Privacy is not security, and Vietnamese knows the difference
We had translated the one word our document tools are sold on, and translated it wrong. It took a review to notice.
Two words, one English word
English uses privacy for both ideas and lets context sort it out. Vietnamese does not. Security is bao mat: keeping an attacker out, encryption, access control, a locked door. Privacy is rieng tu: nobody else holds the thing in the first place.
Which one we were selling
Our PDF signing tool never uploads your file. There is no server copy to protect, because there is no server copy. That is rieng tu. The Vietnamese copy said bao mat, in seven places, including the headline feature card.
It is not a small slip. Bao mat invites the reader to ask who is guarding the file and how well. Rieng tu closes the question: there is nothing to guard.
How it got there
Translating field by field. Each string was handled on its own, and privacy maps to bao mat often enough that it never looked wrong in isolation. Two cards translating the identical English phrase had even settled on different word orders, which is the tell that nobody was reading them side by side.
What we do now
The claim gets written in the concrete form first, in every language: the file does not leave your machine. Then the label, if a label is still needed. A sentence you can check is harder to mistranslate than an abstract noun, because the wrong word stops making sense.
ToolGo Team
Product & Engineering
We build practical SaaS tools and write about what we learn — from product decisions to technical deep-dives.
