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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

#221

Post by Symbiote »

mrob wrote: post #66
EvaK_de wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a Japanese sentence ending, used to seek agreement/confirmation. Similar to "right?" or "isn't it?" in English.

The Chinese sentence ending is 呢 (ne in Mandarin), it would be interesting to know if that's related.

(I've just started learning Mandarin, and enjoy looking at the origin of words and characters.)

"Innit" is slang in Britain, used at the end of a sentence. It doesn't have to mean "isn't it", but could be "aren't you", "won't you" etc.

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

#222

Post by bobbles »

ajuc wrote: post #85

Another thing: "Are you sure you want to quit?" in Slavic language will have gender of the user embedded. You need to know it to adress user correctly. You can do stilted "To the person that uses this program - are you sure you want to quit?", but that's insane. So everybody just use male version.

"Are you sure you want to Cancel?"

[OK] or [Cancel]

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

#223

Post by zem »

daxelrod wrote: post #156
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.

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 tale…

I remember the Hindi translation of Aladdin getting a bunch of critical acclaim too

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

#224

Post by EvaK_de »

MichaelGG wrote: post #144
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.…

That's if you're lucky! Google does far worse, and picks a language based on their often broken geo IP system. It's not even fixable. When viewing alt text for Google doodles, for instance, I get "localized" text even if the rest if the UI is in English. Google Play also has jacked up section titles from time to time. Netflix search box is the same way. This is in addition to the discriminatory practice of often not…

If you prefer using Google search untranslated, try their no-country-redirection: http://www.google.com/ncr

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

#225

Post by EvaK_de »

bcbrown wrote: post #196
emcrazyone wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@eloisant: I work in automotive where I deal with translations for automotive clusters for one of the largest auto makers. Automotive companies are going to what are called reconfigurables which is basically an instrument cluster with no mechanical gauges; just a screen with gauges rendered by 3D engine. Center stacks too. I kid you not, the way we translate is to use Google translate as a first pass and then the scr…

I worked for a place that used German as the "placeholder text", to avoid the problem of text longer than the allotted space. German is supposedly about 1.5 times as long as English, so if you can fit the German version, you won't have any problems with other translations being longer than the space.

German is longer than English, but there are other languages where the difference is even more noticeable, e.g. French.

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

#226

Post by wodenokoto »

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:…

Disney generally spend a lot of effort on the translations.

Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa also plays the lead in the Broadway musical Wicked. Several translations of Frozen use an actress for Elsa who played the lead in a localized version of Wicked.

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

#227

Post by rwmj »

lucio wrote: post #218
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…

Same here. Technical text translation is normally a disaster. I truly hate web pages that switch languages based on IP location, as MSDN sometimes does. In my language the translators always get wrong keywords that should not be translated, specially when they're adjectives. e.g: * "You should use the 'new' keyword..." Often get translated as something like "You should use the word that is not old..." / "Debe usar la…

To be fair this is because the code is wrong. It should use:

    printf (_("You should use the '%s' keyword"), "new");
indicating that the main string should be translated (_ == gettext) and the keyword itself should not. This also happens to generate slightly smaller binaries and fewer translations in the case where you have several keywords.

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

#228

Post by nitrogen »

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…

"X dealt a blow to Y" seems like it could be a more grammatically similar translation.

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

#229

Post by nitrogen »

psykovsky wrote: post #31
reidrac wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair it was a beta of the "Ubuntu Netbook Remix" and that bug was shortly fixed. I took some screenshots because I really liked the interface, but none of them show the bug because I usually stick to en_GB and the problem was spotted in my wife's netbook (she's Spanish teacher and likes to have the OS interface in Spanish to amuse the kids).

Not attacking free software translators. I'm one myself. As amateur as I can be. When one can't code, it can at least translate ;)

I only mention this because it occurs in both of your comments in the thread, but...

When one can't code, it can at least translate ;)

In this context the pronoun "it" would make more sense as "one"; "it" is very rarely used to refer to a person in English.

A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context.

Again, in this context, "it doesn't" might make more sense as "he or she doesn't", or less formally, "they don't".

Hope this helps with your translations :-)

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

#230

Post by pimlottc »

rmc wrote: post #204
canjobear wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". :)

While in others, it would make X a drug dealer.
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