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

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

#131

Post by dmytrish » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

Kudos to the author of the article for his perseverance in decorating message to fit grammar. I'd go another way, just using more formal and dry format:

    Number of scanned directories: %g
    Number of found files: %g

That solves the problem with Slavic languages at least. Italian aversion to 0 may be mitigated with printing 'none', I guess. Please correct me if this form does not fit other languages.

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

#132

Post by SixSigma » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:35 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!

Surely a phone book is a directory, not the other way round.

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

#133

Post by dtech » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #128

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

> I don't know why nobody seems to put information like "warning: this phone's UI in is total and utter crap". This is what makes me use SW and equipment only in English. Translations are pretty much useless (and of course, Googling the English error messages usually gives the best results)

It makes sense if not all of your target demographic, or at least a large part, cannot read English on the level neccesary to use your tool.

However, for a lot of modern tools that isn't the case. Often a translated tool is an order of magnitude less usable because of broken translations and inability to Google things.

It's also infurating that lots of tools look at your Windows location when deciding your language. No, I don't want your broken native translation on my English Windows installation, just because I do like to still have € in front of my currency.

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

#134

Post by HCIdivision17 » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

blywi wrote: post #111

anonymousDan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the classic: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

My favorite is still this one: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/feb/08/diese...

There's a certain schadenfreude to be had where the failed translation is also typo'd - but only once. These sorts of things are especially embarassing, as it not only shows no effort was used proofing, but nothing tripped a sanity check at all.

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

#135

Post by gjm11 » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

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 ther…

I'm pretty sure general opinion among everyone other than Jehovah's Witnesses is that their bible translation is not good, and that the same-word rule is one of the reasons why.

And I really don't see how having a similar rule for translations of text in software would eliminate most "context missing" problems. It seems what it would actually do is stop translators even guessing those missing contexts.

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

#136

Post by randallsquared » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

dmytrish wrote: post #131

Kudos to the author of the article for his perseverance in decorating message to fit grammar. I'd go another way, just using more formal and dry format: Number of scanned directories: %g Number of found files: %g That solves the problem with Slavic languages at least. Italian aversion to 0 may be mitigated with printing 'none', I guess. Please correct me if this form does not fit other languages.

I agree: a huge chunk of this problem goes away if you stop trying to have the software communicate colloquially.

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

#137

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:53 PM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #127

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

You know what multi-million movie has a translation that isn't total crap? Frozen . They really put resources into that. You can look up random Disney songs on Youtube in different languages, and then look up the Frozen songs, and you can sort of tell that they've done a better job even if you don't speak the language. Even relatively obscure languages like Dutch where they usually just watch English-language movies:…

I agree. Frozen, and other Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks children movies (like Shrek) tend to be of awesome quality in all languages. But I attribute this to the fact that those movies are not translated - they're being localized, which by definition requires much more work and paying much closer attention.

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

#138

Post by btbuildem » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:55 PM UTC

So the solution is to design and implement your interface in a Slavic language (presumably most complex, as we found so far) and translate down to other languages with less demanding rules?

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

#139

Post by js2 » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:57 PM UTC

Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095334

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

#140

Post by canjobear » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

dkbrk wrote: post #91

As far as I can tell, the best tool for localisation almost nobody is using is http://www.grammaticalframework.org/ . Licensing is a mix of GPL, BSD and MIT pieces. It's a high-level functional programming language with a dependent type system specialised for operating on language ASTs. It's resource library, to quote "covers the morphology and basic syntax of currently 29 languages: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Catalan, Ch…

I'm very skeptical that this would work outside of toy examples, though it depends on what is meant by language-independent AST.

For example, the best way to translate Spanish "X dió un golpe a Y" would be "X hit Y". But my naive idea of what the AST for the Spanish sentence would look like would be something like `(GIVE (X HIT Y)`, which when naively transduced to English would be the "X gave a hit to Y", which is either unidiomatic or means the wrong thing altogether. In order to avoid this problem, the AST would have to be a more abstract representation of the semantics. And coming up with a sufficiently expressive, tractable, and neutral representation of natural language semantics is an unsolved problem that people are still devoting their whole careers to.

I was briefly involved in a very early stage startup that was considering using systems like this for better machine translation. We ran into problems like the above, and also: ambiguity, and the fact that the hand-written grammars and semantic representation systems were just very brittle and incomplete.