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What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

ericwbailey.design

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Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#101

Post by spinny »

travisjungroth wrote: post #14
lou1306 wrote: post #5

> 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”.

I think a bit more of context would even be better.

The usage of "discover" and "find out" in english and portuguese comes to mind.

words from the "discover" family, in the english language are generally used when talking about discovering something that nobody or few people knew (somebody discovers a cure for some disease), while "find out" is generally used at a more personal level (somebody finds out that someone else bumped his car)

in portuguese you can only "find" (encontrar) physical things. you can't "find out" information

This makes me thing that in some instances it might be necessary some sort of descriptive context on the meaning

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#102

Post by jobigoud »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #93

A related pet peeve of mine: if you want us to volunteer time and energy correcting or adding translations for you ("Help with the translation!"), then please make it as low friction as possible. Just linking to some third party website and expecting me to make an account, email-verify, figure out how it works, all to add a couple phrases of translation, is a good way to demotivate people trying to do free work for y…

What would you consider a low friction workflow?

For a long time in my open source application I had an ODF spreadsheet with all the translations, people could download it and send back to me. But that caused edit conflicts and was a pain to maintain. I've since moved to Weblate, which is basically what you describe, a third party website where users have to register and figure how it works, and I've got a lot more translations in and it is way easier to manage for me.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#103

Post by spidersouris »

kuroguro wrote: post #83

Sometimes I wish we could switch the whole world to a single language. Get rid of timezones and use metric everywhere while we're at it.

Great way of erasing all cultural differences and putting an end to diversity. Might as well merge all countries together into one and establish a single religion and a single political system while you're at it.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#104

Post by Joker_vD »

lou1306 wrote: post #5

> 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…

While most of modern European languages are heavily analytical, English language is pushing it straight into the isolating language territory. Morpological differences between nouns, adjectives, imperatives, infinitives? Who needs those? Just line the words in the correct order!

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#105

Post by hombre_fatal »

kuroguro wrote: post #83

Sometimes I wish we could switch the whole world to a single language. Get rid of timezones and use metric everywhere while we're at it.

About as tempting as switching all cuisine to Soylent to save us the mild indecision when having to choose a restaurant for date night.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#106

Post by squeaky-clean »

r00fus wrote: post #88
dataflow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone sets the language to (say) French but keeps their locale as English, do you write a thousand as 1,000 or 1.000? What about the reverse case?

Locale would be a country so e.g. UK? Then it'd be just like the US (1,000).

This is correct, but if we're being pedantic (it is HN after all) the locale code for the UK is "gb". The language / locale would be fr-gb.

I work on this sort of thing for airline ticketing pages. fr-gb would mean the customer wants the page text to be in French, but they want to buy a ticket using the UK system (i.e. Using GBP instead of EUR as the currency if possible, and all the formatting differences that would be specific to "gb").

Quick edit: technically I guess your locale doesn't have to determine your store region, that's just how we do it. As far as I know there's nothing except development effort preventing us from allowing someone to book a flight in French, using GB locale, and with preference for the Japanese point-of-sale system.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#107

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

908B64B197 wrote: post #82
dataflow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone sets the language to (say) French but keeps their locale as English, do you write a thousand as 1,000 or 1.000? What about the reverse case?

Congratulation: You just opened the Pandora box of locale vs language! My understanding would be that locale should dictate numerical formatting. But one could argue the opposite and also be right.

If you were discussing POSIX locale, the definitions are quite clear, and there's no ambiguity. But that's also because POSIX subdivides locale into many subsections.

From "man setlocale":

       LC_ALL              All of the locale

       LC_ADDRESS          Formatting of addresses and
                           geography-related items (*)

       LC_COLLATE          String collation

       LC_CTYPE            Character classification

       LC_IDENTIFICATION   Metadata describing the locale (*)

       LC_MEASUREMENT      Settings related to measurements
                           (metric versus US customary) (*)

       LC_MESSAGES         Localizable natural-language messages

       LC_MONETARY         Formatting of monetary values

       LC_NAME             Formatting of salutations for persons (*)

       LC_NUMERIC          Formatting of nonmonetary numeric values

       LC_PAPER            Settings related to the standard paper size (*)

       LC_TELEPHONE        Formats to be used with telephone services (*)

       LC_TIME             Formatting of date and time values

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#108

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

One aspect not entirely covered in the article is when you have a deeply technical piece of software and the dominant vocabularly of the technical field is in English.

We get many requests from users of Ardour (a crossplatform digital audio workstation) to disable automatic translation based on their system language setting, because the terms used in the original/English version are the ones they are used to.

It also leads to some hilarious discussions among translators (at least for those of us watching from the outside). The funniest one I recall was the Portugese and Brasilian Portugese translators discussing how to translate the word "Roll" in the context of a DAW's "transport control" (i.e. the "play" button)

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#109

Post by arp242 »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #35

> A device’s location/IP address isn’t indicative of the language preference of the person using it I really don't understand why this is so popular (google being a major offender). The browser already sends the preferred language(s) as a http header.

It's a major PITA as I live in a country where I don't speak the language well. It's even worse when there's no obvious way to just get it in English. It's triple worse if they decide to "localize" content for you based on your location even if you have everything set to a different country anyway.

Google really sucks at this; I can set it to English or Dutch all I want, but I still get suggestions and results in Indonesian. Funny enough, the date format is always in the confusingly reverse "month/day/year" in spite of their ham-fisted forcing of everything else.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#110

Post by obscurette »

Localization is treated as translation job in whole tech world, but in reality it should be a UI/UX design job. Most of localizations are awful even by translation standards though. And not because it lacks some kind of context etc, but nobody just cares – these are done by big agencies using mostly automatic process and with prices racing to the bottom.

PS. I have 10+ years experience with open source localization and tried to make it my job at some point. I escaped industry very quickly.

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