Help us translate “charm” and “speed bump” in Windows 8 – for 23 languages!

A few weeks ago we asked speakers of Chinese Simplified, Japanese, German and French help us translate the planned, new terminology in Windows 8. We got some brilliantly creative suggestions and insightful comments that will help us get the language experience just right in Windows 8.

We are now looking for feedback or alternative suggestions for another 23 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Serbian (Latin), Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.

Some of the trickier terms include charms,apps, speed bump, thumb keyboard and many more.  

To give you an idea of how some of these terms appear, here’s a preview of what the English Windows 8 Start screen currently looks like in the Windows 8 Developer Preview:

Windows 8 International Terminology

It just takes a few simple steps to get started. Click your language above, sign in with your Windows Live account and follow the simple one-off forum registration (no code needed). Click the Glossary link and from there you will see the list of English source terms and our preliminary suggestions to help you along. Then it’s just a case of, for each term, deciding if you like the suggestions provided by selecting Suggest a Translation or Vote.

The forums will remain open for feedback until November 21.

We hope taking part will be a bit of fun and help make the international versions of Windows 8 easy to understand and enjoyable to use for everybody.

Thanks in advance for participating!