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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

#201

Post by weinzierl »

schoen wrote: post #145
blywi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also Brazilian Portuguese "né", which is an end-of-sentence tag with exactly the same meaning. It's a contraction of "não é" ('isn't it') and is used in a way akin to German "nicht wahr".

Also "isso" which in German is colloquial for "Ist so" and means "That's it" or "Exactly". When in Brazil I always found it funny that they use "isso", short for "isso mesmo", in much the same way.

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

#202

Post by theoh »

lmm wrote: post #124
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…

Upper and lower casing can't be assumed to be inverse; there are plenty of other cases where they will change (e.g. precomposed characters that don't have a precomposed upper case). The correct lower-casing of "I" in English is definitely "i"; the correct upper-casing of "ı" in English is maybe a wrong question, because it just isn't an English letter, so I guess you could argue for leaving it unchanged, but converti…

With Unicode, why aren't the two Turkish Is just treated as if they have nothing to do with the normal Latin I? The fact that the glyph for uppercase dotless I resembles the glyph for uppercase Latin I should be irrelevant, surely. It's a kind of typographic false friend situation.

Maybe there's a missing level of indirection in Unicode that prevents it from doing this, but I can't see how there could be.

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

#203

Post by ademarre »

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…

Your experience speaks to this observation:

With very few exceptions, consumer hardware companies are bad at software.

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

#204

Post by rmc »

canjobear wrote: post #140
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 e…

> 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

What's interesting, is that there are dialects of English (Hiberno-English spoken in Ireland) where "X gave Y a hit" would be a way to say "X hit Y". :)

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

#205

Post by tjradcliffe »

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…

> Adhering to that single rule would eliminate like half of the "context missing" problems with software translations.

Sort of. Almost all the issues I have with translators and context come from the same word being used for different things. This is particularly true for words like "date" and "time", which can have different translations depending on context (is it the time of day, or the time the test has been running?)

So as well as using the same word for the same meaning throughout, using different words for similar-yet-subtly-distinct meanings is also required.

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

#206

Post by tjradcliffe »

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 :)

I once got a Spanish translation back and was briefly angry that the translator had left a few strings as "TODO"...

"What?!" I asked myself. "To do? Why did they ship me an incomplete file?"

Then I looked to see what the "untranslated" strings were: "ALL" (I don't speak Spanish but have enough of a smattering of European languages that it was immediately obvious what was going on.)

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

#207

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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 have a tool that does this. I produced machine generated translations of German and French as an expedient. The German messages were corrected by a native speaker and I cleaned up the French as best I could. When French is in use an extra message is printed appealing for someone to edit the weak translations.

I dealt with word order issues by avoiding formatted strings with more than one replacement field. Only one string needs to deal with singular vs plural quantities.

Lack of context was a definite problem with the machine translations. It would inconsistently choose translated words that should have been the same because the short string snippets could not be evaluated for their meaning within the narrow domain of the program using them.

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

#208

Post by jdcryans »

eloisant wrote: post #199
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"?

That's the other way around, the guy who did the translation without context wrote "jour de merde", and I saved them from releasing that in their phone calendar app during my one-day job paid in cash.

Well you really... saved the day!

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

#209

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ygra wrote: post #143
dtech wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I think Gettext on Windows still uses the locale to determine UI language, despite those two things being completely separate concepts.

At least it can be overridden with environment variables.

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

#210

Post by schoen »

weinzierl wrote: post #201
schoen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also Brazilian Portuguese "né", which is an end-of-sentence tag with exactly the same meaning. It's a contraction of "não é" ('isn't it') and is used in a way akin to German "nicht wahr".

Also "isso" which in German is colloquial for "Ist so" and means "That's it" or "Exactly". When in Brazil I always found it funny that they use "isso", short for "isso mesmo", in much the same way.

It's funny to think that the conversation fragment

- ... Né?

- Isso.

could happen in either Brazil or Germany with the same meaning. :-)

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