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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

#121

Post by missedthecue »

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…

It's crazy to believe that EasyJet wouldn't pay an Italian guy for a few months to translate the buttons and commands and notifications in their application, considering Italy is a fairly large market for them.

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

#122

Post by hrpnk »

One problem I stumbled upon frequently is codebases that did not support localized formats, but just assumed a certain format to use, for example through concatenation.

There are capabilities built into the programming languages, which allow to format numbers, currencies, etc. with a specific locale. There are also great resources [1] out there that provide all kinds of formats and localized names for countries, currencies, etc.

[1] Unicode CLDR: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr

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

#123

Post by seszett »

andruby wrote: post #46
lksaar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar experience as a german on the internet. 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 somethin…

Aliexpress in Dutch is lovely! Plenty of items on Aliexpress can be shipped from multiple locations. "China" is almost always one of the options. Well, in Dutch they've translated that to "Porselein". That is a valid translation, if you are talking about plates and dishes made from porcelain) I wonder how actively harmful this bad translation is to their business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_(material) screen…

Weird, I sometimes get the French translation of AliExpress (when my cookie expires I suppose) and I haven't noticed "China" being translated as Porcelaine in French. I wonder why it's different. Also now I wonder why I get the French version, since I live in Flanders (although I'm a French speaker).

AliExpress translations are totally incomprehensible though anyway. I really don't think they should show the translated versions by default.

(By the way, your second link doesn't respond for me)

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

#124

Post by kakkun »

sofixa wrote: post #69
kakkun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had issues with Google's localization choices for a long time. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue with other language combinations. I'm a bilingual Japanese/English speaker. Searching Google's search languages to English and Japanese causes the following: - Random Japanese words show up in things such as Google Maps, even though my display language is set to English. - Japanese results will be prioritize…

Yep. I'm trilingual English/French/Bulgarian, and i have all three as languages in Google search, and they're mixed up too often. I can understand Google proposing the French spelling of an English word and results for it, but almost every time when i search something in Bulgarian i get results in Russian, even when i use words that don't exist in Russian. The languages aren't even that close, and they aren't the onl…

Yeah, it's annoying, especially since I've told Google explicitly the languages I know. I do suppose that a lot of people haven't set their languages, and the automatic detection works well enough, most of the time.

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

#125

Post by seszett »

TrueGeek wrote: post #10
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…

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…

> You really think someone as big as EasyJet would get that right.

Well even Apple has a wrong translation on the iOS keyboard in French. The "Return" key is translated as "Retour" (generally meaning "Back" rather than "Carriage return") instead of "Entrée".

It might have changed in the last years though, I don't know.

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

#126

Post by 1986 »

mappu wrote: post #113
manuel_w wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many many years ago, trying to learn German as an english speaker, i was taught Maybe (EN) -> Wehrscheinlich (DE) - Is that correct? If it's even remotely close to being correct, it definitely makes sense pedagogically to avoid the ambiguity.

I learned:

- maybe = vielleicht

- probably = wahrscheinlich

- definitely = bestimmt

But a big part of the gap between being able to speak in a language and being able to comprehend a language is that there are often plenty of ways to communicate/translate the same concept. It's much easier for a learner to say "vielleicht" every time they mean to indicate "maybe" than it is for a learner to learn that "vielleicht", "eventuell", "möglicherweise", etc. all basically map to the concept of "maybe" (which of course conceptually maps to its own set of English words - "maybe", but also "perhaps", "possibly", etc.).

It gets even hairier because word choice is highly culture-bound and the semantics are not guaranteed to be the same as the top dictionary definition. "Could you maybe take a look at this?" is not really asking someone to "maybe" take a look, the asker definitely wants them to take a look, it's just a construction that carries a deferential tone.

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

#127

Post by lucb1e »

In case the author is here: for me, the font size was at a level where I found it was most comfortable to read after zooming out all the way to 50%. And I have neither great eyesight (I should go for new glasses... soon...) nor a retina screen with zoom or anything. Probably looks great on phones, but on desktop for me the font was set uncomfortably large.

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

#128

Post by qsort »

jobigoud wrote: post #100
qsort wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Ironically, the most Anglo-centric assumption of them all is that people are only fluent in exactly one language. Configuring anything to be truly multilingual as opposed to "in another language" has terrible UX.

What do you mean? Having parts of the interface in one language and other parts in another? I'm fluent in multiple languages (as most European devs) and I've never really heard or thought about this concept so I'm intrigued. What kind of software are you referring to that could have this feature?

I'm talking more about the behavior of websites or applications.

For example, I'm on macOS. I want the OS GUI to be in English and to use the US keyboard layout, because I'm used to that and buttons/labels aren't a big deal anyway.

However, most of my communication with my coworkers (for example, MS Teams) happens in Italian, so I'd prefer those programs to display their UI in Italian (so that everyone using the program would be on the same page) and to have Italian spellcheck.

When I open Safari to look at docs, Wikipedia or search results, I want those in English. But e-commerce sites like Amazon need to be in Italian. Except if I'm shopping for technical books or manuals: I need those in English.

For some of those needs there's a workaround, some I found completely impossible to solve (I can't seem to get the spellchecker to switch reliably, my solution is simply to disable it: I make zero grammar mistakes in Italian and most people are willing to put up with my broken English).

Generally speaking, I find that most UIs are downright hostile to "mixed" needs like mine, and I end up defaulting to the US/English locale everywhere because it's the least broken (except for units of measurement. Come on guys, inches? Farhenheit?)

The concept of locale itself is broken and wrong: I want it.IT or en.US contextually, neither is the correct one, why should I be asked to definitively pick either? In many cases, localization is downright harmful. Excel comes to mind, but even several ETL tools "helpfully" "translate" decimal points to commas by default!

Websites could greatly benefit from this, e.g. social media, where you're likely to be part of both a local community that speaks your native language, and a global community that speaks English.

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

#129

Post by jonas21 »

OneTimePetes wrote: post #23
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 wish the users could edit the text and then the app would take over a text the users agreed upon in majority. It cant be that hard.

Sounds like a good way to end up with all the strings in your app translating to "penis".
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