A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You • Hacker News Board

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#41

Post by psykovsky » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:43 AM UTC

ygra wrote: post #35

psykovsky wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an error only an amateur translator would make. Guess who makes free software translations... A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context.

Ah, that's why Word 2007 ended up with »Keine Gliederung« (»no (document) outline«) for the setting where you can select a shape outline colour ... In all seriousness, translators make mistakes by getting the context wrong all the time; this applies to both professional translators and amateurs, perhaps in different severity. But in my eyes that's not really a problem of the translators, but rather of the tools we us…

Translation is like dates: hard to get right.

I like the Visual Studio approach. I usually resort to running the software I'm translating to get context. Sometimes it's very hard to get some of the text to show up.

I can only think of one way to give translators context: Comments, the exact same way you give other programmers context for your code.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#42

Post by Kiro » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:45 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #13

reidrac wrote: post #7

Slightly 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 :)

OT means Out of Topic? In french we say HS (for Hors Sujet).

I'm really surprised that this is the first time you've seen "OT" being used. I can only presume it's because you don't normally ready English websites/discussion boards but I still find it intriguing that you've never encountered it before.

In Sweden we use "OT" as well but it's referring to "Off Topic" and not something Swedish.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#43

Post by whizzkid » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:46 AM UTC

It made me remember the Norwegian customer I had.

I needed to write Norwegian localization strings in a YAML file which did not work for some reason.

After 4 hours of debugging, the problem was;

In YAML, the "no:" string (for "norwegian") defined in a YAML file was parsed as a boolean, and this makes the application broke..

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#44

Post by pif » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:49 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #27

mrfoto wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 imenik 2 imenika 3 imeniki 4 imeniki 5 imenikov 6 imenikov … 101 imenik 102 imenika 103 imeniki … 201 imenik … 1001 imenik … Slavic languages are f*d up :D

Not to mention that I would never realise that "imenik" means directory. An imenik is a phone book. Potentially the Contacts app on my phone. But never a directory. I think this has to do with vocabulary registers as well. We've learned to use English words for computer things. Using Slovene translations just feels weird unless they're a bastardisation of the English word. Similar to how English uses French words for…

But, a directory is a phone book!

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#45

Post by eveningcoffee » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:51 AM UTC

TL;DR - when you are facing a localization problem - you have to parametrize the units of measurements in your text.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#46

Post by zamalek » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:51 AM UTC

Edit: Disregard, turns out things have improved

> The %g slots are in an order reverse to what they are in English. You wonder how you'll get gettext to handle that.

I learned C/++ after C# and this is one thing that really got to me. String interpolation in C++ is extremely primitive, which would be fine only if more recent iterations of stdlib had something that wasn't so completely incompetent.

For those who don't use .Net, the Italian translation would have been: "In {1:g} directories contains {0:g} files match your query." It doesn't solve all the problems, but being able to specify indices in your template string does solve many.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#47

Post by gambiting » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:54 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #26

gambiting wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just trying to think of how it would work out in Polish.... directory is "katalog" in Polish, and it would be: 1 katalog 2 katalogi 3 katalogi 4 katalogi 5 katalogów 6 katalogów ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) But if you wanted to say "X files were found in Y directories" then you would have to say: ....1 katalogu ....2 katalogach ....3 katalogach ....1000 katalogów (for 1001 even I am not…

> Compared to the grammar of Slavic languages, English is super easy. And thus is solved the mystery all us Slavic speakers have such good English. Especially on the online. Because nobody had the guts to localize to our languages. If they did localize to our languages "Omg this looks weird and smells off", we all cried. And switched our interfaces to English. Admit it, you did this in High School or even Middle Scho…

Yeah. I remember being a kid and HATING Polish translations of English games. Even though I barely knew any English playing any game in Polish just felt wrong. Nowadays I think it just felt more mysterious and interesting if apart from being difficult, the game was in a language I couldn't fully understand. But yeah, it contributed massively to me learning English, so it was definitely a good thing. But I also know what you mean - I wouldn't translate my programs to Polish unless I had to, because it just feels wrong to have them in my native tongue.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#48

Post by mrfoto » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 11:58 AM UTC

lepouet wrote: post #30

mrfoto wrote: post #10

Funny 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,…

Wikipedia mention only singular, dual and plural ? What is the one for 3 and 4 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_grammar