The difference in date formats across various countries of the world can sometimes cause great blunders. As an example, let’s take date formats used in two different countries. Suppose country ‘A’ uses dd-mm-yy and country ‘B’ uses mm-dd-yy then if you have to refer to the 4th day of May in the year 2009, you might write it as 04-05-09 but if the translation is read by someone in country ‘B’ then that person would mistakenly understand it as referring to the 5th day of April in 2009.
People residing in various countries have a tendency to stick to the format that they have always used, many of them are not aware that there is already an International Standard for date format in existence. It has been defined by the ISO under the classification ISO 8601.
The ISO 8601 prescribes an order in which the larger value (i.e. year) is followed by the smaller value (i.e. month, day, hour, seconds). The standard for date is ISO 8601:2004(E). It suggests numeric representations for date and time. This is in order to eliminate the possibility of confusion or misunderstanding. Accordingly the standard notation of the date mentioned in the beginning of this post would be 2009-05-04. If you have to mention hour, minutes, seconds as well, then you would have to write them down in a descending order, as in hour followed by minutes, followed by seconds.
As professional translation services providers we should all do our bit to promote this standard date format which would greatly reduce errors of various degrees in language translations.
Similar Posts:
- Web site translation – Avoid these pitfalls
- Excellent Subtitle Translation Applications
- Libyan President Gaddafi exhausts translator with long-drawn speech
- 2010 Translations - New Year Resolution
- Improving quality of language translation while keeping the costs low
One Comment
Sorry, but I don’t agree: as translators we should use the ISO format only when either a) so requested by the customer, or b) when the source text also uses it.
In all other instances it is much clearer to use the common date format for the target locale.
Also, in order to avoid misunderstanding, whenever possible, all numeric dates (e.g., 5/10/200)) should be translated as alphanumeric dates (10 maggio 2009 rather than 10/5/2009): using the correct numeric format for the target locale, in some instances, might be perceived as ambiguous, if the reader knows that the source document comes from a country with a different date format.