What they don’t tell you when you translate your app • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by IncRnd » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

kemitche wrote: post #144

IncRnd wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even Create Ticket. From the description, it seems a ticket is being created not opened, despite the slang that people incorrectly use for buttons.

If a ticket is closed upon completion, it stands to reason that creating a ticket is "opening" it.

> If a ticket is closed upon completion, it stands to reason that creating a ticket is "opening" it.

That's faulty reasoning.

At the inception of a ticket, it is first created and then opened. It is common to have these programmed to work as a single button push, but they are two actions, and creation always happens first, even when the ticket is not opened. Later, when the ticket is completed, it gets closed.

When you go into your house, an opening must first be created, either a doorway or some other hole in the wall like a window. Then, after the hole is created, you can enter the house.

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

#162

Post by crazygringo » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior

There are multiple comments here about how it usually is inferior.

But even when it's not, there can still be reasons to stick to English.

I've done a lot of work with Brazilian graphic designers, and they all use Photoshop/Illustrator in English -- the Portuguese version is essentially "unusable". Not because the translations are necessarily bad, but because Photoshop has its own bespoke vocabulary.

E.g. what's the difference between "image" size and "canvas" size, between auto "tone" and auto "color", between "crop" and "trim", or between "vibrance" and "saturation"?

In layperson English these are essentially synonyms, but mean different things in Photoshop. And if you want to follow any Photoshop tutorial, or communicate with any designer, you need to know these "English" terms, just like every programmer needs to know "if" and "then".

Translating adds yet another layer of confusion that hinders more than it helps.

Of course, this is specific to professional tools that require training -- it doesn't really apply to consumer software intended for a general audience.

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

#163

Post by gverrilla » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

I see a lot of bad translations to brazilian portuguese even on big companies/services. It was always obvious to me that they could get better conversion rates if they fixed it. It's tricky, but not that hard compared to the benefit.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #107

908B64B197 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you were discussing POSIX locale, the definitions are quite clear, and there's no ambiguity. But that's also because POSIX subdivides locale into many subsections. From "man setlocale": LC_ALL All of the locale LC_ADDRESS Formatting of addresses and geography-related items (*) LC_COLLATE String collation LC_CTYPE Character classification LC_IDENTIFICATION Metadata describing the locale (*) LC_MEASUREMENT Settings…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by aaron695 » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

And translators are artists, don't trust them to know what they are doing from an IT perspective. Like using short, close enough phrases.

They also might get nationalistic and think they represent their country/culture over your app.

And fuck worrying about things like 'Flags are not languages' it's bike shedding.

And bullshit about culture and colors and what means yes/no. If they have a phone they know world/Western concepts.

These are the least of your worries over formatting and keeping updates and testing on what's now two apps.

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

#166

Post by chrismorgan » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

Hmm, haven’t come across the language icon before: http://www.languageicon.org/>. Unfortunately, it looks rather shabbily done and very abandoned. Serving a JPEG for the large image instead of a PNG (to get an alpha channel while still being easily copyable) or SVG (for best results except for most copy-and-paste purposes), speaking of 2013 in the present tense, no HTTPS, claiming “copyright and hassle free” but it’s actually using an extremely problematic barely-specified license (claiming “a CC license” with no link, and a whole bunch of terms so that it’s a poorly-modified CC-BY-SA-NC), claiming you can download “rar or zip” and it includes SVG and more but it’s actually ZIP only with an eclectic mixture of bizarre formats (not including SVG), colours (some obviously wrong) and sizes, the icon itself is not aligned to any sort of sane grid and has been hand-placed and angled… all up it’s an unhappy mess. That’s not the way to go about trying to make a universal language icon that you want adopted. Pity, because the idea is decent (though the original article is quite correct that labels are far better than icons anyway).

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

#167

Post by jefftk » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

> The web’s Anglocentric-bias exists largely because of where it was originally created

At CERN, in Switzerland?

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

#168

Post by travisjungroth » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 12:16 AM UTC

yarcob wrote: post #114

travisjungroth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think there are any "middle options" that result in a good product. You want a localized app, but you don't want to put the work in. 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.…

> You want X, but you don't want to put the work in.

Yes! That is exactly what people want.

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

#169

Post by ajsnigrutin » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

I live in slovenia... for many cases, it is impossible to even translate stuff directly into our language, because we don't only have singular and plural, we also have "dual" (for two of something). We also have a lot of irregular stuff, where we count beers:

- eno pivo (one beer)

- dve pivi (two beers)

- tri piva (three beers)

- štiri piva (four beers)

- pet piv (five (or more) beers)

How the hell do you put this into strings.xml?!

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

#170

Post by mastazi » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 12:33 AM UTC

Youtube still shows dates for "Premieres on..." in MM/DD/YY, regardless of the locale. Internationalisation and localisation are such hard problems that even the big FAANG companies fail at it.