A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
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A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
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Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#2Article is from 1998 and very much out of date. Read: http://blogs.perl.org/users/aristotle/2011/04/stop-using-mak...
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#3That is so, so awesome.
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#4What if the text wasn't a sentence?
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#5What if the text wasn't a sentence?
If the text is not a whole sentence or paragraph, it cannot be accurately translated anymore into a number of languages with different word order.
As a programmer with i18n responsibilities, you learn to identify and fix fragmented text problems first.
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#6Just in case people are wondering about the horror story: use ngettext which is a function in the gettext library.
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#7Slightly OT, mi favourite localization error was in Ubuntu when they had that nice netbook interface (that later would become Unity). The network icon label was "Rojo" in the Spanish localization, that is the word for "red" color. What?
Well, if you translate "Net" to Spanish you get "Red"; and if you translate that again (by mistake), you get "Rojo". There you are :)
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#8I saw most of this coming. I have studied a little Ancient Greek which has the same problem of the Arabic, and Polish which is similar to the Russian, and now I am living in Italy.
I guess it is one of those things though as programmers that we just forget about too much, and just expect translation to a mechanical process in the last stage of the development cycle.
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#9In order to avoid these pitfalls, usually I get out of "sentence" mode to "label" mode. For instance: "Directories scanned: 12". Probably not well suited for all cases, but usually good enough for mine, though actually I only have to support pt-BR, es-ES and en-US so maybe that's not saying much.
Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
#10Funny how Slovene seems to tick all the complications checkboxes :D We have 4 grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural for 3 and 4, plural for 5 and above), they repeat at mod 100 (so 101 is singular, 102 dual,…), it's an inflectional language with 3 grammatical genders, sentence should take a different form depending on whether the user is male or female,…