Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ericwbailey.design

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 236 posts

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

#171

Post by david_allison »

chrismorgan wrote: post #166

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’…

https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate is a reasonable alternative to be used with a dropdown selector

PNG/SVG available. Under Apache 2.0 [0]

[0] https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/...

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

#172

Post by Galanwe »

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…

French here, I do the same, French translation are unbearable.

Not only will there be tons of small mistakes with nouns/verbs as you mentioned, but maybe worst, there is often "overtranslation".

Some words are well established as technical jargon in English, and should _not_ be translated.

- "cloud" -> "infonuagique"

- "email" -> "courriel"

- "freeware" -> "gatuiciel"

...

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

#173

Post by MatmaRex »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #169

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 in…

Well, I don't know how to put it into strings.xml specifically, but there are localisation systems that handle it without much fuss. It requires a bit more effort from developers and translators, but it's not that hard in concept.

For example, Fluent (https://projectfluent.org/, used by Firefox), or MediaWiki's localisation system (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Message_paramete...).

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

#174

Post by david_allison »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #169

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 in…

CLDR should work

https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/37/supplem...

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

#175

Post by fomine3 »

copperx wrote: post #45
emilecantin wrote: post #12

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.

Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with translated apps.

I wonder why message code culture disappeared now.

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

#176

Post by brigandish »

david_allison wrote: post #40
brigandish wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars and Stripes or a Hinomaru ?

A few issues: You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open yourself up to political/territorial disputes. Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to maintenance and territorial disputes). Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China flag Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban flag for Pashto (Afghani)? Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our tran…

Why would anyone pick anything other than:

- a Union Jack, because that’s the origin

- an American flag, because it’s the largest English speaking nation

- or their own flag (e.g. Australian)

if the language is English?

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

#177

Post by brigandish »

317070 wrote: post #38
brigandish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some sites, like Google, will helpfully change the language depending on your current IP address. Trying to find how to switch to English from say, Korean, when Google surely knows that I'm English and don't speak Korean (I'm reminded of this[1]) should be forced upon the chimps writing their UIs. What's wrong with using national flags? It's so easy for the user, don't designers care about us? [1] https://news.ycombi…

National flags and languages are not a 1:1 map. Some flags have multiple languages, and some languages have multiple flags. And that can be "close enough", until you for example serve English speaking people in Ireland the Union Jack. Both languages and flags can be sensitive topics in certain parts of the world.

If anyone in Ireland is offended at the use of a Union Jack to signify the button for English language then they need to grow up. Fast.

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

#178

Post by brigandish »

yorwba wrote: post #73
317070 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National flags and languages are not a 1:1 map. Some flags have multiple languages, and some languages have multiple flags. And that can be "close enough", until you for example serve English speaking people in Ireland the Union Jack. Both languages and flags can be sensitive topics in certain parts of the world.

Also, often the country and language settings need to be independently modifiable, e.g. for pricing vs. product description.

Agreed. The symbol for pricing could surely be the actual symbol though (€$¥£ etc).

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

#179

Post by brigandish »

kakkun wrote: post #60
brigandish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some sites, like Google, will helpfully change the language depending on your current IP address. Trying to find how to switch to English from say, Korean, when Google surely knows that I'm English and don't speak Korean (I'm reminded of this[1]) should be forced upon the chimps writing their UIs. What's wrong with using national flags? It's so easy for the user, don't designers care about us? [1] https://news.ycombi…

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…

I’m learning Japanese and I’ve had a very similar experience... although I haven’t noticed the Chinese results, which is surely a result of my slow progress! (o_0)

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

#180

Post by david_allison »

brigandish wrote: post #176
david_allison wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few issues: You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open yourself up to political/territorial disputes. Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to maintenance and territorial disputes). Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China flag Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban flag for Pashto (Afghani)? Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our tran…

Why would anyone pick anything other than: - a Union Jack, because that’s the origin - an American flag, because it’s the largest English speaking nation - or their own flag (e.g. Australian) if the language is English?

(1) You're proposing displaying a Union Jack to users in the Republic of Ireland

(2) You have a dependency on the number of states in the US. British people tolerate seeing the US flag, but it implies en-US, rather than en-GB

It's much more simple to avoid these issues by using a generic "A/文" symbol

Post reply on HN