Spanish Translation Guidelines
COVES translation policy
- COVES will maintain translations for core questions, updating the Spanish version as soon as possible following any adjustments or changes. View the Spanish translations for the COVES core survey here!
- COVES will update translations for site-specific questions on at least a quarterly basis or once our translator’s minimum word count is reached, whichever comes first.
- COVES Members with internal capacity may provide translations for their site-specific questions, to be consistent with any local norms or to have the translations added at the time of the English updates.
For any museum experiences mentioned on the survey, we aim to make the names as clear as possible for Spanish-speakers visiting your museum. In practice this means matching what they would see in person or is easily available on your website, so exhibition titles or proper names for experiences are usually listed in English. We have guidelines for how these experiences are (or are not) translated, which are primarily applied to the two questions: “Because you indicated you came to see something specific, please select which one:” and “Which of the following did you and/or your group do at [Museum Name] today?”
Guidelines for translating museum experiences
Exhibitions or experiences that have English-only titles or proper names will not be translated unless they are already translated in the exhibition or on your website. If an exhibition or experience with a proper name is already translated in your museum or on your website, please send us your translations. This helps us make sure the language matches what the visitor will see, as there may be variations in which words a translator chooses.
Example: At the Museum of Science, Arctic Adventure only has an English title so is not translated on our survey, while the title for Changing Landscapes: An Immersive Journey has both an English and Spanish title in the exhibit hall, so is displayed as Paisajes cambiantes on the Spanish version of our survey.
Descriptive experiences are translated.
Example: “guided tour” is listed as “visita guiada”
Phrases surrounding proper names or clarify the experience are translated. The default is to use past tense and first-person singular/plural (I/we) for translations to match the grammar in the question.
Example: “Visited Arctic Adventure” is “Visité/Visitamos Arctic Adventure”
Example: “MARKET Seattle (SAM restaurant)” is “MARKET Seattle (el restaurante del SAM)”.
Exceptions to these guidelines will be reviewed as needed.
Example: A museum has a robust translation practice and Spanish-translations onsite or digitally, so all experiences are translated.
Example: A children’s museum may choose to always use only the “we visited” conjugation, because the visitors answering the survey will always visit with at least one child.
