[HN Gopher] What they don't tell you when you translate your app
___________________________________________________________________
What they don't tell you when you translate your app
Author : flowerbeater
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-09-09 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ericwbailey.design)
(TXT) w3m dump (ericwbailey.design)
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| > A device's location/IP address isn't indicative of the language
| preference of the person using it
|
| I really don't understand why this is so popular (google being a
| major offender). The browser already sends the preferred
| language(s) as a http header.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Seconded. I'd really love to finally hear from the person at
| Google that made this decision. There has to be some reason, of
| all companies I'd trust Google to be both big enough to have a
| good overview of what it should be (based on complaints, user
| research, the impact they know this decision has) and
| engagement testing (since they do a lot of things based on
| data).
|
| Not that I'd know where to complain to, but Google employees
| have friends so it would reach them in some modicum anyhow if
| others experience this problem as well. And _everyone_ who ever
| went to a country whose language they 're not very comfortable
| in will be having this problem.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's a major PITA as I live in a country where I don't speak
| the language well. It's even worse when there's no obvious way
| to just get it in English. It's triple worse if they decide to
| "localize" content for you based on your location even if you
| have everything set to a different country anyway.
|
| Google really sucks at this; I can set it to English or Dutch
| all I want, but I still get suggestions and results in
| Indonesian. Funny enough, the date format is always in the
| confusingly reverse "month/day/year" in spite of their ham-
| fisted forcing of everything else.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Apart from the translation itself being bad (plenty of comments
| here already), this is another thing that also bugs me with
| apps/software in Brazilian Portuguese:
|
| > Words may have radically different lengths in other languages
|
| Sometimes the UI gets completely screwed, and I know it'll just
| look better in English, if the design was originally done with
| English text
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| A related pet peeve of mine: if you want us to volunteer time and
| energy correcting or adding translations for you ("Help with the
| translation!"), then please make it as low friction as possible.
| Just linking to some third party website and expecting me to make
| an account, email-verify, figure out how it works, all to add a
| couple phrases of translation, is a good way to demotivate people
| trying to do free work for you.
| jobigoud wrote:
| What would you consider a low friction workflow?
|
| For a long time in my open source application I had an ODF
| spreadsheet with all the translations, people could download it
| and send back to me. But that caused edit conflicts and was a
| pain to maintain. I've since moved to Weblate, which is
| basically what you describe, a third party website where users
| have to register and figure how it works, and I've got a lot
| more translations in and it is way easier to manage for me.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| It's about proportional overhead. When I found uBlock (before
| it was Origin I think) was available in my language, I was
| willing to create an account because I knew I wanted to use
| it long term, and planned to work on as many phrases as I
| could, so it seemed worth the overhead.
|
| 99% of the time though, it's a word or two that I wish to
| correct in a site I might never visit again (just like I
| might correct a typo in a Wikipedia article that I'll never
| see again), and the overhead is many times more work than the
| actual translation. If I was able to (for eg.) hover on the
| vertical Feedback button that many sites now have, see a
| Translation Feedback option, and paste in the offending
| phrase with some context, and the correct translation, I'd be
| much more likely to do it. That can perhaps then
| automatically go into the third party website as from some
| common guest user, maybe even given lower priority since they
| likely require more processing - you can even warn me with
| "Register here to ensure your translation is seen" to manage
| expectations. But this way, the long tail of users that are
| put off by the friction can still together contribute - many
| eyes, shallow mistakes, etc.
|
| > my open source application
|
| My gripe is with the many large (for- and non-profit)
| organizations that do this though, to be clear. If it's
| something from a solo developer or a small team, it's
| understandable that the overhead of processing these might be
| more than they can bear (though that can be reduced by some
| categorization on the feedback form).
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| That's an obnoxiously large font, especially for a .design
| website
| kuroguro wrote:
| Sometimes I wish we could switch the whole world to a single
| language. Get rid of timezones and use metric everywhere while
| we're at it.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Getting rid of time zones is a nice idea for the first five
| seconds you think about it.
| david_allison wrote:
| Mainland China did mostly. Everything is +8[0] (besides
| Xinjiang Time[1])
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
| spidersouris wrote:
| Great way of erasing all cultural differences and putting an
| end to diversity. Might as well merge all countries together
| into one and establish a single religion and a single political
| system while you're at it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| About as tempting as switching all cuisine to Soylent to save
| us the mild indecision when having to choose a restaurant for
| date night.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Having just recently been picking a restaurant for an
| anniversary, I can tell the problem is real and I'm appalled
| at the sad state of technology for restaurant discovery.
| conductr wrote:
| Soylent for two?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| One aspect not entirely covered in the article is when you have a
| deeply technical piece of software and the dominant vocabularly
| of the technical field is in English.
|
| We get many requests from users of Ardour (a crossplatform
| digital audio workstation) to disable automatic translation based
| on their system language setting, because the terms used in the
| original/English version are the ones they are used to.
|
| It also leads to some hilarious discussions among translators (at
| least for those of us watching from the outside). The funniest
| one I recall was the Portugese and Brasilian Portugese
| translators discussing how to translate the word "Roll" in the
| context of a DAW's "transport control" (i.e. the "play" button)
| emilecantin wrote:
| One annoying issue with translated apps the author doesn't cover
| is "googlability", the fact that we often need to google an error
| message or menu label in order to solve a problem. This leads to
| a lot of bilingual people running their software in English just
| in case they need to paste an error message into a search engine.
| copperx wrote:
| Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with
| translated apps.
| bartvk wrote:
| I've always felt that a popup with an error code should have
| a "search the web for this code" button.
| conductr wrote:
| That's where "error code" essentially comes from, an actual
| code you could look up in a manual. Errors have evolved to
| be more of "error messages" which then have grammar, word
| choice, and a million other concerns.
| Jyaif wrote:
| > Translation and localization costs money
|
| If you have a fan base, you can leverage it to get some amount of
| translation done. A lot of users are happy to help the product
| they like get better. Granted, the quality will not be as good as
| the quality you get with professional translators.
|
| The article also did not talk about the actual the translation
| process, which in the case of a product that is released but
| keeps getting updates is not trivial.
|
| There are tools that exists, but I personally decided to build a
| workflow around git, with a python scripts that generates a
| status of all the translations:
| https://github.com/jyaif/ppl-i18n#status
|
| The downside is that contributors need to figure out how to use
| github to contribute. The upside is that it's free, you get
| auditability, versioning, and the barrier of entry may actually
| increase the quality of translations.
| huachimingo wrote:
| Like Shattered PD with Transifex.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Also make sure whoever translate is familiar with the profession
| nomenclature. To avoid phrases like "save to disk" be translated
| to "leftover on plate" which will be very confusing.
| eCa wrote:
| > People may prefer the English experience because they expect
| the translated version to be inferior
|
| No, it is not about expectations. In +95% of cases[1] the
| localized[2] version is objectively worse, to the point where it
| often only is possible for me to understand by first translating
| it back to English.
|
| If you give me a localized version first, and don't give me an
| obvious way to permanently choose English, I'm likely gone.
|
| [1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite
| often they fail too
|
| [2] My first language is one of the smaller European languages
| (<20M speakers), perhaps bigger languages have higher quality.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I think that's exactly what the author meant.
| tester756 wrote:
| >[1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite
| often they fail too
|
| MS docs
|
| I mean they're good when displayed in English, but defaulting
| to "native_language" is annoying.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| One nitpick about localization:
|
| If you speak several languages, try setting your device to use
| one _language_ and keep your locale to US.
|
| Now you can spot which developer understands the difference
| between a language and a locale and which one doesn't (hint: on
| large enough apps you'll land on pages using the wrong one, ie
| determines the language using locale). Or the opposite (watch the
| UI quote you prices in Euro despite your locale being USD).
| dataflow wrote:
| If someone sets the _language_ to (say) French but keeps their
| locale as English, do you write a thousand as 1,000 or 1.000?
| What about the reverse case?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Ouch. If you are writing user interface for something that
| doesn't need to be "correct" (legally, or whatever), I find
| it best to accept whatever decimal separator (what you want,
| or change by locale, or both, whatever), and never use or
| allow thousands separators. Bonus points if you document it
| somewhere on the interface.
|
| If you really, really, really need a thousands separator, use
| spaces.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Congratulation: You just opened the Pandora box of locale vs
| language!
|
| My understanding would be that locale should dictate
| numerical formatting. But one could argue the opposite and
| also be right.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you were discussing POSIX locale, the definitions are
| quite clear, and there's no ambiguity. But that's also
| because POSIX subdivides locale into many subsections.
|
| From "man setlocale": LC_ALL
| All of the locale LC_ADDRESS
| Formatting of addresses and
| geography-related items (*) LC_COLLATE
| String collation LC_CTYPE
| Character classification LC_IDENTIFICATION
| Metadata describing the locale (*)
| LC_MEASUREMENT Settings related to measurements
| (metric versus US customary) (*)
| LC_MESSAGES Localizable natural-language messages
| LC_MONETARY Formatting of monetary values
| LC_NAME Formatting of salutations for persons
| (*) LC_NUMERIC Formatting of
| nonmonetary numeric values LC_PAPER
| Settings related to the standard paper size (*)
| LC_TELEPHONE Formats to be used with telephone
| services (*) LC_TIME Formatting
| of date and time values
| Vinnl wrote:
| If we're opening Pandora's boxes...
|
| I've got GNOME set up in English, but my region to be the
| Netherlands. It will helpfully display local dates, but
| that also results in the month names being in Dutch.
| dataflow wrote:
| Yeah my understanding is people would classify this as
| locale too, but it's always seemed weird to me. I guess my
| question is whether this is about _formatting_ to begin
| with. Periods mean something different depending on the
| language, right? It seems less about displaying it
| differently and more about conveying correct information.
| But then again, mm /dd/yy and dd/mm/yy are often exposed as
| a formatting option...
| pjscott wrote:
| I checked the documentation for the ICU Unicode library and
| Apple's Foundation library, and they both say that
| numerical formatting is a property of the locale rather
| than the language. I'd be surprised if other major
| platforms did otherwise.
| conductr wrote:
| Not to disparage the conversation the technical bits are
| certainly interesting but, for almost every application,
| this is the point where things move towards diminishing
| returns. You could invest infinitely into getting every bit
| of design and copy for every language and locale
| permutation flawless and you're company would be worse off
| because you should have spent that time elsewhere. In many
| cases, it's simply not unrealistic to expect your customer
| to use google translate.
| r00fus wrote:
| Locale would be a country so e.g. UK? Then it'd be just like
| the US (1,000).
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| This is correct, but if we're being pedantic (it is HN
| after all) the locale code for the UK is "gb". The language
| / locale would be fr-gb.
|
| I work on this sort of thing for airline ticketing pages.
| fr-gb would mean the customer wants the page text to be in
| French, but they want to buy a ticket using the UK system
| (i.e. Using GBP instead of EUR as the currency if possible,
| and all the formatting differences that would be specific
| to "gb").
|
| Quick edit: technically I guess your locale doesn't have to
| determine your store region, that's just how we do it. As
| far as I know there's nothing except development effort
| preventing us from allowing someone to book a flight in
| French, using GB locale, and with preference for the
| Japanese point-of-sale system.
| david_allison wrote:
| locale defines decimal formatting
| timw4mail wrote:
| This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge
| distraction:
|
| Why is the font so big?
| timw4mail wrote:
| To clarify, 30px size text on a 22" 1080p monitor looks more
| like a headline that is really long than body copy.
|
| I realize that viewing websites on computers is much less the
| norm than it used to be, but such large text feels really
| strange.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| It looks fine in my locale.
|
| Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice
| at the top of the page.
| atatatat wrote:
| Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners
| now.
|
| Now what do I use if something's important?"
| jaywalk wrote:
| The banner on this site is too skinny, and the background
| color is too dull. It doesn't jump out as anything
| important, and I skipped right over it as well.
|
| A wider banner with more intense background color would go
| a long way.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Alert boxes. Can't go wrong!
| TrueGeek wrote:
| I typically close those too. The trick is to make them
| modal and persistent until you enter your email address.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Probably because the author is thinking about people with poor
| vision?
|
| IMO, it's poor design for a page to handle accessibility issues
| that are already built into the browser. (It's trivial to
| shrink and zoom in a browser.)
| kruuuder wrote:
| What I don't get is why some companies with obviously large
| marketing budgets have so poorly translated websites. Most recent
| example I stumbled upon: 1password's German website. It sounds so
| horribly bad. Everything sounds like a word by word translation
| of English texts. "Halten Sie Ihre Familie online sicher" -
| wiebitte? Nobody speaks like that. 1Password immediately feels
| like a scam when I read those sentences.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Interesting and related: why Mozilla created Fluent, a project to
| translate software with:
| https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/fluent-1-0-a-localization-...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not to mention messages are almost impossible to google.
|
| In fact, I used to play all my games in english for the same
| reason: items, places, starts... When you want to know more, the
| only good wikis and tutorials are in english.
|
| I used to write a blog in french, it became super popular. Yet,
| it's a shadow of what you can achieve woth an english audience.
| feikname wrote:
| I'd like to add being able to switch languages in a website is
| really heplful for learning another language.
|
| I commonly do it with Wikipedia
| hyperman1 wrote:
| All of this is so recognizable, but I'd add one more: Make sure
| the user has a way to switch the translation back to English.
|
| I have some sites showing in, say, Chinese, where even the
| current language is a Chinese glyph. Nothing on such a page is
| readable for a non-Chinese speaker. So you get to click around
| randomly until some menu opens where you see the word 'English'
| which brings you to a page you can read enough to get to your own
| language.
| asiachick wrote:
| I've run into this problem but I don't know there is a good
| solution. Let's say for whatever reason the app guesses the
| user wants Japanese. The app has no way to know what to present
| to allow to user to switch languages. Should they put a button
| that says "Language", how does that help a Chinese language
| person, a Korean person, a Thai person? Should they put
| "English"? Same point as above. As you complain, they'll likely
| put Yan Yu , the Japanese for "language" and only if you click
| it will you see other languages, and it may be buried under She
| Ding (settings). Sure it's not useful for you, but neither is
| "English" or "Language" useful for a large part of the world.
|
| I don't know there is a good solution. Checking my iPhone it's
| She Ding +>Yi Ban +>Yan Yu toDi Yu +>iPhonenoShi Yong Yan Yu
| so fairly buried in language not useful for someone who doesn't
| know Japanese. Checking apple.jp, the place to switch is at the
| bottom right and it just says Ri Ben , no indication that if
| you click it you'll get a list of countries and if you don't
| know Japanese you'd likely not know that means "Japan".
| david_allison wrote:
| Try symbols in the preferences. As an example:
|
| Settings - https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/cog
|
| Language - https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate
|
| Example: https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/62114487/94086518-...
| brigandish wrote:
| National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of
| the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars
| and Stripes or a _Hinomaru_?
| bloak wrote:
| National flags are not in general a very good way of
| labelling languages. There are far more languages in the
| world than countries. In any case, since people are looking
| for a language they understand it's good enough to write
| each language name in the corresponding language, like
| Wikipedia does (wikipedia.org).
|
| But that's not the question, anyway. The question is how to
| label the button that lets the user change the language
| when the user might not understand the current language at
| all. Perhaps a big bright "?" ...?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| National flags are actually a very good way of labeling
| languages for two reasons: first and most important,
| almost everybody already understands that a flag-looking
| icon (or two-flags-stacked-on-each-other icon) is used
| for switching languages. That's already a very strong
| practical reason to use them. Second, for like 70% of the
| most popular languages there are flag assignments that
| won't mortally offend the speakers of those languages --
| maybe they'd rather see a different flag but generally
| they'd grumpily agree that "guess it conveys the intent
| good enough, whatever, I've managed to chose the actual
| language I want to use".
| david_allison wrote:
| A few issues:
|
| You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open
| yourself up to political/territorial disputes.
|
| Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to
| maintenance and territorial disputes).
|
| Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China
| flag
|
| Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban
| flag for Pashto (Afghani)?
|
| Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our
| translation platform doesn't have a flag for Cantonese)
|
| Flag to language is a many to many mapping. My Android
| lists ~107 available languages under 'English'.
| brigandish wrote:
| Some sites, like Google, will _helpfully_ change the language
| depending on your current IP address. Trying to find how to
| switch to English from say, Korean, when Google surely knows
| that I 'm English and don't speak Korean (I'm reminded of
| this[1]) should be forced upon the chimps writing their UIs.
|
| What's wrong with using national flags? It's so easy for the
| user, don't designers care about us?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28336850
| kakkun wrote:
| I've had issues with Google's localization choices for a long
| time. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue with other
| language combinations.
|
| I'm a bilingual Japanese/English speaker. Searching Google's
| search languages to English and Japanese causes the
| following:
|
| - Random Japanese words show up in things such as Google
| Maps, even though my display language is set to English.
|
| - Japanese results will be prioritized over English ones. For
| example, If I search for "the beatles", it will show the
| Japanese Wikipedia page as the top result before the English
| version. For some sites (like Discogs) only the Japanese
| version of the site will show up.
|
| If just set English as my search language, searching in
| Japanese can bring up results that are entirely in Chinese,
| even though I've set my preferred languages as English and
| Japanese (in that order).
| sofixa wrote:
| Yep. I'm trilingual English/French/Bulgarian, and i have
| all three as languages in Google search, and they're mixed
| up too often. I can understand Google proposing the French
| spelling of an English word and results for it, but almost
| every time when i search something in Bulgarian i get
| results in Russian, even when i use words that don't exist
| in Russian. The languages aren't even that close, and they
| aren't the only Cyrillic ones...
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Well, those are quite close to each other from the
| orthographic point of view, I guess: Ukrainian or Serbian
| are visually very distinct from either Russian or
| Bulgarian, while to tell the latter two apart you need
| some actual knowledge about the differences of those
| languages: say, that the abundance of letter "'", words
| ending in "'t"/"ta"/"to" and tons of prepositions (i.e.,
| often repeated two-three letter words) are a pretty good
| indication of a Bulgarian text.
| kakkun wrote:
| Yeah, it's annoying, especially since I've told Google
| explicitly the languages I know. I do suppose that a lot
| of people haven't set their languages, and the automatic
| detection works well enough, most of the time.
| jakub_g wrote:
| BTW re:google products, sometimes this is really annoying and
| not easy to find where to change lang in UI.
|
| A trick that often works: add ?hl=en to the URL.
| 317070 wrote:
| National flags and languages are not a 1:1 map. Some flags
| have multiple languages, and some languages have multiple
| flags.
|
| And that can be "close enough", until you for example serve
| English speaking people in Ireland the Union Jack. Both
| languages and flags can be sensitive topics in certain parts
| of the world.
| yorwba wrote:
| Also, often the country and language settings need to be
| independently modifiable, e.g. for pricing vs. product
| description.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| In fact, the first external link in TFA is to a whole
| website [http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-
| flags-do-not-re...] apparently dedicated to this.
| crote wrote:
| > People may prefer the English experience because they expect
| the translated version to be inferior
|
| Even more, bilingual people exist!
|
| A translated version is _always_ worse. With a good human-made
| translation, it may just be a matter of making things un-Google-
| able or misrepresenting certain concepts. With an automatic
| translation, it 's usually completely unusable.
|
| I'm a native speaker of Dutch. I'm a near-native speaker of
| English. Having a page with both languages interspersed is
| completely acceptable! Don't "helpfully" translate everything
| which isn't in the configured language - you're only making
| things worse.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| While this is true, as another near-native speaker of English,
| reading things in my native language always feels easier.
| There's a slight stress on the mind when reading and using
| English that I don't even realize exists, except for the 2% of
| the time when I get to interact with UI in my native language
| and realize that it feels significantly better this way.
| qsort wrote:
| Exactly! Ironically, the most Anglo-centric assumption of them
| all is that people are only fluent in exactly one language.
| Configuring anything to be truly multilingual as opposed to "in
| another language" has terrible UX.
| jobigoud wrote:
| What do you mean? Having parts of the interface in one
| language and other parts in another?
|
| I'm fluent in multiple languages (as most European devs) and
| I've never really heard or thought about this concept so I'm
| intrigued. What kind of software are you referring to that
| could have this feature?
| qsort wrote:
| I'm talking more about the behavior of websites or
| applications.
|
| For example, I'm on macOS. I want the OS GUI to be in
| English and to use the US keyboard layout, because I'm used
| to that and buttons/labels aren't a big deal anyway.
|
| However, most of my communication with my coworkers (for
| example, MS Teams) happens in Italian, so I'd prefer those
| programs to display their UI in Italian (so that everyone
| using the program would be on the same page) and to have
| Italian spellcheck.
|
| When I open Safari to look at docs, Wikipedia or search
| results, I want those in English. But e-commerce sites like
| Amazon need to be in Italian. Except if I'm shopping for
| technical books or manuals: I need those in English.
|
| For some of those needs there's a workaround, some I found
| completely impossible to solve (I can't seem to get the
| spellchecker to switch reliably, my solution is simply to
| disable it: I make zero grammar mistakes in Italian and
| most people are willing to put up with my broken English).
|
| Generally speaking, I find that most UIs are downright
| hostile to "mixed" needs like mine, and I end up defaulting
| to the US/English locale everywhere because it's the least
| broken (except for units of measurement. Come on guys,
| inches? Farhenheit?)
|
| The concept of locale itself is broken and wrong: I want
| it.IT or en.US _contextually_ , neither is the correct one,
| why should I be asked to definitively pick either? In many
| cases, localization is downright harmful. Excel comes to
| mind, but even several ETL tools "helpfully" "translate"
| decimal points to commas by default!
|
| Websites could greatly benefit from this, e.g. social
| media, where you're likely to be part of both a local
| community that speaks your native language, and a global
| community that speaks English.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Ah ok, I agree and I have some of the same issues. I'm
| using Firefox and the spellchecker works well. I
| regularly switch between 3 languages. Same for
| Thunderbird, plus there is an extension that remembers
| which language I'm using with a specific contact, which
| is great.
|
| Regarding the en-US locale, I've read that some people
| use the en-CA locale instead, this way you get (partly)
| American spelling, but with metric units and
| international standards like A4 paper size and reasonable
| date format.
| Symbiote wrote:
| en-IE is a good choice in Europe: defaults to EUR, Anglo-
| Irish spelling, metric, 10 September style dates.
| drran wrote:
| Wow, 100% of users on English-speaking site said that they prefer
| to use English language. I suspect that 100% of them are using
| Internet also.
| lou1306 wrote:
| > People may prefer the English experience because they expect
| the translated version to be inferior
|
| As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated
| apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A
| couple example:
|
| * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto"
| (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb).
| Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothing bad, just
| unnecessarily confusing (what is an "open ticket"? As opposed to
| a "closed" one?)
|
| * EasyJet's app does the reverse and makes it much worse. The
| English version likely says something like "Gate close: xx:xx
| (am|pm)". They mis-translated this as "Gate chiuso: xx:xx", which
| actually means "Gate _has closed_ ", even though the gate is
| still open. So you get a small heart attack, notice the actual
| closing time, curse the translators, and go on with your life.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| I wish the users could edit the text and then the app would
| take over a text the users agreed upon in majority. It cant be
| that hard.
| translator6546 wrote:
| Facebook did that early on, no idea if they still do. As a
| professional software localizer, I was not amused by the
| resulting translations.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Sounds like a good way to end up with all the strings in your
| app translating to "penis".
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I always use the English version of everything simply because
| error messages in Dutch or any amount of troubleshooting isn't
| going to helpful at all.
|
| In the Netherlands, almost anyone who has about any device he
| owns configured in Dutch is almost certainly technically
| illiterate. People keep everything English not even because the
| Dutch translation is inferior but because any online
| documentation one will find is based on the English version.
| This is so entrenched that any notes I even keep to myself on
| my computer are in English rather than my native language
| without even giving it any second thought.
|
| It is honestly somewhat strange and awkward to read technical
| documentation in Dutch. Many of the translated words they use
| take a moment for me to figure out since I never heard them in
| Dutch.
| el-salvador wrote:
| Same here. Some IT departments even have a policy of setting
| up every server in English to make troubleshooting easier.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| This is surprising. You really think someone as big as EasyJet
| would get that right.
|
| We're doing a translation now into Japanese and the translator
| is actually taking the time to look at screenshots and use the
| app to see the text in context. It makes a huge difference.
|
| As you've pointed out, it's one thing to see the string "open"
| in a XLF file, it's quite another to realize it's intent. This
| requires setting up demo environments for each translator
| though.
| seszett wrote:
| > You really think someone as big as EasyJet would get that
| right.
|
| Well even Apple has a wrong translation on the iOS keyboard
| in French. The "Return" key is translated as "Retour"
| (generally meaning "Back" rather than "Carriage return")
| instead of "Entree".
|
| It might have changed in the last years though, I don't know.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| The secret is that you cant verbatim translate into Japanese
| as well, which forces more attention (also its a bigger
| economy)
| Pinus wrote:
| Heck, Microsoft got it wrong -- Swedish versions of Windows
| used to have a folder called "Vanliga filer" (Ordinary
| files). This was, of course, the "Common files" folder, but
| the translator, probably having no context, picked the wrong
| meaning of "common", and chose a Swedish word which does not
| have the "shared" meaning.
| el-salvador wrote:
| In El Salvador (our TLD is "sv") we sometimes get apps or
| websites in Swedish because "sv" is used as a language
| abbreviation for Svenska/Swedish. Spotify was like that for
| months when it launched here.
| r00fus wrote:
| The problem isn't the translation, per-se, it's that
| translation isn't tested (or tested thoroughly enough).
|
| Amazing Microsoft can sell a whole other version of Windows
| and mess something like that up.
|
| Everything that impacts the user experience needs to be
| tested.
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| Another data point:
|
| When Windows 10 just came out, many of apps in start menu
| had a label next to them, which in Russian version said
| "Sozdat'" (~Create). It took me some time to figure out
| that it's a poor translation of "New" (~Recently added).
| Proper Russian translation would be "Novoe".
| franky47 wrote:
| My Italian teacher in college had the following saying:
| "Traduttore, traditore": the translator is a traitor.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I think the issue is many translation databases just hold the
| English text and then all the translations. So the entry is
| "Open ticket" and then you just drop in the translation
| anywhere that phrase shows up. But sometimes "open" is a verb,
| sometimes a noun.
|
| The actual identifier should be something like "Open a ticket
| (imperative, button)" and then that phrase has translations,
| including the English "Open ticket".
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| This is what the gettext contexts and the pgettext macros are
| for: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Co
| ntex...
| toast0 wrote:
| Yep, there's a ton of software that wants to use the english
| text as the translation key, which leads to all sorts of bad
| results.
|
| Things like Open Ticket used as a verb to create a bug
| report, or open a bug report, or as an adjective to indicate
| a bug report is still active. Or similar when ticket means a
| transportation or entertainment event. If your key is the
| English text, you can't translate those three usages
| differently which is not good.
|
| But also, minor edits to the English text are hard to manage
| for the translations, some systems have a way to suggest an
| existing translation, but it requires a translator to
| affirmatively select it. If the key doesn't change, you can
| still use the existing translations until the translators
| review the English change and decide if they want to also
| make a similar change or not.
|
| Of course, the worst thing that people try to do is numbers;
| there are tools for that, but trying to do Open Ticket vs
| Open Tickets as singular vs plural falls over with languages
| that have a form for one, two, three, or more, or even more
| forms.
|
| And then you get people trying to do string math. Delete this
| ticket vs Delete this image need to be translated as whole
| units, you can't add 'delete this' to the type name, gendered
| verbs and objects and sometimes even more complex stuff makes
| it not work.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I was using Qt recently and saw that example code did that
| English keying. It's good that they're promoting creating
| translatable UIs, but I don't know if it's the right thing
| to do if they're encouraging people to do it by using
| English text as the key.
| toast0 wrote:
| I think that approach is quick and easy for an English
| only developer to understand and do, but it's hard to get
| quality results. A synthetic key tied to the context so
| the same English text can be translated differently as
| appropriate.
|
| Tools that show translators the application context are
| really helpful, too. Bulk translation in a spreadsheet is
| an OK place to start when there are a lot of new
| translations to do, but everything needs to be checked
| where it's used as well. Especially for languages that
| tend to result in layout issues when added to formerly
| English only apps, like German (lots of very long
| compound words) and LTR languages like Arabic.
| [deleted]
| spinny wrote:
| I think a bit more of context would even be better.
|
| The usage of "discover" and "find out" in english and
| portuguese comes to mind.
|
| words from the "discover" family, in the english language are
| generally used when talking about discovering something that
| nobody or few people knew (somebody discovers a cure for some
| disease), while "find out" is generally used at a more
| personal level (somebody finds out that someone else bumped
| his car)
|
| in portuguese you can only "find" (encontrar) physical
| things. you can't "find out" information
|
| This makes me thing that in some instances it might be
| necessary some sort of descriptive context on the meaning
| yongjik wrote:
| Another example I saw was "(N) seconds ago" (e.g., "30
| seconds ago") vs. just "seconds ago" (i.e., someone just
| posted this). They were translated into a single phrase.
| Hilarity ensued.
| shoulderchipper wrote:
| >The actual identifier should be something like "Open a
| ticket (imperative, button)"
|
| Or even better: "ui.ticket.actions.open" -- trying to
| shoehorn linguistic categories into translation files is a
| painful experience, but dumb specific IDs work great and make
| untranslated captions apparent.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Or even Create Ticket. From the description, it seems a
| ticket is being created not opened, despite the slang that
| people incorrectly use for buttons.
| kemitche wrote:
| If a ticket is closed upon completion, it stands to
| reason that creating a ticket is "opening" it.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Yup. The "key" for the translation is the English phrase
| itself. It also makes English text changes weird because you
| either have to change the key across all languages to match
| the new English or you leave the key alone and change/add an
| English "translation" that is the new text.
|
| Personally I think it is better to use a "surrogate key" that
| isn't the English text itself.
| ygra wrote:
| That's actually a nice idea in forcing even the default
| language to be handled by the same workflows, processes, and
| tools as the other languages. I've found that in a lot of
| those cases there simply is lots of context missing from the
| strings that should be translated. If all you get is the
| English text without any indication of how and where it's
| used in the UI, you're bound to make such mistakes in the
| translation.
|
| For example, it took me a while to figure out why Word 2007
| in its German version used the word >>Gliederung<< for the
| stroke of a shape. But translating >>outline<< in a word
| processor to mean >>document outline<< instead of >>shape
| outline<< is actually quite understandable.
|
| Back then I tried thinking about automatic or semi-automatic
| solutions to get a bit more context for the translator. The
| trouble is that most UI toolkits make it very hard to
| impossible to solve this, unless the developer actually knows
| enough about the problem to always include context and a
| description. Qt has (had? That was pre-QML, I think) a nice
| mode in its translator UI where the XML UI description could
| be used to show the string in its UI context. Windows Forms
| had a way of changing the form's language and simply
| replacing all strings directly in the designer (which has the
| problem that the translator might accidentally destroy all
| layout). Most things that are used just from source code have
| no visual way of relating strings to UI at all.
| smoe wrote:
| In most places I worked that used translation systems, all
| languages where translations including the default one.
| Within code using message keys like "thing.title",
| "thing.add_action", "thing.on_save_error", etc or something
| like that.
|
| I really like this approach because it makes the code and
| especially templates much more readable. You usually don't
| care about the verbose form of the text that should be
| displayed and those type of keys give you just enough
| information to understand what it is.
|
| Problem is, it makes it harder to outsource the
| translations, and well, as it is known, naming things is
| hard.
| DougWebb wrote:
| Oh, cool. You just reminded me of a feature I had built
| into my web app many years ago when we implemented
| translations. We accepted internal commands in our search
| box, and one of the commands told the app to display the
| language text identifiers alongside the language text. It
| was a great mode for developers, QA, and translators.
| Developers and QA could easily locate text that needed to
| be put into the language system, and translators could work
| page by page to find the identifiers they needed to
| translate.
| cyxxon wrote:
| In my job I sometimes have to do with rollouts of a centrally
| maintained software to subsidiaries in other countries.
| Translation is often done by simply sending a Excel file with
| all string identifiers and their English value to a key user
| in that country, and maybe they translate it themselves,
| maybe they give it to some agency. So we can be 100% sure
| that now, there will be several additional rounds for them to
| figure out what the string is really supposed to mean versus
| what they initially thought it would mean.
|
| Yes, we improved on this somewhat. In the last rounds they
| got access to the software in English beforehand, and there
| are now also access keys to press to see the string id for
| any label in the app. It is still a very time consuming
| process, and I love it when a rollout is done to a country
| where we can just say, consumer facing texts get translated,
| our employees all speak English well enough to use this as
| is.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Obj-C and Swift allow comments to go along with translation
| strings, so you would add let buttonStr =
| NSLocalizedString("Open ticket", comment: "For user to open a
| ticket")
|
| And the comment would make its way into the eventual xliff
| file sent to translators
| jraph wrote:
| This looks like the right approach: giving context to the
| translation strings.
|
| Many translation tools give the locations in the code where
| a string is used. It's a first step, though translators are
| not always able to read code.
| yarcob wrote:
| Or maybe the translator should get annotated screenshots of
| the app. Laid out in a story board.
|
| If you just hand someone a list of strings to translate,
| there's no way you'll get sensible results.
|
| Also, you should test you translations. Some of the
| translations that I've seen (even from reputable companies)
| are so bad that it's pretty obvious no native speaker has
| ever looked them over.
| david_allison wrote:
| > Also, you should test you translations. Some of the
| translations that I've seen (even from reputable companies)
| are so bad that it's pretty obvious no native speaker has
| ever looked them over.
|
| Testing is a must. Before I fixed + linted it, we often had
| community-provided translations which would cause the app
| to crash due to missing/additional format strings.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| The tension is that people want to reuse translations. So
| maybe you have the story board for the first version. Then,
| someone makes a new button. In Django, they'd put _("Open
| ticket") as the text, see there's already a translation,
| and think they're good to go. Sure, having every page
| looked at by a translator for every language every time you
| make a change would be ideal, but also a bit costly and
| slow. I think there are better options in the middle.
| yarcob wrote:
| I don't think there are any "middle options" that result
| in a good product. You want a localized app, but you
| don't want to put the work in.
|
| If you add some new text somewhere in the UI, you need to
| start the app and make sure it looks right. If you only
| do that for one language, and don't check other
| languages, then there's going to be one language that's
| broken.
|
| So your app is going to look broken in one language. And
| you probably will never find out, because the people who
| run into the bug don't speak your language.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I set my Android phone to English mostly to avoid badly
| translated apps. Not so much for the major ones, but you never
| know if you might get some really bad machine-translated stuff
| in some apps.
|
| As there isn't an easy way to set this per app, it makes more
| sense to me to just switch the phone entirely to English.
| sdiq wrote:
| Sometimes this doesn't work like what happens on the desktop
| with Google, for example. English is my default language, and
| in country where English is also the official language but
| Google in its wisdom, decided that the default for google.com
| is Swahili. Yet, I don't know of anyone that uses Swahili as
| his default langauge on digital devices. Microsoft too. Every
| once in a while they would send me text messages in cryptic
| Swahili that I have never bothered to find out what it means.
| Delk wrote:
| That's also one of the reasons why I don't use a localised
| version of a desktop OS. Especially on Linux, where
| everything follows the OS locale and the translations of many
| open source applications are either only half-done or leave a
| bit to be desired in terms of quality, the original English
| strings are just a better experience if you're proficient
| enough.
|
| I'm not saying this to bash open source translations (let
| alone translators) or anything. A good translation takes a
| lot of work. That's just how things seemed to be last time I
| tried, and I don't really have the energy to contribute
| myself nowadays.
|
| Of course there are other reasons for not using a localised
| desktop especially if you're a technical person, such as
| better web searchability in case of problems. But the
| inconsistent quality of translations is probably one of the
| top reasons for me.
| baxtr wrote:
| It's really embarrassing that two large Europeans companies are
| unable to pay 20 EUR per hour for a mediocre translator, which
| you could find on upwork within minutes.
| asveikau wrote:
| > translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto"
|
| I have a good example. I won't name names. I saw an Italian
| localization on a "like" count in social posts that localized
| "N people like this" as "N persone come questa" [N people like
| this one]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Hopefully it's better now, but back when I lived in Sweden, I
| had to routinely translate strange Swedish wording to English
| to figure out what arcane computer term the translator had
| misunderstood.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| While most of modern European languages are heavily analytical,
| English language is pushing it straight into the isolating
| language territory. Morpological differences between nouns,
| adjectives, imperatives, infinitives? Who needs those? Just
| line the words in the correct order!
| agarsev wrote:
| It is true that English is extremely analytical, but most
| european languages are fusional rather than analytical:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language
| lksaar wrote:
| I have a similar experience as a german on the internet.
|
| Aliexpress (straight up wrong translations), Discord
| (anglicism, adjective ordering and weird sentence/tone
| structures) and plenty of others I don't remember, the list is
| pretty long. Size doesn't really seem play an effect aswell.
|
| Another big issue are potential bugs you encounter. If you just
| get a translated error message without any error number or
| something similar it's a very frustrating experience to
| troubleshoot it. I've spend quite some time retranslating error
| messages to solve issues. Add to it that often knowledge bases
| are outdated in the translated languages.
| andruby wrote:
| Aliexpress in Dutch is lovely!
|
| Plenty of items on Aliexpress can be shipped from multiple
| locations. "China" is almost always one of the options. Well,
| in Dutch they've translated that to "Porselein". That is a
| valid translation, if you are talking about plates and dishes
| made from porcelain)
|
| I wonder how actively harmful this bad translation is to
| their business.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_(material)
|
| screenshot: https://fransdejonge.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/11/Screensh...
| seszett wrote:
| Weird, I sometimes get the French translation of AliExpress
| (when my cookie expires I suppose) and I haven't noticed
| "China" being translated as Porcelaine in French. I wonder
| why it's different. Also now I wonder why I get the French
| version, since I live in Flanders (although I'm a French
| speaker).
|
| AliExpress translations are totally incomprehensible though
| anyway. I really don't think they should show the
| translated versions by default.
|
| (By the way, your second link doesn't respond for me)
| alex_young wrote:
| "Open ticket" doesn't even really make sense in English. Maybe
| "Buy ticket" or "View ticket" or similar would make sense
| there.
|
| Flux bus is German, I suspect the translation was from German
| and not English in this case?
| yarcob wrote:
| In German adjectives and verbs are easily distinguishable
| without context. The verb "open" would be "offne" and the
| adjective "open" would be "geoffnet". So it's unlikely this
| mistake would happen if you translate from German to Italian.
|
| It's common to talk about "opening" files to view them, so I
| assume that's why the developer chose that term, even tough
| "view" would have been better.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Don't German UI conventions follow the convention of using
| infinitive verbs for commands normally? ('offnen' instead
| of 'offne'?) [the only exception I know is the adjective
| "ruckgangig" for "undo" ]
|
| Though even there your point still stands - they can be
| easily distinguished from the perfect form ('opened'
| (geoffnet) vs 'to open' (offnen) ). So I guess I'm nit-
| picking a bit.
| manuel_w wrote:
| Native german speaker here.
|
| Have no clue about UI conventions nor grammar, but I'd
| expect either "Offne Ticket" or "Ticket offnen". "Offnen
| Ticket" is wrong, just as "Ticket offne".
|
| I suppose the Flixbus app was made by native German
| speakers coding in English language. That would explain
| why they chose "open ticket" rather than "view ticket" or
| similar. As some of the parent posts said, you also "open
| files" here, so they probably just did what they assumed
| is right.
|
| Denglish (Deutsch-Englisch) is full of this.
|
| Happened to me as well; for most of my life I used
| "eventually" incorrect, thinking it means "maybe".
| * German "eventuell" = English "maybe" * German
| "schlussendlich" = Englisch "eventually", "at last"
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| I've noticed a few other German-English anomalies in my
| time around German people. First is "some-" instead of
| "any-". Second is the use of "since", e.g: "I've been
| working here since 8 years". Present tense confusion -
| e.g: "I'm having" instead of "I have" - my understanding
| is that in German there is only one present tense,
| whereas English has a few subtly different ones, so it's
| not surprising that some confusion ensues. "Driving a
| bike" is always funny. Saying "with X years" instead of
| "aged X years".
|
| In all of those cases it's still obvious what the person
| means. And to be clear I don't mean to pick on anyone
| here, I just find the language differences interesting.
| Far be it from me to judge - I can barely speak one
| language, let alone two.
| mappu wrote:
| Many many years ago, trying to learn German as an english
| speaker, i was taught Maybe (EN) -> Wehrscheinlich (DE) -
|
| Is that correct? If it's even remotely close to being
| correct, it definitely makes sense pedagogically to avoid
| the ambiguity.
| 1986 wrote:
| I learned:
|
| - maybe = vielleicht
|
| - probably = wahrscheinlich
|
| - definitely = bestimmt
|
| But a big part of the gap between being able to speak in
| a language and being able to _comprehend_ a language is
| that there are often plenty of ways to communicate
| /translate the same concept. It's much easier for a
| learner to say "vielleicht" every time they mean to
| indicate "maybe" than it is for a learner to learn that
| "vielleicht", "eventuell", "moglicherweise", etc. all
| basically map to the concept of "maybe" (which of course
| conceptually maps to its own set of English words -
| "maybe", but also "perhaps", "possibly", etc.).
|
| It gets even hairier because word choice is highly
| culture-bound and the semantics are not guaranteed to be
| the same as the top dictionary definition. "Could you
| maybe take a look at this?" is not really asking someone
| to "maybe" take a look, the asker definitely wants them
| to take a look, it's just a construction that carries a
| deferential tone.
| yarcob wrote:
| Oh yes, word order is also a major problem in software
| translated to German. You can tell when an English
| speaker programmed something...
|
| It annoyed me more than it should that Word for Mac for
| years had a menu command "Beenden Word" (Quit Word) where
| the order of the words was obviously hard coded...
|
| Or how Siri says "In 50 Meter Sie haben Ihr Ziel
| erreicht." (it should be "In 50 Meter haben Sie Ihr Ziel
| erreicht")
|
| In English you can just take the sentence "You have
| arrived at your destination" and prefix it with something
| like "In 50 yards", and it's a perfectly valid sentence:
| "In 50 yards you have arrived at our destination". It
| might sound a bit mechanical, but it's not wrong.
|
| If you do the same in German, it just sounds very
| confusing and wrong.
| 1986 wrote:
| English has borrowed so many words from so many other
| languages that there are false friends _everywhere_. As a
| native English speaker and German learner, it took me a
| minute to get over the same thing with "aktuell" - yes,
| of course I want the _actual_ news!
| yarcob wrote:
| Oops, you are right, now that I think about it it would
| be weird to see a button labelled "offne" instead of
| "offnen".
|
| I just thought that it was unlikely that the
| verb/adjective confusion comes from German->Italian
| translation, it's more likely from English->Italian.
|
| It's a common mistake that I've already seen in software
| translated from English to German as well, it's just what
| happens when you translate English strings without
| context.
| Symbiote wrote:
| An open ticket, in English, means a flexible transport ticket
| rather than one with fixed departure times.
| zelos wrote:
| Confusingly, "Open Ticket" is a valid term for a ticket with no
| fixed date it has to be used on.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It's crazy to believe that EasyJet wouldn't pay an Italian guy
| for a few months to translate the buttons and commands and
| notifications in their application, considering Italy is a
| fairly large market for them.
| jakub_g wrote:
| > So you get a small heart attack
|
| This is something overlooked by devs and PMs sitting
| comfortably in their chairs.
|
| People using apps in the modern world, especially mobile apps,
| are tired, stressed, busy, unfocused, and on the move. Small
| things like that added to the mix can induce a lot of stress.
|
| For many devs/PMs it's just a piece of text. For the user it's
| much more.
|
| The translations are somehow unappreciated part of the app dev
| by many people. I know several languages and I checked all new
| translations in our app each time but few people cared as much.
| dharmab wrote:
| Tom Scott used an example of a phone system for results of an
| STI test to demonstrate this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZM9YdO_QKk
| q_andrew wrote:
| From IGN's article about the difficulties of game development
| (https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-
| making-g...):
|
| "Planning ahead helps, but nothing will prepare you for German,"
| [Joe Mirabello] said. "German destroys your best laid plans.
| German will defeat you. That text field you thought would only
| ever need a single 10-20 character word? Nope. German has a
| unique word for that and it's a hundred and twelve characters
| long. We even have a native German developer on our team and he
| refuses to translate our games into German. This is all said
| tongue-in-cheek, of course, just to illustrate a point, and that
| is; whatever scaling flexibility you think you've planned for in
| your UI to account for localization? It's not enough. It's never
| enough."
| arp242 wrote:
| It's not that German has a "unique word" for things, it's that
| they use compound words: multiple words written together
| without space to form a new word. This is a feature found in
| most Germanic languages except English, because reasons. It's
| just that German is the most commonly translated of them.
|
| So, for example, in Dutch you would write
| _sciencefictiontelevisieserie_ instead of "science fiction
| television series"; it's not an "unique word", just four words
| strung together. There are some examples that can be quite
| long; the longest in the dictionary is
| _meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornissen_ , or "multiple
| personality disorders", although you can easily make it longer
| by adding more words:
| _meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandeling_ ( "multiple
| personality disorder treatment") or
| _meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandelaaropleiding_ (
| "multiple personality disorder treatment education"). I miss
| this in English by the way; you can get creative with it and
| form new compound words quite easily.
|
| Sometimes the addition or lack of a space can change something
| quite a lot, so you can't just insert them because it's
| convenient.
|
| It sure can be annoying fitting these things in boxes at times
| though.
|
| [1]:
| https://twitter.com/spatiegebruik/status/1434538804883427330
| lucb1e wrote:
| You add a reference but never refer to it! Let me explain for
| the English here :)
|
| The Twitter link shows a picture taken at a race event, where
| it says on the door: _wedstrijd secretariaat_ , meaning
| secretariat competition in English. It's two words, so the
| first modifies the second (adjective) rather than forming a
| compound noun, thus some _wedstrijd_ (competition) of the
| secretariat seems to be held there. Writing
| _wedstrijdsecretariaat_ as one word makes it a compound noun
| and translates as competition secretariat which is
| (presumably? :D) what was meant. Ha-ha! Germanic humor, I
| guess. (I really enjoy them at least, since it really is what
| people wrote and they don 't even realize it. Probably ties
| into pentesting, where I also exploit what people incorrectly
| wrote?)
|
| > Sometimes the addition or lack of a space can change
| something quite a lot, so you can't just insert them because
| it's convenient.
|
| Correct, but note that hyphens between the parts are always
| legal if you think it's more readable.
|
| For example _meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandeling_
| was not hard to get for me but then the
| _...behandelaarsopleiding_ variant is really stretching the
| possibilities and I 'd definitely start to hyphenate there,
| also because it's a bit of a false start (it's an education,
| but you're starting off with a disorder and then segueing
| into treatment and then again veering off into it being an
| education that you're describing -- it's a bit like "The old
| man the boat." in English: a garden-path sentence or an
| _intuinzin_ which starts off making you think it 's one thing
| and then continues in a way that forces you to reevaluate
| it).
|
| Also, if you have a reason why you didn't put an "s" between
| behandelaar and opleiding I'd be interested! It feels to me
| like there should be one but I don't know the rule.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Reminds me of the Pseudo-Locales Windows Vista added that
| "translate" English strings to things that look like English,
| but use unusual characters and end up with longer strings in an
| attempt to catch UI issues before having full localization
| versions ready.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/pseudo-l...
| lucb1e wrote:
| In case the author is here: for me, the font size was at a level
| where I found it was most comfortable to read after zooming out
| all the way to 50%. And I have neither great eyesight (I should
| go for new glasses... soon...) nor a retina screen with zoom or
| anything. Probably looks great on phones, but on desktop for me
| the font was set uncomfortably large.
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I used to work on the localization team at my company. It's a
| pretty complicated world in itself. I was nodding my head while
| reading this and I think the biggest surprise I ran into is how
| not a lot of companies do a great job at localizing for many
| different regions. I think this is also something where large
| companies have a huge lead on compared to newcomers.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| I went through a lot of these pains. The biggest one was undoing
| the misuse of localisation tools to display content differently
| on each geographic region, and misuse of plurals.
|
| I would also add collaboration efforts, how to make localisation
| work with continuous integration and not go waterfall, where you
| make a release, and you have to wait 4-6 days to localise half a
| dozen strings
| hrpnk wrote:
| One problem I stumbled upon frequently is codebases that did not
| support localized formats, but just assumed a certain format to
| use, for example through concatenation.
|
| There are capabilities built into the programming languages,
| which allow to format numbers, currencies, etc. with a specific
| locale. There are also great resources [1] out there that provide
| all kinds of formats and localized names for countries,
| currencies, etc.
|
| [1] Unicode CLDR: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I tend to try designing the app with as much culturally-neutral
| iconography as possible (difficult). ISO icons are useful
| (although many designers hate them). I also try to leave as much
| as possible to the platform (Apple platforms). Again, designers
| tend to hate that. The problem is that every custom element
| requires both a visible string, and at least one "invisible" one
| (voiceover). It can get a bit _dense_. It 's nice, if I can rely
| on the built-in Apple versions.
|
| I've also been caught out by choosing culturally-biased icons and
| visual elements.
|
| I've used ibabbleon.com, in the past, and I'm told they do a good
| job. Not too expensive, fast, and technically correct.
|
| Nothing beats having the end-users do the translations, though. I
| have been able to do this, with some of the open-source stuff
| that I've done. It can be an ... _iterative_ ... process, though,
| as they can do things like send you translations with illegal
| characters, or in formats like UTF-8(BOM).
| obscurette wrote:
| Localization is treated as translation job in whole tech world,
| but in reality it should be a UI/UX design job. Most of
| localizations are awful even by translation standards though. And
| not because it lacks some kind of context etc, but nobody just
| cares - these are done by big agencies using mostly automatic
| process and with prices racing to the bottom.
|
| PS. I have 10+ years experience with open source localization and
| tried to make it my job at some point. I escaped industry very
| quickly.
| hrpnk wrote:
| +1 to that. If you design UIs, you need to understand concepts
| like Right-To-Left, one-few-many for numbers and counts, etc.
| Same for phrases that use different typefaces with an aim of
| concatenation (e.g. "red" + "apples") where other languages may
| have more than 2 words or need a reverse order (e.g. "apples in
| red").
|
| Modern UI design tooling allows for integrations with
| Localization Management Systems, which will perform automated
| translation or pseudolocalization in order to allow the
| designer to preview how their text looks like in another
| language or length.
| bckygldstn wrote:
| Another concern: If your app/website is available in a language,
| customers will expect support in that language.
| david_allison wrote:
| For consumer-facing apps, online translation, community support
| and screenshots work well enough that it's only a minor
| inconvenience.
|
| I do this over Facebook Messenger at least once per fortnight.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I've had lots of support conversations where the customer is
| typing in their own language while I type in English. Google
| Translate isn't perfect but it gets the ideas across well
| enough that we can usually resolve their issue.
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