151–160 of 236 posts
> Words may have radically different lengths in other languages
Sometimes the UI gets completely screwed, and I know it'll just look better in English, if the design was originally done with English text
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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 prog…
Ah ok, I agree and I have some of the same issues. I'm using Firefox and the spellchecker works well. I regularly switch between 3 languages. Same for Thunderbird, plus there is an extension that remembers which language I'm using with a specific contact, which is great. Regarding the en-US locale, I've read that some people use the en-CA locale instead, this way you get (partly) American spelling, but with metric un…
> 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…
“Open ticket” doesn’t even really make sense in English. Maybe “Buy ticket” or “View ticket” or similar would make sense there. Flux bus is German, I suspect the translation was from German and not English in this case?
So it's pretty easy to get from Open ticket to Papers Please.
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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…
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National flags are not in general a very good way of labelling languages. There are far more languages in the world than countries. In any case, since people are looking for a language they understand it's good enough to write each language name in the corresponding language, like Wikipedia does (wikipedia.org). But that's not the question, anyway. The question is how to label the button that lets the user change the…
National flags are actually a very good way of labeling languages for two reasons: first and most important, almost everybody already understands that a flag-looking icon (or two-flags-stacked-on-each-other icon) is used for switching languages. That's already a very strong practical reason to use them. Second, for like 70% of the most popular languages there are flag assignments that won't mortally offend the speake…
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I set my Android phone to English mostly to avoid badly translated apps. Not so much for the major ones, but you never know if you might get some really bad machine-translated stuff in some apps. As there isn't an easy way to set this per app, it makes more sense to me to just switch the phone entirely to English.
That's also one of the reasons why I don't use a localised version of a desktop OS. Especially on Linux, where everything follows the OS locale and the translations of many open source applications are either only half-done or leave a bit to be desired in terms of quality, the original English strings are just a better experience if you're proficient enough. I'm not saying this to bash open source translations (let a…
The translators also likely did not understand which words were key app terms which should stay constant. For example "benefit" is a key term which can not ever be substituted out with something like "improvement" even if it seems like it makes more sense in the particular string. But without knowing the app well, you wouldn't know this.
Seems like it would be better just convincing everyone to use the English versions of everything since those are perfect and the majority of the world knows it now.
> 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 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…
This holds true in all areas of software development—nay, in business in general. To the point where I’m not really sure why people do expect large players to do a good job, because they just about never do.
Large organisations are very close to incapable of producing good results—their software will be clunky and slow, their translations present but bad, their customer support painful. Small organisations are more likely to be able to produce good results. Notwithstanding this, small enterprises are often unable to match large for certain resource availability (including time!), which acts as a balancing factor so that small is not often uniformly superior to large, though it’s much more likely to be superior in a certain subset of fields; and this is the case with i18n/l10n.
I think this actually stands to very simple reason when examined numerically: have enough mass and you’ll produce average results (regression to the mean); be small and you’re more likely to deviate from the mean, whether for good or for bad, and if for bad you’re more likely to fail, so you’ll tend to end up with more above-average small players.
This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
One annoying issue with translated apps the author doesn't cover is "googlability", the fact that we often need to google an error message or menu label in order to solve a problem. This leads to a lot of bilingual people running their software in English just in case they need to paste an error message into a search engine.
On the other way, Chromium devtools doesn't even have translations so it doesn't have this problem. And the new Edge (Chromium) translates the devtool by default, but there is an option allowing you to switch back to English in devtool only.
> 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.