Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

randomascii.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 157 posts

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#91

Post by vshade »

orlp wrote: post #59
quintussss wrote: post #32

One thing that really annoys me is youtube translating video titles - why would I ever want the title of an english language video to be translated?

If I didn't speak English, I'm sure I would appreciate it. E.g. to swap the roles, while I'm sure some wouldn't mind but I'd guess that the majority of people who watch anime appreciate the anime titles have English translations, even if they watch in Japanese (with subtitles).

But YouTube uses some weird translations, this behaviour is not fully consistent and also YouTube knows that I don't watch videos of those channels with subtitles.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#92

Post by matsemann »

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.

I think the problem stems from translators being sent a bunch of strings with little context. At least even when we hired professionals it could sometimes be a bit wonky, especially with shorter texts.

For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#93

Post by jillesvangurp »

hyperman1 wrote: post #67
arka2147483647 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GPT-4 is actually quite good with languages. You can even get it to do some local Dutch dialects. We use it (via the code gpt plugin) for helping us with localization files for apps. We just give it whole chunks of localization files (mozilla fluent) and task it with translating those while preserving the id structure. Aside from minor formatting issues, I've not caught it making any mistakes. I doubt we'll be working with external contractors for localizations again.

It's also really good at doing things like synonyms. We used this to improve our icon search by letting it come up with comma separated lists of alternatives for each icon name. Worked really well too.

And it can do fictional languages. We did a pirate speak localization a few weeks ago for international pirate day. Just for giggles but it works.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#94

Post by Sharlin »

An affine space is a tuple (𝗔, 𝗩) where 𝗩 is a vector space and 𝗔 has the same structure as 𝗩 but has "forgotten its origin"; ie. unlike a vector space, has no privileged zero point. As such, multiplication by a scalar is not meaningful, and neither is the addition of two elements of 𝗔. The elements of 𝗔 are called points, and the elements of 𝗩 are translation vectors, or simply translations. The fundamental operations are:

(−): 𝗔 × 𝗔 → 𝗩 — gives the translation from a point to another point, and

(+): 𝗔 × 𝗩 → 𝗔 — applies a translation to a point.

(For convenience we can also write 𝒂 − 𝒗 = 𝒂 + −𝒗 for all 𝒂 ∊ 𝗔, 𝒗 ∊ 𝗩).

The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales are affine, and technically should have separate units for temperatures and temperature differences so that mishaps like in TFA would be less likely to happen.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#95

Post by Karellen »

psychoslave wrote: post #7
usui wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kelvin doesn't use degrees

Why do we use degrees for other temperatures by the way? Is that related to some kind of absolute vs relative metric? (Kelvin, I guess, is based on absolute zero as a reference point, doesn't it?) Incidentally, why is the degree immune to disappearance in division unlike all other units? That is, if I divide a distance (m) by a speed (m/s) I get a duration (s). From sheer memory, degree doesn't work like that. Any cl…

The root of the word "degree" basically means "units" or "subdivisions" or "measurements" or "amounts".

We didn't really have a better word for units of temperature, as "Celsiuses" or "Farhenheits" didn't become a thing, so "degrees (of) Celsius" or "degrees (of) Fahrenheit" is kind of what we're left with. We could have chosen to say "degrees (of) kelvin", but we decided to go with "kelvins" (like "meters" or "seconds") instead. It's just a choice of language.

Temperature does have dimensionality, but it's weird because it's a bulk property of a particular material. If you consider two stars, you can add their masses, or their volumes, and the resulting values are meaningful. But you can't add their temperatures. You can't even average their temperatures meaningfully without knowing the relative sizes of the stars and a bunch of other information either.

That said, I can't think of a situation where degrees (of temperature?) would disappear in a mathematical operation. Can you give a specific example?

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#96

Post by aib »

quintussss wrote: post #32

One thing that really annoys me is youtube translating video titles - why would I ever want the title of an english language video to be translated?

At least you get English videos. A couple of times I've gotten videos in... Hindu, I think, by searching in English and clicking on a video with an English title. And it was a technical video, not much language-independent content.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#97

Post by rendaw »

School-Cotton wrote: post #63
master-lincoln wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Per wikipedia

> The degree Celsius is ... one of two temperature scales used in the International System of Units (SI), the other being the Kelvin scale.

Edit: To expand, within SI Celsius is defined as a derived unit, and Kelvin is a base unit.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#99

Post by shalmanese »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #64

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 unit…

How do frameworks deal with the miles/gallon -> liters/100km conversion? I've always found that one particularly interesting as one that requires inverting the units also.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#100

Post by dontlaugh »

shalmanese wrote: post #99
gillesjacobs wrote: post #64

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 unit…

How do frameworks deal with the miles/gallon -> liters/100km conversion? I've always found that one particularly interesting as one that requires inverting the units also.

It’s even worse, the US has different gallons from the rest of the world.
Post reply on HN