A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

Post by pavel_lishin » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

po wrote: post #53

mrfoto wrote: post #10

Funny how Slovene seems to tick all the complications checkboxes :D We have 4 grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural for 3 and 4, plural for 5 and above), they repeat at mod 100 (so 101 is singular, 102 dual,…), it's an inflectional language with 3 grammatical genders, sentence should take a different form depending on whether the user is male or female,…

Just curious... are Slovene web services more likely to ask your gender after you sign up so they can get the grammar right or do they just go with 'male' or something?

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #39

PinguTS wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not notice it. But there are other people who do. That is the difference between a very well designed product or a product, which just does the job. That is the reason why engineers should not design interfaces. That should be left to UI/UX experts. Just the other day, I as an engineer myself, complained to another that his product does the job nicely and looks OK. But it was missing this little twist of a fi…

Of course, I'm sure there are people who notice this. My question was whether something like this makes enough of a difference to justify the investment. As a developer you only have a limited amount of funds and time to spend on your product. Your goal is to invest these in a way that gives you the biggest returns. Of course it's great to not just have a translation that "does the job" and if you can do better you d…

Post by pavel_lishin » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:11 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #119

userulluipeste wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, in Russian either "ты" (singular/informal) or "вы" (plural/formal) works fine for both genders. Now, for your example, Google translated result is "Вы уверены, что хотите выйти?" which seems fine to me!

"Wy" (plural you) don't work for single person in Polish, it sounds like "communist-speach" to us (almost like you called people "tovarishch") :) It was only used by soviet puppet politicians during communism (as carbon copy of Russian expression). So it needs "Ty" (singular you), and with singular you "sure" translates to "pewien" for male recipients and "pewna" for female. In Polish it should be "Jesteś pewny(or pe…

Post by radnor » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

theoh wrote: post #68

The two Turkish letters dotted and dotless i are often confused by users of poorly localised software. Wikipedia links to a murder case allegedly caused by this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I A real horror story. (Less seriously, Unicode has counterintuitive case-changing behaviours with those letters. If you are working outside the Turkish locale and uppercase a dotless I and then lowercase it, i…

Post by chucksmash » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #13

reidrac wrote: post #7

Slightly OT, mi favourite localization error was in Ubuntu when they had that nice netbook interface (that later would become Unity). The network icon label was "Rojo" in the Spanish localization, that is the word for "red" color. What? Well, if you translate "Net" to Spanish you get "Red"; and if you translate that again (by mistake), you get "Rojo". There you are :)

OT means Out of Topic? In french we say HS (for Hors Sujet).