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

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

#181

Post by taejo » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #141

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…

That sounds like a great technical approach, although it can't necessarily remove the problem of idiomaticity that the article mentions (with the example of "I didn't search any directories"). Probably better examples are possible, in any case where the most idiomatic way to express something isn't a literal translation of that thing from other languages. Maybe like English "I don't care" Portuguese "tanto faz" (lite…

BTW, egal doesn't mean equal in German (though it's borrowed from French égal, which does). It means "irrelevant", "all the same", "unimportant".

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

#182

Post by btown » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:27 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:…

If, by analogy, the visuals of a movie musical are the "backend" and the audio is the "frontend," then what these localizers do is the equivalent of completely redesigning the entire frontend. Dubbed musicals have an incredible number of constraints in terms of number of syllables, scansion, etc., so the script translators need to be given a tremendous amount of leeway and creative freedom. They're basically lyricists in their own right, in a world where everything's composed melody-first!

In software, this would translate to localization coders being able to (and having the talent to) rewrite the entire frontend logic. And if your software product is going to make multi-millions in new markets by virtue of feeling like it's translated natively, it might be worth retaining native-speaker coder(s) to maintain a branch that parallels (and consistently merges in) your master branch, and rewrites display logic as it comes in. I'd imagine the Googles of the world do exactly this.

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

#183

Post by csours » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

blywi wrote: post #125

lmm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool example, but I think "ne" is the "correct" way to romanize ね.

Could also be from German, although this would also be written ne instead of neh. People from the northern part of Germany use this in pretty much the same way it is used in Japanese (at least according to what I know with my limited knowledge of Japanese) I always thought of this as a strange quirk that the same language construct can evolve in two unrelated languages. It's just like parallel evolution in biology.

Interestingly, there's also the Yiddish: nu? Which itself likely comes from German or Russian

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

#184

Post by tedunangst » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #174

theoh wrote: post #68

The two Turkish letters dotted and dotless i are often confused by users of poorly localised software. Wikipedia links to a murder case allegedly caused by this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I A real horror story. (Less seriously, Unicode has counterintuitive case-changing behaviours with those letters. If you are working outside the Turkish locale and uppercase a dotless I and then lowercase it, i…

Link to the case in question: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two...

I think if you stab somebody over a text message, there's more going on than just a missing dot. As if it'd be acceptable to kill somebody even if they did call your daughter a prostitute.

The article itself could benefit from corrections: "with a knife on his chest" That doesn't sound so bad.

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

#185

Post by tedunangst » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

tux3 wrote: post #15

Qt takes care of that in a really nice way. You write tr("I scanned %1 directory.", "", count) and it takes cares of applying the correct translation with the right plurals depending on the number. http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.2/qobject.html#tr

How does that deal with the case where it should translate to "I didn't scan any directories"? According to the documentation, "In the translated version the variables must still appear." http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.2/linguist-translators.html

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

#186

Post by jdcryans » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 5:10 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…

> and me for French > The French guy actually translated "Garbage day" to something like "Shitty day"

So you translated it to "jour de merde"?

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

#187

Post by smhg » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

Now, I don't know the state of the gettext utilities in 1999, but the arguments don't seem to hold up anymore (as others commented).

It just surprises me how many times gettext is discarded as "not solving the problem" while it gets many things right.

It feels like the lack of knowledge about the complexity of i18n/l10n and about gettext are often the real issues.

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

#188

Post by mcphage » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 5:12 PM UTC

jdcryans wrote: post #186

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…

> and me for French > The French guy actually translated "Garbage day" to something like "Shitty day" So you translated it to "jour de merde"?

The commenter wasn't the translator, they were the proof-reader:

> When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone.

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

#189

Post by jdcryans » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #188

jdcryans wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and me for French > The French guy actually translated "Garbage day" to something like "Shitty day" So you translated it to "jour de merde"?

The commenter wasn't the translator, they were the proof-reader: > When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone.

Ah that makes more sense, thanks.

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

#190

Post by sosborn » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

bmn_ wrote: post #89

lmm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

That's incorrect, that interrogation particle (for making the question in your example) is か. ね is different.

ね is the colloquial way of turning a statement into a question.