The Property Organiser’s new site carries 714 listings. Each one has a name, a tagline, a summary, an area and a description, and each of those had to exist in French, Italian, Dutch and Russian. That came to 11,564 texts.
A listing is a hard thing to translate, because it is a promise about a physical object. A marketing sentence can drift a little and still do its job. A description of a house is checked by a buyer who flies in, climbs the stairs and looks up. A fluent translation that moves a house one floor up has told a foreign buyer something false in very good prose.
So the question throughout was the same. Which errors read perfectly?
The floor that had to change
Some numbers must stay identical across languages. Floor numbers are the exception.
Russian counts the ground floor as the first floor. A home on the “first floor” in English sits on the second in Russian. So in the Russian texts every floor number reads one higher than the English, on purpose, as a written convention.
This is where a simple check goes wrong. A comparison that asks whether the numbers match would flag every one of those lines as an error, and a tired editor might “fix” them. The convention has to be written down and applied everywhere, or a Russian reader gets some floors counted one way and some the other, with no way of knowing which.
The ceiling that was not painted
After the translations were live we did a second reading. All 11,564 texts were confirmed in place. About 1,050 flags were read and 22 paragraphs were read whole.
That pass found one thing worth changing. In one villa, a “decorated” ceiling had become a painted one in Dutch and Russian. A ceiling can be decorated in many ways: stucco, moulding, coffering. “Painted” is a specific claim about a specific house, and a buyer who has been promised a painted ceiling and finds plasterwork has a reason to doubt the rest. We corrected it and checked it on the live page.
One fix in 1,050 flags is a good result, and it is also the reason for reading. Nothing about that sentence looked wrong.
A translation can be fluent, grammatical and false. Reading for meaning is a different pass from reading for language.
Whose text is the truth
Translating 714 descriptions means finding things in the source: a misspelled place name, a detail that does not quite add up. The temptation is to quietly improve them. We set a rule against that before starting.
The firm’s English is the truth. What differs is what we do about different kinds of doubt:
| What we found | What we did |
|---|---|
| A slip in a place name | Corrected in the translation, and logged |
| A factual doubt about a property | Kept as written, and logged for the firm to rule on |
| A floor number in Russian | Changed by the written convention |
| Anything the firm answers later | The English and all four translations change together |
The reason is ownership. Only the firm knows the house. If a translation silently corrects a fact, the four languages and the English now disagree, and nobody can tell which is right. The log keeps the doubt visible while the listing stays faithful.
Fingerprints: what happens the day the English changes
The most dangerous moment for a translated listing comes after launch. The firm lowers a price note, or a garden is sold off, and the English is edited. The Russian still describes the old house. On most multilingual sites nothing notices, and the versions drift apart for years.
Each translation here stores a fingerprint of the exact English it was written from. The site shows a translation only if its fingerprint matches the current English. When the English changes, the fingerprint stops matching, and the page falls back to English for that field until the translation is redone. The firm’s own form flags the field as out of date.
That choice has a cost, because a Russian reader may see a paragraph in English. We think it is the right cost. A reader can see that a paragraph is in English and can ask about it. They have no way of seeing that a translated paragraph is out of date.
The same fingerprint protects the other direction: a translation written against an old version of the English is refused on arrival.
The checks that never get tired
Two kinds of error are close to invisible when you read, so they are checked mechanically on every line. One is mixed Latin and Cyrillic letters inside a single word, which look identical on the screen in many fonts. The other is invisible characters such as the soft hyphen, which can slip into a place name without showing at all.
For any listing in any language
- Decide what never changes, what changes by convention, and who owns the facts, before the first line is translated.
- Read for meaning in a separate pass from language.
- Tie every translation to the exact source text it came from.
- When they no longer match, show the source. A stale translation is the worst version of the page.
