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

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

#71

Post by bloodorange » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #39

PinguTS wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not notice it. But there are other people who do. That is the difference between a very well designed product or a product, which just does the job. That is the reason why engineers should not design interfaces. That should be left to UI/UX experts. Just the other day, I as an engineer myself, complained to another that his product does the job nicely and looks OK. But it was missing this little twist of a fi…

Of course, I'm sure there are people who notice this. My question was whether something like this makes enough of a difference to justify the investment. As a developer you only have a limited amount of funds and time to spend on your product. Your goal is to invest these in a way that gives you the biggest returns. Of course it's great to not just have a translation that "does the job" and if you can do better you d…

We have 100s of thousands to millions of pageviews per day in 10s of languages on the various pages of our site. The site grows from A/B testing and I have to say that many of these small things do add up over time (they add up to measurable conversion in the funnel). There is the odd one that surprisingly does nothing or does worse but generally, paying attention to language details did prove effective for us. I work on this stuff everyday in a small team where we know more than 30 languages between us and sometimes just two or three of these small changes more than pay for our annual wages in just a month.

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

#72

Post by tinganho » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:36 PM UTC

gulpahum wrote: post #18

olau wrote: post #6

Just in case people are wondering about the horror story: use ngettext which is a function in the gettext library.

Indeed, this is a solved problem. Use ngettext, see its page for all different language variations (even the Slovenian four different forms) https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...

ngettext can't handle two plural words well.

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

#73

Post by nathell » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:41 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #17

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,…

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…

And don't even get me started at the case where you don't know the noun beforehand and need to synthesize the entire numeral phrase at runtime ("You have %d %s.")

Because, in Polish, numerals inflect in gender and case, come in two main variants ("normal" and "collective", and that's not including ordinals), and can (but not necessarily have to) for some genders undergo case changes that affect the verb part of the sentence under certain circumstances. Add to this the fact that there's even no definitive consensus on how many grammatical genders there are in Polish (opinions range from 3 to 9, with some of the theories based on numeral connectivity), and you're all set.

The Polish word "dwa" (two) has at least seventeen distinct grammatical forms, each of which has arcane rules that govern its usage.

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

#74

Post by bmn_ » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:42 PM UTC

philh wrote: post #29

gulpahum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this is a solved problem. Use ngettext, see its page for all different language variations (even the Slovenian four different forms) https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...

How does ngettext handle "Your query matched %g files in %g directories"?

With reordering syntax.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/c_002d...

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

#75

Post by Swizec » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:44 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #47

Swizec wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

I think the poor understanding of English was part of the problem. We didn't understand, we just knew that you found what you need when you click "Insert" or whatever. To us "insert" didn't mean insert, it meant "That menu where you find an Image to put in your document".

In our mind the English word and its native translation have semantically different meanings. I discover this problem a lot now that I'm older. I understand the words and their translations, but they still mean semantically different things to me in different languages.

The funniest part is how when I'm in the US I know all the English words for pots and pans and stuff, but when I'm home in Slovenia and my girlfriend is here, it becomes almost impossible to translate. Because in Slovenia the pots and pans have Slovenian names, in the US they have English names. And to me those are completely different.

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

#76

Post by Swizec » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:46 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #44

Swizec wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

To you. To me it very much is not because as a kid I learned that directory is that thing on the computer where the other files are.

Things like that are difficult to shake off no matter how well you know a language.

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

#77

Post by lmm » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

EvaK_de wrote: post #55

mrob wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's intended to be a romanization of ね, then yes, "ne" is more common. Alternatively it could be a reference to Ender's Game, where "neh" is used in the same way.

Thanks for bringing back to my mind where I snatched this one up! Yep, it's Ender's Game. :) What is the meaning of the Chinese (?) symbol?

Japanese; you put it on the end of a statement to make it a question instead, e.g. "the server is up to date, ne?" to mean "is the server up to date?"

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

#78

Post by _obbx » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

We version (localize) projects all the time, so I thought reasonable logic for seeing whether a string is empty is to check whether its trimmed length was greater than two, allowing for two stray characters that show up all the time in content. For example, someone who's not sure how to translate something would type "??" in a field. So, {if $slide.title|length>2} ... This worked for 4-5 languages.

Then our Chinese (Mandarin) division called and asked me to look into buggy behavior with their translations. Turns out a whole sentence got translated to ... two characters, and wasn't showing up.

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

#79

Post by bmn_ » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:52 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #46

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…

The article is outdated. Gettext does have reordering syntax.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/c_002d...

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

#80

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 12:55 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #33

When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone. A major Japanese brand, actually. That was really comical. There was an Australian guy for English, an German guy, an Italian lady, and me for French. What they did prior to the meeting is: * translate from Japanese to English by Japanese people with a poor English level (maybe the software engineers actually) * translate from weird English to othe…

I don't know why nobody seems to put information like "warning: this phone's UI in is total and utter crap".

Anyway, what you wrote is exactly why I stick to using all software and webservices - OS, text editors, Facebook, et al. - in en_US instead of my native pl_PL. Because translations are always crappy - even for big players. Lack of context is the key here - translated text often feels out of place, because there usually is some overarching idea behind them that isn't communicated to translators. Then there is lack of consistency. Words in original text often have some site-specific meaning, which tends to also be somehow lost in the translation process. For example, on Facebook the word "like" talks about a well-defined thing, not about the dictionary meaning, so it's totally not ok to randomly replace it with synonyms during translation [0].

I realized at some point that I often look at a crapy translation, guess what was the English original, and then in my mind translate to what it should be in the first place. Because for some strange reason I, the user, have the context, and the paid translation team has not. I guess I'm going to put that into my "Translation issues" file in the "Mysteries of capitalism" drawer, right next to "how on Earth multi-milion media companies can't do a movie translation that isn't a total crap" file. I mean, seriously, you're better off looking for pirated subtitles even if you bought the original because pirates at least seem to have watched the movie they're translating.

[0] - I wish more translators would use the approach Jehovah's Witnesses used when doing their own Bible translation. Since it was designed to be studied and analyzed, they preferred accuracy over aesthetics - therefore one of the translation rules was "as much as possible, let's have any given word in original text be always represented by the same word in English". Adhering to that single rule would eliminate like half of the "context missing" problems with software translations.