Sixteen languages, one question, two people

Duoheart is in sixteen languages and follows each device, which means two partners can answer the same question in two different languages and read both answers side by side.

Getting a question to mean the same thing in sixteen languages turned out to be a considerably larger problem than translating the interface.

Why the interface is the easy part

Buttons are buttons. "Save", "Answer", "Settings" have stable equivalents everywhere and the failure mode is a word being too long for a button.

A question is different, because a question has a tone, and tone is carried by grammar that varies enormously.

Formality is the first problem

English has one "you". A great many languages have two, and choosing between them is not a style decision.

A question addressed to your partner in the formal register is absurd. In the informal register it is correct in most languages and, in certain contexts and age groups, presumptuous in a couple of them.

There is no neutral option. Every question in those languages has taken a position on intimacy before it has asked anything.

In English you can write a question that has not decided how close it is to you. In most other languages you cannot.

Gender is the second

In languages that mark gender on adjectives and past-tense verbs, a question cannot always stay neutral about who is being described.

"What is your partner most proud of?" is neutral in English. In several languages, the natural phrasing forces a grammatical gender for the partner, which is wrong for a large number of couples and cannot be fixed by choosing a different word.

The solutions are ugly and specific. Rephrase around the problem, use a construction that avoids the agreement, or accept a slightly stilted sentence. We have done all three and we are not entirely happy with any of them.

The perspective rule holds everywhere

Every question addresses the reader about their partner, never in the first person as though one partner were asking the other. That rule has to survive translation, and it is the fixed point everything else is written around.

It is easy to break accidentally. Several languages have idiomatic phrasings for this kind of question that are naturally first-person, and a translator working sentence by sentence will produce them without noticing, because the sentence is correct and only the system is broken.

Directness is the third problem

A question that reads as warm and open in one language reads as an interrogation in another.

"What are you afraid of?" is a reasonable English question. Rendered directly into some languages it is much blunter than intended, and the fix is not a better word but a different question that does the same work through a less confronting route.

This means several questions do not exist in all sixteen languages in the same form. They exist as a family of questions that ask the same thing in the way each language asks things.

Two languages in one couple

The feature that this enables is the one we are most pleased with.

A couple who do not share a first language can each answer in their own. Each writes at full resolution, in the language where they have the small words and the exact softeners, rather than one of them permanently operating at a disadvantage.

For those couples the app is not a translation tool and does not try to be. It is a place where both people get to be as precise as they would be with their oldest friend.

Where it still falls short

Some languages are better than others. English and Estonian have had the most attention because that is where the product started.

Right-to-left languages are not supported yet.

And there are questions that simply do not travel, which we have dropped rather than shipped badly. It is a smaller set than you would expect and it is not zero.