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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

#151

Post by bitdestroyer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
fennecfoxen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to mention that the context of each line of dialogue is pretty close to unambiguous since you have the source material right in front of you for a movie. I imagine it's still a huge job, but has to be more enjoyable that translating/localizing for us asshole programmers and our magic translation strings.

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

#152

Post by TeMPOraL »

userulluipeste wrote: post #108
Fuxy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that gets confused on what the menus and other things on a non English computer or device actually mean when translated. This coming from someone doesn't speak English as their first language. I speak Romanian, Hungarian and English perfectly but my devices are always in English since it would be harder to figure out what they mean otherwise unless you have the structure memorized already.

All things being equal, I guess that's because you accept to pay the necessary price of learning English interfaces of your devices, but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages.

> but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages

One problem is that English is the language majority of technology is created in, and it has developed agreed-on terms for a lot of things. Everyone calls their tabs "tabs" in English, but when it comes to translating, every other app uses a different word. Even if names are consistent within the app, they are inconsistent between each other. This leads to a lot of problems if say, an app reports an error that's related to some OS thing, and calls it with a different translated name than the OS translation does.

EDIT: And I'm not making this up. I worked on a localized Ubuntu for a very short while before switching back to English because messages I got in my command line were painfully inconsistent with each other and with agreed-upon proper translations in my language.

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

#153

Post by TeMPOraL »

bitdestroyer wrote: post #151
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to mention that the context of each line of dialogue is pretty close to unambiguous since you have the source material right in front of you for a movie. I imagine it's still a huge job, but has to be more enjoyable that translating/localizing for us asshole programmers and our magic translation strings.

That's why I say some translators seem not to bother even watching movies they're working on. Otherwise they wouldn't make such stupid mistakes.

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

#154

Post by barrystaes »

I dont agree with the article. The author goes about manually implementing localisations, and eventually throwing out GnuGetText. But it DOES have excellent plural support, and a header in your PO file allows chinese to use "nplurals=1; plural=0;" for example: http://localization-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/l10n/plu...

Or use plurals as such: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Transl...

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

#156

Post by daxelrod »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
fennecfoxen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Latin American Spanish localization of Dreamworks's Shrek is a great example.

They brought in Eugenio Derbez, a Mexican comedian, to voice Donkey (voiced in English by Eddie Murphy). Donkey in particular speaks in colloquialisms and pop culture references with wordplay, so Derbez wrote a bunch of new lines and jokes that referenced Latin American colloquialisms and pop culture.

Children learn different fairy tales in different countries, so they also managed to change the identity of some of the characters without changing their appearances (and without altering video at all, just audio).

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

#157

Post by annnnd »

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"?

Let's face it - sometimes it is better to just avoid the problem than to (try to) solve it. Just use some other form of sentence, people will not even notice and you will save yourself tons of problems.

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

#158

Post by barrystaes »

merijnv wrote: post #149
fennecfoxen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

To be honest, I thought the Dutch translation was relatively awkward (I have to admit I've only heard the Dutch "Let It Go" version, not the rest of the movie). I thought the Flemish version was much nicer, despite some Flemish phrasing sounding off as Dutch...

(For those wondering: Flemish is the Belgian variant of Dutch.) And i agree.. i also prefer the Flemish dubbed voices. For example, Timon&Pumba in The Lion King are Flemish, to great effect.

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

#159

Post by TeMPOraL »

MichaelGG wrote: post #146
gldalmaso wrote: post #9

In 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.

Exactly. All this work, or just restructure the message. It should be acceptable in most languages, because charts and spreadsheets aren't going to have per cell labels. And it has the benefit of being easier to read and parse. Also, it's a really terrible style to use first person in an app unless it's actually sentient. Otherwise it's annoyingly like Clippy, or just plain obnoxious and presumptive.

> Also, it's a really terrible style to use first person in an app unless it's actually sentient. Otherwise it's annoyingly like Clippy, or just plain obnoxious and presumptive.

I agree, though I found another nice use case, well demonstrated by Bret Victor[0][1]. I played around with it for a while and I find that describing what something will happen in a normal sentence, parts of which you can tweak, is a pretty good way of doing options pages.

[0] - http://worrydream.com/#!/TenBrighterIdeas [1] - http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

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

#160

Post by schoen »

4ad wrote: post #105
4ad wrote: post #69

I wonder if it isn't better to generate the messages as an AST, and have a language generator, the back-end of a compiler really, that generates strings for each language. I'm sure there will be less edge cases that way. /edit: wow, downvotes.

This compiles to "He likes 2 green cats" in English. The representation makes no assumption of SVO order, the grammatical category of numbers, and what cases and tenses are available. (OPRESENT ((OSUBJECT (OPRONOUN (3, 0))) ((OVERB, "like") OMUL (2, (OCAST (OATTR (OCOLOR "brown")), (ONOUN (OANIMAL, "cat"))))))) I'm sure someone smart will tell me what assumption I made that's invalid in some language I do not know, b…

Now I'm just wondering about the lexicon since the primitive tokens are things like "like". One potential problem is when two languages don't have words with enough semantic overlap to be comfortable using one as a translation for another. Another potential problem is when

An analogy to my other comment on AST translation: in English you "like doing something" but in German you "do something gladly" (and again in English you "like a person" but in German you can "have a person dear", akin to English "hold dear"). If we expect that the AST can produce a translation using the single verb "like", we may be in for trouble if the target language doesn't do that (although maybe code can be written that uses the AST and that's aware of this complexity as part of the realization of the translation).

Another example could come from the problem of describing states of being or perception, like "I'm cold", "I'm tired", "I'm hungry", "I'm thirsty", "I'm sick", etc. In English we really like using "to be" plus adjectives for such situations, but other languages have other preferred strategies. For example Latin has specialized verbs for the actions of (at least) being hungry, thirsty, or sick (like esurio, sitio, aegroto); in Romance languages people often "have" hunger or thirst (Spanish "tengo hambre", lit. 'I have hunger'; Portuguese "estou com fome", lit. 'I am with hunger'); in German it is cold "to" a person ("mir ist kalt", not "ich bin kalt" 'I am a cold person').

If you imagine having your AST start with Latin, you may have a challenging story about how you could get from "sitisne?" to "are you thirsty?" "¿tienes sed?" "está com sede?" and "hast du durst?" -- not to deny that it may be achievable with enough work.

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