content in that this category refers only to whether the text is given the proper mechanical form for the locale, not whether the content applies to the locale or not. If text conforms to conventions for the locale, but does not apply to the target locale, locale-specific-content should be used instead.

• An advertising text translated for Sweden refers to special offers available only in Germany and therefore is misleading.
• A manual for a printer sold in Spain describes features that apply only to versions of the printer sold in Japan and thus may confuse purchasers.

• This issue type is distinguished from locale-convention in that this category applies to cases where text corresponds to the conventions of the target locale, but does not apply to the intended audience in the target locale. For example, if the Swedish advertising text mentioned above is properly translated and follows all mechanical locale conventions (e.g., using Swedish kronor instead of euros) but the offer does not apply to Sweden, cocale-specific-content should be chosen. If, however, the text applies to the locale, but does not follow locale conventions (e.g., numbers are formatted incorrectly for the locale), locale-convention should be used instead.

• A text translated from English to Japanese maintains European-style punctuation—such as full-stops (.)—instead of using the appropriate Japanese punctuation, such as the Japanese full stop (。).

• An online submission form to register for appointments with a product demonstrator does not allow data to be submitted for many countries because it validates data against a US-centric model.

• See the subtypes for specific examples. Note that this issue type and its children apply to internationaliztion problems in the source, not to specific instances in a target language, although they may be discovered as problems classified under locale-convention in specific target languages. Although most of the examples of child nodes use specific instances where problems appear, they all refer to engineering problems of the source content.

• Specifications called for 4 cm inside margins, but 2.5 cm margins were used instead.

• Markup is used incorrectly, resulting in incorrect formatting.

• A text in France uses feet and inches and Fahrenheit temperatures.

• An engineering software system developed in France supports only the metric system and when localized for use in the United States does not support U.S. measurement formats, rending it unusable when users print bill of parts sheets to order components from U.S. suppliers.

• Corresponds to measurement-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A segment has three sets of paired formatting tags at the end, after the final full stop (.).

• A French-language website has not been fully localized. When the user clicks a link to one of these pages he or she should be taken to the English-language source page, but instead is taken to a blank page with no content.

• It is common practice to allow software or websites to fall back on another language if some content is missing. For example, a partially-localized German website might display some content in English for pages that have not yet been localized.

• An HTML file is missing an <img> tag, so no graphic is shown.

• A source segment has a set of italic tags, but the target text does not have any tags.

• A translation is complete, but during DTP a text box was inadvertently moved off the page and so the translated text does not appear in a rendered PDF version.

• This issue does not refer to omitted text (i.e., text that was present in the source but not present in the translation). Instead it refers only to cases where text is present in some form but does not appear in the laid-out version. It also does not refer to text that has been truncated due to text expansion.

• A chapter heading is not listed in a Table of Contents.

• A physics text describes the interaction of subatomic particles in a medical scanning device. The translation seems plausible, but incorrectly conveys the relationship of two particles and is therefore incorrect.
• A source text describes how a piano action (the mechanism connecting a piano key to the hammer that strikes a string) is translated in a way that incorrectly conveys the relationship between two components.

• This issue is not used for incorrect use of individual terms, which would be classified in terminology or one of its children. Rather, it is used for cases where a translation might appear to be correct but where it ends up misconveying information about a technical subject.
• Instances of this issue may point to confusing source materials or to lack of translator experience in a specialized domain.

• A source text states that a medicine should not be administered in doses greater than 200 mg, but the translation states that it should be administered in doses greater than 200 mg (i.e., negation has been omitted).

• A source text inconsistently uses “dog”, “buzzing bridge”, and “buzzer” for the component of a musical instrument.

• Do not use this issue for cases where a single source term is translated in multiple ways in the target language content.

• A German source text uses one term for a component of a vehicle, but the target text uses “brake release lever”, “brake disengagement lever”, “manual brake release”, and “manual disengagement release” for this term in English.

• Applies to target text only since it refers to cases where one term has multiple translations. As with term-inconsistency, termbase or one of its children should be used instead if a termbase contains a specified term for a concept and the text does not use that particular term.

• A text translated from Hungarian to English presents names with the family name first when the name order should be instead inverted to have family name last.
• A web form translated for Indonesia requires users to provide a “last name” even though many Indonesians have only a single name.
• A translated text refers to “Pedro Diego Estavez” as “Mr. Estavez” rather than “Mr. Diego”.

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• An online registration form asks for “last name” and “first name”, resulting in confusion for users where family names are listed first (e.g., China, Japan, and Hungary) or where users have multiple family names (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Brazil) or only one name (e.g., Indonesia).

• Corresponds to name-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A French advertising text uses anglicisms that are forbidden for print texts by the Academie française specifications.

• A UI has hard-coded positions in a form and when an address box is expanded to three lines to support addresses in certain locales it then overlaps other UI elements, making them unreadable.

• Many UI frameworks automatically support dynamic adjustment of the position of UI elements. Home-built UIs are particularly prone to this problem.

• A web-form is left-aligned with multiple items per line, but when translated to Arabic the items appear in the wrong order because the UI cannot automatically adjust their layout.

• Many UI frameworks automatically support UI adjustment for bi-directional layouts. Home-built UIs are particularly prone to this problem.

• A text may not include colons or forward- or back-slashes, which might cause confusion with path names on some computer systems, but it contains these characters.

• A German text has “123,456” instead of the locale-appropriate “123.456”.
• A text translated for India has “100,000” rather than “1,00,000”.

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• An online system displays all numbers with commas to delimit thousands and a full stop (.) to indicate the decimal position. This format is confusing in many locales that use other delimiters or delimit texts using hundreds separators instead of thousands separators.

• Corresponds to number-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• The source text specifies that a part is 124 mm long but the target text specifies that it is 135 mm long.

• A text contains words generally considered to be profanities outside of a context where they would be allowed
• Images in a document depict nudity for a culture where nudity is considered offensive
• An American text uses the “OK” symbol (👌) to indicate approval, but this symbol is considered offensive in Brazil.

• if offensive is to by used, clear guidelines should be given since content offensive in one context may be acceptable in another.
• In many cases offensive content may be detected in a (semi)automatic fashion through the use of lists of unacceptable phrases, often in conjunction with terminology checkers. However, automatic checkers will not be able to identify all potentially offensive content, especially as content considered unobjectionable in one context or culture may be considered highly offensive in another.

• A paragraph present in the source is missing in the translation

• A translated text should read “Number of lives remaining: $lifeNumber” but is rendered as “Number of lives remaining:”, with the variable $lifeNumber omitted

• A quality process checks for errors generated from speech-to-text generated during conference interpretation. Because this error type is highly specific to the specific situation, it is not included in any predefined issue type elsewhere.

• This category should be used only for any issue type that cannot be mapped to one of the issue types listed above. If an issue type can be considered a more granular example of an existing type, it should be categorized as that type, possibly with a custom extension if the additional granularity is needed.

• The source text refers to a “boy” but is translated with a word that applies only to young boys rather than the more general term

• In some cases differences in concept structure between languages may render an apparent over-translation necessary. In such cases this issue should not be considered an error, although the issue may be noted for further consideration.

• A document is formatted incorrectly (e.g., it should have been set up for a print layout but instead is set up for an online presentation.

• A Hungarian text contains the phrase Tele van a hocipőd?, which has been translated as “Are your snow boots full?” rather than with the idiomatic meaning of “Feeling overwhelmed?”.

• There is a page break between a figure and its caption.

• A table of contents refers to page numbers from the source document that do not apply to the translated text.

• A printer driver supports only international A paper sizes, and therefore crops data when printing to US Letter paper.

• The first line of body paragraphs should be indented 4 mm, but some paragraphs were indented 25 mm instead.

• A text reads “Read these instructions careful” instead of “Read these instructions carefully.”

• The regular expression ["'”’][,\.;] (i.e., a quote mark followed by a comma, full stop, or semicolon) is defined as not allowed for a project but a text contains the string ”, (closing quote followed by a comma).

• A text refers to Figure 1, but Figure 1 appears six pages after the point where it was referred to.

• A translated online form validates all postal codes as consisting of exactly five numbers but the target locale uses a combination of six letters and numbers.

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• An English text uses a semicolon where a comma should be used.

• In most cases it is not necessary to distinguish this issue type from typography.

• A text has opening tags but no closing tags for formatting.

• A French text should use guillemets («») but instead systematically uses German-style quotes („”)

• Use this issue only if the problem is systematic. Otherwise use Typography or Punctuation, if available.

• A formal letter uses contractions, colloquialisms, and expressions characteristic of spoken rather than written language, and those comes across as less serious than intended.

• Register involves a number of factors, including appropriateness of the discourse for the specific subject field, the level of formality, and the mode of discourse (e.g., written text versus transcribed speech).
• The notion of register used in this document is derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics.
• For uses of the improper grammatical register that do not otherwise impact style, such as German du vs. Sie, use grammatical-register instead.

• A legal notice in German uses the informal du instead of the formal Sie.

• Standard practice in writing international code is to put all translatable resource into external resources (such as files containing UI strings). Failure to do so is a major cause of problems or failure in software localization tasks.

• A graphic presents an (implicit) left-to-right ordering of events, but users in the Middle East may follow the steps in reverse order because they expect right-to-left ordering.

• CTRL-S is used for saving files and cannot be changed, but some locales customarily use other keyboard shortcuts to save files.

• Corresponds to shortcut-key in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A software product uses CTRL-S to save a file in Hungarian, rather than the appropriate CTRL-M (for mentenni).

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• A Japanese translation refers to “Apple Computers” as アップルコンピュータ when the English expression should have been left untranslated.

• A listing of items should be in alphabetical order but appears in a random order instead.

• The spell-checking engine used in a presentation tool localized for Korean does not include rules for the Korean language and cannot be used to spell-check Korean text.

• The German word Zustellung is spelled Zustetlugn.

• A German matching algorithm should recognize that the names Roemer and Römer are the same name (oe and ö are alternative spelling for the same sound) but does not, thus returning only some of the appropriate matches to a query.

• This issue may also extend to Unicode characters using different normalization forms if a matching algorthim does not consider canonical equivalence. This issue is closely related to text-indexing

• The translation of a light-hearted and humorous advertising campaign is in a serious and “heavy” style even though specifications said it should match the style of the source text.

• A German text presents a telephone number in the format (xxx) xxx - xxxx instead of the expected 0xx followed by a group of digits separated into groups by spaces.

• Very often this issue indicates an underlying internationalization problem.

• A contact database does not store country codes and fixes all telephone numbers at 10 digits, rejecting any shorter telephone numbers. As a result, it cannot be used outside of a handful of countries that have phone numbers matching these requirements.

• Corresponds to telephone-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

An English text reads “After the button is pushing” (present progressive) instead of “After the button has been pushed” (past passive)

• A French text translates English e-mail as e-mail but terminology guidelines mandated that courriel be used.
• The English musicological term dog is translated (literally) into German as Hund instead of as Schnarre, as specified in a terminology database.

• All issues specifically related to use of domain- or organization-specific terminology are included in this issue and its children.
  
  Do not use this issue if a text is simply mistranslated, i.e., if the translation would be a valid translation of the source but simply does not use the particular mandated terminology. For example, if a text translates [river] bank into Spanish as banco (a financial institution) instead of orilla (a river bank), this would be a mistranslation because banco would never be a valid term for the concept of a river bank. However, if a termbase specified that orilla should be used and the translation uses ribera instead, this would be a Terminology error because ribera is a valid term for the concept, but not the specified one.

• A heading should be left-aligned but was centered instead.

• When users enter text with accented vowels using UTF-8 encoding, these are systematically converted to other characters due to an internal text-processing routine that assumes ISO Latin-1 encoding.

• Problems with text corruption often emerge when different systems interact with each other without considering the encoding emitted or expected by other systems.

• Translation specifications state that all localized versions of a service manual must preserve the same pagination as the English source, but no extra room has been left for languages that text more physical space than the source text, such as German (which may be 30% longer than the English source).

• This issue corresponds to truncation-text-expansion in the Design dimension. This issue is used to identify instances in the source where insufficient room has been left in a document or other item containing text while truncation-text-expansion is used for specific cases where text has extended beyond the allowed bounds.

• The German name Römer should be indexed for retrieval as “Römer”, “Roemer”, and “Romer”, but the indexing engine uses only the first. As a result, users looking for this name in a database will not find it if they use one of the alternative forms.

• This issue is closely related to string-matching

• Specifications stated that English text was to be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, but the text delivered followed the American Psychological Association style guide.

• Specifications for translation of a software application specify that UI terms be translated according to the public termbases provided by the developers of the platforms upon which it will be deployed, but certain terms are not translated consistently with these specifications.

• Should be used only when it is necessary to distinguish terminology issues related to third-party termbases from more general termbase issues.

• A text written for the U.S. uses a 24-hour time notation rather than AM/PM time.

• A time picker requires users to use AM/PM time even in cases where 24-hour time is the norm.

• Corresponds to time-format in locale-convention. This is used to mark engineering problems in the source content, not specific problems in the target.

• A shared calendar system does not consider timezones and sends out all notifications based on the time on the server’s clock. As a result it does not send out reminders for meetings at the appropriate time.

• The German translation of an English string in a user interface runs off the edge of a dialogue box and cannot be read.

• This issue may indicate an underlying internationalization problem.

• A text uses punctuation incorrectly.
• A text has an extraneous hard return in the middle of a paragraph.

• Do not use for issues related to spelling.

• A text reads “After completing this, move to the next step,” but there are a number of possible referents for this in the text.

• The source text uses words that refer to a specific type of miltary officer but the target text refers to military officers in general

• In some cases differences in concept structure between languages may render an apparent under-translation necessary. In such cases this issue should not be considered an error, although the issue may be noted for further consideration.

• The following text appears in an English translation of a German letter: “We thanked him with heart” where “with heart” is an understandable, but non-idiomatic rendering, better stated as “heartily”.

• The following text appears in an English translation of a German automotive manual: “The brake from whe this કુતારો િસ S149235 part numbr,,.”
• Text appears in a translation that cannot be understood at all.

• A source text specifies that an item is 25 centimeters (~10 inches) long, but the source states that it is 25 inches (63.5 cm) long.

• A text reads “King Ludwig of Bavaria (1845–1896 was deposed on account of his supposed madness,” omitting the closing parenthesis around the dates.

• Part labels in a graphic were left untranslated even though running text was translated

• A sentence in a Japanese document translated into English is left in Japanese.

• A user interface was manually aligned and spaced around English-language UI strings and so, when localized, shows strange spacing in the UI.

• A refers to dollars as “clams” in a case when this slang term would be inappropriate.

• The text states that a feature is present on a certain model of automobile when in fact it is not available.

• Verity issues can apply to the source or target text and often emerge during translation when, for example, a factual statement is true in the source locale but not true in the target locale.

• A document uses a string of space characters instead of tabs
• Extra spaces are added at the start of a string