111–120 of 236 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with translated apps.
I've always felt that a popup with an error code should have a "search the web for this code" button.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't German UI conventions follow the convention of using infinitive verbs for commands normally? ('öffnen' instead of 'öffne'?) [the only exception I know is the adjective "rückgängig" for "undo" ] Though even there your point still stands - they can be easily distinguished from the perfect form ('opened' (geöffnet) vs 'to open' (öffnen) ). So I guess I'm nit-picking a bit.
Native german speaker here. Have no clue about UI conventions nor grammar, but I'd expect either "Öffne Ticket" or "Ticket öffnen". "Öffnen Ticket" is wrong, just as "Ticket öffne". I suppose the Flixbus app was made by native German speakers coding in English language. That would explain why they chose "open ticket" rather than "view ticket" or similar. As some of the parent posts said, you also "open files" here, s…
Is that correct? If it's even remotely close to being correct, it definitely makes sense pedagogically to avoid the ambiguity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe the translator should get annotated screenshots of the app. Laid out in a story board. If you just hand someone a list of strings to translate, there's no way you'll get sensible results. Also, you should test you translations. Some of the translations that I've seen (even from reputable companies) are so bad that it's pretty obvious no native speaker has ever looked them over.
The tension is that people want to reuse translations. So maybe you have the story board for the first version. Then, someone makes a new button. In Django, they'd put _("Open ticket") as the text, see there's already a translation, and think they're good to go. Sure, having every page looked at by a translator for every language every time you make a change would be ideal, but also a bit costly and slow. I think the…
If you add some new text somewhere in the UI, you need to start the app and make sure it looks right. If you only do that for one language, and don't check other languages, then there's going to be one language that's broken.
So your app is going to look broken in one language. And you probably will never find out, because the people who run into the bug don't speak your language.
From IGN's article about the difficulties of game development ( https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-making-g... ): “Planning ahead helps, but nothing will prepare you for German,” [Joe Mirabello] said. “German destroys your best laid plans. German will defeat you. That text field you thought would only ever need a single 10-20 character word? Nope. German has a unique word for that and it’s a hundred…
So, for example, in Dutch you would write sciencefictiontelevisieserie instead of "science fiction television series"; it's not an "unique word", just four words strung together. There are some examples that can be quite long; the longest in the dictionary is meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornissen, or "multiple personality disorders", although you can easily make it longer by adding more words: meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandeling ("multiple personality disorder treatment") or meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandelaaropleiding ("multiple personality disorder treatment education"). I miss this in English by the way; you can get creative with it and form new compound words quite easily.
Sometimes the addition or lack of a space can change something quite a lot, so you can't just insert them because it's convenient.
It sure can be annoying fitting these things in boxes at times though.
[1]: https://twitter.com/spatiegebruik/status/1434538804883427330
> 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”.
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 a…
Modern UI design tooling allows for integrations with Localization Management Systems, which will perform automated translation or pseudolocalization in order to allow the designer to preview how their text looks like in another language or length.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't German UI conventions follow the convention of using infinitive verbs for commands normally? ('öffnen' instead of 'öffne'?) [the only exception I know is the adjective "rückgängig" for "undo" ] Though even there your point still stands - they can be easily distinguished from the perfect form ('opened' (geöffnet) vs 'to open' (öffnen) ). So I guess I'm nit-picking a bit.
Native german speaker here. Have no clue about UI conventions nor grammar, but I'd expect either "Öffne Ticket" or "Ticket öffnen". "Öffnen Ticket" is wrong, just as "Ticket öffne". I suppose the Flixbus app was made by native German speakers coding in English language. That would explain why they chose "open ticket" rather than "view ticket" or similar. As some of the parent posts said, you also "open files" here, s…
> 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!