You should use software in the language of its authors, given that you speak it, of course. This language just happens be English most of the time. Localization is, in my experience, almost always poorly done.
Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#22Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a per-user, per-program or per-session. Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.
Typically on a windows box they're in resources (not hard-coded) and the resources pointed to are toggled by the current culture. Unfortunately this usually works on the premise that you change the language for the computer in one go as opposed to being able to do it per application or per session.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#23That's why I write my code (var and function names, comments) in English. First, it meshes nicely with the rest of the language, keywords specially. Second, the most important docs, books, forums, wikis, mailing lists, etc are in English.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#24This is why my company decided to go with a logging/messaging mechanism that stores messages by ID with parameters. We can get a log file from customers in France who see the error message in French, but we can read their log file in English because it's in a neutral format. This isn't a panacea, as it means that there's a bit more work involved to integrate with tools like Splunk, and we obviously don't log to anyth…
Why would your customers even need to see the log file? For general errors we have a language table that spits out the local copy to the screen. Common errors are translated (~100). Behind the scenes, the logs are in english for internal errors, and the language of the OS for everything else. We rely on .NET so exceptions are tied to the OS. We have some older components that do spit out error codes. (like COMS, erro…
Our logs aren't just error messages; they're all sorts of messages that the user of our (backup) software may be interested in. I'm trying to figure out ways to reduce our messages so that our customers only see the details that they will really be interested in, but there is a large subset of our customers who want to be able to review how their backups went (and not just with the email summary that we send, which is generated from the log messages, BTW).
Our tracing facility, on the other hand, is purely English.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is. However, if you don't include search keys in the text presented to the user, it isn't going help when you get a dialog that says (FTA): Sterownik ekranu przestał działać, ale odzyskał sprawność. That's missing something at the beginning or end that allows a search engine to say "aha! this is looking for this error message, which in English is this ". This is a hard problem, at the same time; the translate…
Hmmm... Including a button on dialog boxes for googling (or bing'ing) the error in language-neutral form... Nice item for a future GUI wishlist.
I'm not sure that a button for search is the right way to go; it would work, definitely, but at the cost of cluttering your UI. Insertion into copy is probably a better idea, because you may be emailing the error message to a systems administrator instead of searching it.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#26Another small example of the network effect increasing the dominance of the already-dominant language.
Yes, but the dominant languages can change over time.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#27Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a per-user, per-program or per-session. Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.
Years ago when I had nVidia graphics cards, their control panel always displayed the language of your computer's country settings, you got absolutely no option of selecting the display language yourself. Needless to say, the controls for overriding anti-aliasing or fog-table or z-buffer settings, translated to my native language, was completely incomprehensible. I still don't understand why they bothered.
English could be considered a neutral language, one to fall back when you can't use the right one.
That does not forbid nVidia from hiring decent translators.
And, BTW, were the software open-source, you could correct the messages for them to make sense..
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would your customers even need to see the log file? For general errors we have a language table that spits out the local copy to the screen. Common errors are translated (~100). Behind the scenes, the logs are in english for internal errors, and the language of the OS for everything else. We rely on .NET so exceptions are tied to the OS. We have some older components that do spit out error codes. (like COMS, erro…
Our logs aren't just error messages; they're all sorts of messages that the user of our (backup) software may be interested in. I'm trying to figure out ways to reduce our messages so that our customers only see the details that they will really be interested in, but there is a large subset of our customers who want to be able to review how their backups went (and not just with the email summary that we send, which i…
Okay, just a difference in semantics. In that regards our systems are similar. Our reports = your logs, our logs=your traces.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#29Actually you should switch to software that keeps localization in configuration space instead of code, allowing you to switch languages on a per-user, per-program or per-session. Having user-targeted messages hard coded is a bug.
Yes, it is. However, if you don't include search keys in the text presented to the user, it isn't going help when you get a dialog that says (FTA): Sterownik ekranu przestał działać, ale odzyskał sprawność. That's missing something at the beginning or end that allows a search engine to say "aha! this is looking for this error message, which in English is this ". This is a hard problem, at the same time; the translate…
Try hitting Ctrl-C in a standard active Win32 dialog. It already puts something nice on the clipboard automatically :)
You might put the key information in the dialog's window title.
Re: Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years ago when I had nVidia graphics cards, their control panel always displayed the language of your computer's country settings, you got absolutely no option of selecting the display language yourself. Needless to say, the controls for overriding anti-aliasing or fog-table or z-buffer settings, translated to my native language, was completely incomprehensible. I still don't understand why they bothered.
English could be considered a neutral language, one to fall back when you can't use the right one. That does not forbid nVidia from hiring decent translators. And, BTW, were the software open-source, you could correct the messages for them to make sense..
The point is that some technical terms like anti-aliasing usually make little sense even when translated well.