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Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

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Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#61

Post by pests »

Isn't ths following incorrect.... somehow? Something doesn't line up.

----

Reading the article I found this:

parts of Malawi saw a maximum temperature of 43C (109F), compared with an average of nearly 25C (77F)

As I expected the actual temperature increase was 32 °F, not 68 °F.

---

Except the error should have been 32 (which you go on to explain, because we add 32 to start a conversion) and the correct temp difference should have been 36 (20 * 1.8) which is shown later in the article.

I can see getting that wrong, but the actual temps quoted seems to correctly portray 32 opposed to 36 like we would expect.

Just rounding errors or some other oddness?

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#62

Post by mort96 »

josalhor wrote: post #24
matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

I can select English UK and that seems to work pretty well.

That's my solution in some places too. I generally want US spellings of words (especially in anything related to programming!) so "en_US language, Norwegian units/time/etc, but US number format" is my preferred set-up, but "UK everything" is an alright approximation of that for software which doesn't have that much specificity.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#63

Post by School-Cotton »

master-lincoln wrote: post #53
mgaunard wrote: post #33

It's not hard at all, the localization team just made a mistake. The solution is to not localize for Americans.

Maybe it helps to push for Murica to finally adapt SI units. All American countries outside the USA already use °C https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/weights-an...

> Maybe it helps to push for Murica to finally adapt SI units.

Nitpick: Celsius is not an SI unit.

Answering the substantive point: it’d be nice if we switched to SI units (plus Celsius); personally my phone is already set to display those and I wish we’d join the rest of the world and do standard stuff. However, I think it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen. The deadlocked US political system makes it impossible to enact any reform on any topic that anyone can create controversy about, and that includes switching to international standard units.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#64

Post by gillesjacobs »

Delta's like temperature are standard issue to resolve in globalization. Another fun one are complex units that are a combination of more base units like luminance (nits = candela / m*2 or mph.

I worked on a package to globalize a consumer-oriented fintech reporting product. With ESG reporting this has become increasingly important to get the unit conversions and Delta's right. You end up mapping the data source units to locale targets.

In Python, the Pint framework plus Babel locales are excellent.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#65

Post by porbelm »

matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

Hello, fellow mountain ape. I get Norwegian text in /some/ apps on the Mac even though Norwegian is 2nd in "preferred languages." I guess some use "Region" to decide instead of the logical setting. And setting the region to something else will cock up in other interesting ways by showing wrong units instead of the wrong language.

Even the keyboard on my MBP is physically US ANSI, because if you've ever coded more than a hundred lines using brackets on an ISO keyboard you know why.

I managed to get everything right in KDE on my PC though, by some weird way of using "Danish (UK)" or whatever it's called in some specific settings -- I don't even remember how or why but everything worked just right. Sorting, decimal point, app languages, everything. Could never replicate it though.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#66

Post by School-Cotton »

mort96 wrote: post #62
josalhor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can select English UK and that seems to work pretty well.

That's my solution in some places too. I generally want US spellings of words (especially in anything related to programming!) so "en_US language, Norwegian units/time/etc, but US number format" is my preferred set-up, but "UK everything" is an alright approximation of that for software which doesn't have that much specificity.

Try Canadian English: en_CA. That might be an even closer approximation of what you want. (They still spell some words the British way, but a lot the American way).

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#67

Post by hyperman1 »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #35
matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

It really is incredible how many translated apps/websites talk like a drunken finn, when i set language to finnish. Only the things made by native finns seem to have good Finnish on them.

It's the same in Dutch. In the past, Microsoft had very good translations, but even they seem detoriating.

Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet.

Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language.

There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#68

Post by School-Cotton »

ginko wrote: post #36
matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

IMO the worst is that cal starts weeks on Sundays for some weird reason.

As long as the boundary doesn’t happen in the middle of the work week, I find it completely arbitrary whether the official first day is Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Why’s it any more weird to start on one or the other?

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#69

Post by alpaca128 »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #52
matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

You don't know the pain until you move to Switzerland. Geolocalisation to German websites or language, numerical format is a mess (sometimes thousand separators are either ' or space, huge mess in excel), cloud Saas providers believe only fr-FR or de-DE exists. Just awful...

MS Visio refused to run in anything other than English on a PC I used because Windows was set to a specific flavor of German which Visio didn't have in its language list. As far as I could tell there was no way to change the program's language other than changing the OS language and reinstalling Visio.

Now Firefox added stupid popups offering translating websites written in my native language because the OS is set to English. And they didn't see a need to create a checkbox for that outside of about:config (Mozilla, if you want to get rid of me you can just say so instead of spamming me with popups)

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#70

Post by alpaca128 »

reddalo wrote: post #37
matsemann wrote: post #16

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make…

I'm Italian and I have the same problem. You just have to set the system to English (UK) and all your problems will be fixed :)

Except now the web browser will offer to translate every Italian website you visit.
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