131–140 of 236 posts
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior 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 l…
> 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”.
> 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.
Not that I'd know where to complain to, but Google employees have friends so it would reach them in some modicum anyhow if others experience this problem as well. And everyone who ever went to a country whose language they're not very comfortable in will be having this problem.
> 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…
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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”.
>The actual identifier should be something like “Open a ticket (imperative, button)” 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.
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…
It's not that German has a "unique word" for things, it's that they use compound words: multiple words written together without space to form a new word. This is a feature found in most Germanic languages except English, because reasons. It's just that German is the most commonly translated of them. So, for example, in Dutch you would write sciencefictiontelevisieserie instead of "science fiction television series";…
The Twitter link shows a picture taken at a race event, where it says on the door: wedstrijd secretariaat, meaning secretariat competition in English. It's two words, so the first modifies the second (adjective) rather than forming a compound noun, thus some wedstrijd (competition) of the secretariat seems to be held there. Writing wedstrijdsecretariaat as one word makes it a compound noun and translates as competition secretariat which is (presumably? :D) what was meant. Ha-ha! Germanic humor, I guess. (I really enjoy them at least, since it really is what people wrote and they don't even realize it. Probably ties into pentesting, where I also exploit what people incorrectly wrote?)
> 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.
Correct, but note that hyphens between the parts are always legal if you think it's more readable.
For example meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandeling was not hard to get for me but then the ...behandelaarsopleiding variant is really stretching the possibilities and I'd definitely start to hyphenate there, also because it's a bit of a false start (it's an education, but you're starting off with a disorder and then segueing into treatment and then again veering off into it being an education that you're describing -- it's a bit like "The old man the boat." in English: a garden-path sentence or an intuinzin which starts off making you think it's one thing and then continues in a way that forces you to reevaluate it).
Also, if you have a reason why you didn't put an "s" between behandelaar and opleiding I'd be interested! It feels to me like there should be one but I don't know the rule.
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.
Getting rid of time zones is a nice idea for the first five seconds you think about it.
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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…
Heck, Microsoft got it wrong — Swedish versions of Windows used to have a folder called "Vanliga filer" (Ordinary files). This was, of course, the "Common files" folder, but the translator, probably having no context, picked the wrong meaning of "common", and chose a Swedish word which does not have the "shared" meaning.
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 t…
99% of the time though, it's a word or two that I wish to correct in a site I might never visit again (just like I might correct a typo in a Wikipedia article that I'll never see again), and the overhead is many times more work than the actual translation. If I was able to (for eg.) hover on the vertical Feedback button that many sites now have, see a Translation Feedback option, and paste in the offending phrase with some context, and the correct translation, I'd be much more likely to do it. That can perhaps then automatically go into the third party website as from some common guest user, maybe even given lower priority since they likely require more processing - you can even warn me with "Register here to ensure your translation is seen" to manage expectations. But this way, the long tail of users that are put off by the friction can still together contribute - many eyes, shallow mistakes, etc.
> my open source application
My gripe is with the many large (for- and non-profit) organizations that do this though, to be clear. If it's something from a solo developer or a small team, it's understandable that the overhead of processing these might be more than they can bear (though that can be reduced by some categorization on the feedback form).