11–20 of 236 posts
This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
I realize that viewing websites on computers is much less the norm than it used to be, but such large text feels really strange.
No, it is not about expectations. In +95% of cases[1] the localized[2] version is objectively worse, to the point where it often only is possible for me to understand by first translating it back to English.
If you give me a localized version first, and don’t give me an obvious way to permanently choose English, I’m likely gone.
[1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite often they fail too
[2] My first language is one of the smaller European languages (<20M speakers), perhaps bigger languages have higher quality.
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothi…
The actual identifier should be something like “Open a ticket (imperative, button)” and then that phrase has translations, including the English “Open ticket”.
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothi…
This is surprising. You really think someone as big as EasyJet would get that right. We're doing a translation now into Japanese and the translator is actually taking the time to look at screenshots and use the app to see the text in context. It makes a huge difference. As you've pointed out, it's one thing to see the string "open" in a XLF file, it's quite another to realize it's intent. This requires setting up dem…
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothi…
I think the issue is many translation databases just hold the English text and then all the translations. So the entry is “Open ticket” and then you just drop in the translation anywhere that phrase shows up. But sometimes “open” is a verb, sometimes a noun. The actual identifier should be something like “Open a ticket (imperative, button)” and then that phrase has translations, including the English “Open ticket”.
Or even better: "ui.ticket.actions.open" — trying to shoehorn linguistic categories into translation files is a painful experience, but dumb specific IDs work great and make untranslated captions apparent.
I have some sites showing in, say, Chinese, where even the current language is a Chinese glyph. Nothing on such a page is readable for a non-Chinese speaker. So you get to click around randomly until some menu opens where you see the word 'English' which brings you to a page you can read enough to get to your own language.
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothi…
Aliexpress (straight up wrong translations), Discord (anglicism, adjective ordering and weird sentence/tone structures) and plenty of others I don't remember, the list is pretty long. Size doesn't really seem play an effect aswell.
Another big issue are potential bugs you encounter. If you just get a translated error message without any error number or something similar it's a very frustrating experience to troubleshoot it. I've spend quite some time retranslating error messages to solve issues. Add to it that often knowledge bases are outdated in the translated languages.
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothi…
Flux bus is German, I suspect the translation was from German and not English in this case?
This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
IMO, it's poor design for a page to handle accessibility issues that are already built into the browser. (It's trivial to shrink and zoom in a browser.)