191–200 of 236 posts
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.
But why people don’t use JAN / FEB / MAR … DD YYYY, IDK, seems low friction and no one gets confused even if they would rather see 7 JAN 2022
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior Even more, bilingual people exist! A translated version is always worse. With a good human-made translation, it may just be a matter of making things un-Google-able or misrepresenting certain concepts. With an automatic translation, it's usually completely unusable. I'm a native speaker of Dutch. I'm a near-native spe…
My parents are software translators. They've been in the business since before I was born; back when software was just starting to be translated. You have no idea how much prices and quality have fallen. It's really, really sad.
Software localization used to involve the localizers working together with the developers, making UI changes, testing the real software, and using translation memory tools as an aid to ensure consistency.
These days people just get a pile of strings to translate with no context, machine translation is used by default (and agencies pay less because they give you a garbage MT version to start off with, as if it doesn't take as much time to fix it as it would to transalate from scratch), and translation memories are used with no cross checks, often translating things wrong due to entirely different context.
Further, localization is often treated as an afterthought, with developers having no idea of what the technical requirements for good localization are. Plural forms, placeholder reordering, etc.
If you want a good translation, you need to pay for it, but nobody wants to do that these days; they just want the bare minimum so they can claim to have their software available in such and such language.
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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.
Last time I fiddled with some automated kiosk at Ben Gurion airport I noticed they used a Jordanian flag for Arabic. That's an interesting choice, because if I had to guess most of the people choosing Arabic at that kiosk would not choose that as their flag.
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.
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.
(The Tibetan flag is literally illegal to display in Tibet, as the Chinese government considers it a symbol of the separatist movement. So you probably don't want to use that...)
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If you actually care about people being able to find the switch language button, use flags. Usability trumps correctness here.
Please don't. Flags are not languages. ( http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/ ) There are many languages which cannot be clearly distinguished with a flag icon -- for example, there are dozens of languages which could be represented by an Indian flag (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Urdu...), and some languages which don't have any clear flag, or whose flag could be politically complicated to display (like Catalan, Romani, o…
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.
I would very much be on board for YYYYMMDD universal standard enforced by whatever means necessary to get it done. But why people don’t use JAN / FEB / MAR … DD YYYY, IDK, seems low friction and no one gets confused even if they would rather see 7 JAN 2022
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you actually care about people being able to find the switch language button, use flags. Usability trumps correctness here.
Please don't. Flags are not languages. ( http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/ ) There are many languages which cannot be clearly distinguished with a flag icon -- for example, there are dozens of languages which could be represented by an Indian flag (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Urdu...), and some languages which don't have any clear flag, or whose flag could be politically complicated to display (like Catalan, Romani, o…
On the contrary, if you just use the name of the language then it's not at all clear to a user who's using the "wrong" language where the language selector is.
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Getting rid of time zones is a nice idea for the first five seconds you think about it.
Mainland China did mostly. Everything is +8[0] (besides Xinjiang Time[1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
> 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" ...
My personal favourite is illectronisme, a combination of illettrisme (illiteracy) and électronique (electronic), to refer to people who are not good with computers.
This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
Probably because the author is thinking about people with poor vision? IMO, it's poor design for a page to handle accessibility issues that are already built into the browser. (It's trivial to shrink and zoom in a browser.)