Fun with Metrics
Posted by Jim Cottrell on Tue, Sep 30, 2008 @ 09:49 PM
Are you translating documents from English into another language for use outside of the United States? Maybe it's an RV brochure which will be used in Canada. Or, maybe it's an employee newsletter being sent to The Netherlands. These are two examples where the units of measurement would need to be converted to the metric system.
There are only three countries in the whole world which do not exclusively use the metric system - Burma, Liberia and the United States.
One option is to include both the imperial units and the metric equivalents so there is no confusion, especially for US companies with plants in other countries. Actually, in the United States, we've been using dual measurements for many years - e.g. "2 liters (67.6 fl. oz.)". The other option is to completely replace the imperial units and only use the metric values.
Many of us though still aren't familiar converting US measurements into their metric equivalents. Here are a few websites which might help:
But instead of looking at this as a boring math problem, changing the values to metric make your statements much more interesting:
- I weigh 100,697 grams. (I'll let you figure that one out.)
- It's 23 degrees here in the office.
- Today, the average price of gasoline in the US is $1.02 per liter.
- On the way to work, I was going 118 on the interstate.
Injecting metric values into our everyday sentences, makes them a little more interesting! Using the standard metric conversions, you can convert these values to see what we normally would say here in the United States.
This is something to keep in mind when thinking about language translation and website translation for your documents. If you're not comfortable figuring the conversions yourself, our translators will calculate the metric values while working on the language translation.
When translating documents for other countries, it's important to localize the translations so they read as if they were originally written just for them. That is our goal with every translation.