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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

#111

Post by blywi »

anonymousDan wrote: post #63
BjoernKW wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An amateur error perhaps but hardly limited to free software. In a particularly expensive piece of enterprise software for the finance sector that was translated into German a form field was labelled 'Hauptstadt', which translates back into 'capital (city)' as in Washington, D.C. Now, this kind of geographic information doesn't make sense at all in financial software but the well-paid developer (who had to double as…

Or the classic: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

My favorite is still this one: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/feb/08/diese...

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

#112

Post by Concours »

neilk wrote: post #57

Side note: as you might expect, Wikipedia's internationalization is the only system that attempts to do quantities and other formatting correctly for every goddamn language on the planet , but is considerably easier for translators to work with than the OP's examples (sorry, Sean ;) I did some work on bringing it to JavaScript and making it HTML-aware, and since then Santhosh Thottingal has vastly extended it and it'…

I've been looking for something like this for weeks, no luck till now, I guess I should have searched for internationalization instead of localization in this specific case on google and github. This is a great starting point, thanks a bunch for sharing. Perfect for me.

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

#113

Post by userulluipeste »

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.

I don't know, in Russian either "ты" (singular/informal) or "вы" (plural/formal) works fine for both genders. Now, for your example, Google translated result is "Вы уверены, что хотите выйти?" which seems fine to me!

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

#114

Post by cj »

I created Localize.js (https://localizejs.com), a localization SaaS.

Pluralization is a challenge, but we're able to solve this with some pretty simple HTML tags.

For example:

I have 3 dogs!

Localize.js identifies the tag with the pluralize attribute, and pluralizes the phrase to any language (including languages like Arabic which can have 6 different plural forms).

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

#115

Post by mynegation »

bmn_ wrote: post #81
neilk wrote: post #57

Side note: as you might expect, Wikipedia's internationalization is the only system that attempts to do quantities and other formatting correctly for every goddamn language on the planet , but is considerably easier for translators to work with than the OP's examples (sorry, Sean ;) I did some work on bringing it to JavaScript and making it HTML-aware, and since then Santhosh Thottingal has vastly extended it and it'…

The Russian demo does not work. Must be 1 котёнок, 2 котёнка.

Ironically, this is exactly the case described in the article, and even the article got it slightly wrong. The rules in pseudocode - for this specific sentence! - are as follows:

  if ((n % 10 == 1) && (n % 100 != 11)) { 
      // singular nominative  (not accusative as article says) - 1 котенок, 101 котенок, 301 котенок
  } else if (n % 10 >= 2 && n % 10  14) {
      // singular genitive: 2 котенка, 43 котенка, 1024 котенка
  } else {
      // all other cases plural genitive: 5 котят, 11 котят, 212 котят
  }
But this is true only for this sentence because kittens here are the subject, not the object: with Russian verb "есть" (to be, to exist) the literal translation would be "Kitten/Kittens exists/exist belonging to Harry".

Once the declension of the numbered subject(s) turns to accusative: "Гарри гладит 1 котенка" ("Harry pets one kitten"), the rules become much simpler:

  if ((n % 10 == 1) && (n % 100 != 11)) { 
      // singular accusative - 1 котенка, 101 котенка, 301 котенка
  } else {
      // all other cases plural genitive: 2 котят, 43 котят, 5 котят, 11 котят, 212 котят
  }

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

#116

Post by julie1 »

cj wrote: post #114

I created Localize.js ( https://localizejs.com ), a localization SaaS. Pluralization is a challenge, but we're able to solve this with some pretty simple HTML tags. For example: I have 3 dogs! Localize.js identifies the tag with the pluralize attribute, and pluralizes the phrase to any language (including languages like Arabic which can have 6 different plural forms).

You don't solve the inflexion problem. You would need something where the lemmization tokenization of the sentence is easily accessible to a grammar engine. Something horrible like: I have

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

#118

Post by kruczek »

gambiting wrote: post #17
mrfoto wrote: post #10

Funny how Slovene seems to tick all the complications checkboxes :D We have 4 grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural for 3 and 4, plural for 5 and above), they repeat at mod 100 (so 101 is singular, 102 dual,…), it's an inflectional language with 3 grammatical genders, sentence should take a different form depending on whether the user is male or female,…

I was just trying to think of how it would work out in Polish.... directory is "katalog" in Polish, and it would be: 1 katalog 2 katalogi 3 katalogi 4 katalogi 5 katalogów 6 katalogów ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) But if you wanted to say "X files were found in Y directories" then you would have to say: ....1 katalogu ....2 katalogach ....3 katalogach ....1000 katalogów (for 1001 even I am not…

> ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5)

Not so lucky there either:

....21 katalogów

....22 katalogi

....23 katalogi

....24 katalogi

....25 katalogów

And the same pattern repeats modulo 10.

EDIT: And as I think about the 1001 part... Actually the following sounds right to me (translating "in X directories"):

....w 1000 katalogów (w tysiącu katalogów)

....w 1001 katalogu (w tysiąc-jednym katalogu)

....w 1002 katalogach (w tysiąc-dwóch katalogach)

etc.

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

#119

Post by ajuc »

userulluipeste wrote: post #113
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.

I don't know, in Russian either "ты" (singular/informal) or "вы" (plural/formal) works fine for both genders. Now, for your example, Google translated result is "Вы уверены, что хотите выйти?" which seems fine to me!

"Wy" (plural you) don't work for single person in Polish, it sounds like "communist-speach" to us (almost like you called people "tovarishch") :) It was only used by soviet puppet politicians during communism (as carbon copy of Russian expression).

So it needs "Ty" (singular you), and with singular you "sure" translates to "pewien" for male recipients and "pewna" for female.

In Polish it should be "Jesteś pewny(or pewien)/pewna, że chcesz wyjść?"

So, it's Polish-specific, not Slavic-specific as I thought.

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

#120

Post by dezgeg »

eCa wrote: post #99

Also, if you 'localize' something using Google Translate[1], please let the user choose language somewhere in the app. For example, the Hostelworld ios app[2] requires the user to change language for the entire device . As something of a language perfectionist it leaves the app virtually useless. [1] Translating to English from other languages works fine for me. [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hostelworld.com-hos…

I wanted to do that on one Android app, but apparently it's impossible to implement with Android's built-in localization features.
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