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A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

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Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#211

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

schoen wrote: post #145
blywi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also be from German, although this would also be written ne instead of neh. People from the northern part of Germany use this in pretty much the same way it is used in Japanese (at least according to what I know with my limited knowledge of Japanese) I always thought of this as a strange quirk that the same language construct can evolve in two unrelated languages. It's just like parallel evolution in biology.

There's also Brazilian Portuguese "né", which is an end-of-sentence tag with exactly the same meaning. It's a contraction of "não é" ('isn't it') and is used in a way akin to German "nicht wahr".

Could this have been influenced by the Japanese colonists in the São Paulo region?

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#212

Post by crpatino »

daxelrod wrote: post #178
emcrazyone wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@daxelrod: Wow, thanks for that. Quite interesting. I always wondered about how that was done and if it was a direct conversion of sorts but I guess it's not. Very interesting. I just have to ask: How do you know this?

All of this information comes from the teacher of a Spanish class I took (we watched the Latin American version of Shrek in the class). I wish I had some more tangible sources to cite. EDIT: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0220240/otherworks : "Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dreamworks allowed [Eugenio Derbez] not only to dub Donkey's voice, but to translate and adapt the script of "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" to make it more appealing…

Gingerbread Man is translated as "El Hombre de Jengibre", which was previously unknown to Spanish speaking children.

What was relocalized was the Muffin Man nursery rhyme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muffin_Man), which was substituted by Pinpon's ronda song:

Pinpon is a puppet very handsome and made out of cardboard. He washes his little face with soap and water. He untangles his hair with an ivory comb. And in spite of the hair pulling he cries not nor even winces.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#214

Post by ajuc »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #175
ajuc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

How is that typically handled in software? I can also imagine non-software examples where this might be hard (A sign reading "Warning: you are entering a restricted area", etc.)

I explained poorly, verbs in second person are gender agnostic, adjectives are gender-dependent.

The "restriced area" is funny, standard version is "Nieuprawnionym wstęp wzbroniony" ~ "For non-priviledged-ones entry is forbidden", it's plural noun made from adjective, in nominative it would be different for male and mixed/female groups (uprawnieni/uprawnione), but fortunately in plural in dative case it's "uprawnionym" for both genders so it works out OK. I guess it's common and maybe that's why the dative case works that way?

In most dialogs in software adjectives are the problem, especially "are you sure". Usually software that don't know your gender for other reasons just use male version.

In non-software world in formal documents it's often written like "he/she" in every gender-dependent place, often with passive voice to cut the amount of "/".

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#215

Post by alxndr »

I wonder if Lojban[1] could serve as an unambiguous, largely-context-independent way to store representations of the central concepts, which can then be translated into natural human language.

[1] "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#217

Post by daxelrod »

crpatino wrote: post #212
daxelrod wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this information comes from the teacher of a Spanish class I took (we watched the Latin American version of Shrek in the class). I wish I had some more tangible sources to cite. EDIT: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0220240/otherworks : "Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dreamworks allowed [Eugenio Derbez] not only to dub Donkey's voice, but to translate and adapt the script of "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" to make it more appealing…

Gingerbread Man is translated as "El Hombre de Jengibre", which was previously unknown to Spanish speaking children. What was relocalized was the Muffin Man nursery rhyme ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muffin_Man ), which was substituted by Pinpon's ronda song: Pinpon is a puppet very handsome and made out of cardboard. He washes his little face with soap and water. He untangles his hair with an ivory comb. And i…

Ah! Thank you, you're absolutely right, I misremembered the character.

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#218

Post by lucio »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
eloisant wrote: post #33

When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone. A major Japanese brand, actually. That was really comical. There was an Australian guy for English, an German guy, an Italian lady, and me for French. What they did prior to the meeting is: * translate from Japanese to English by Japanese people with a poor English level (maybe the software engineers actually) * translate from weird English to othe…

I don't know why nobody seems to put information like "warning: this phone's UI in is total and utter crap". Anyway, what you wrote is exactly why I stick to using all software and webservices - OS, text editors, Facebook, et al. - in en_US instead of my native pl_PL. Because translations are always crappy - even for big players. Lack of context is the key here - translated text often feels out of place, because ther…

Same here. Technical text translation is normally a disaster. I truly hate web pages that switch languages based on IP location, as MSDN sometimes does. In my language the translators always get wrong keywords that should not be translated, specially when they're adjectives. e.g: * "You should use the 'new' keyword..." Often get translated as something like "You should use the word that is not old..." / "Debe usar la nueva palabra..."

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#219

Post by Yen »

schoen wrote: post #145
blywi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also be from German, although this would also be written ne instead of neh. People from the northern part of Germany use this in pretty much the same way it is used in Japanese (at least according to what I know with my limited knowledge of Japanese) I always thought of this as a strange quirk that the same language construct can evolve in two unrelated languages. It's just like parallel evolution in biology.

There's also Brazilian Portuguese "né", which is an end-of-sentence tag with exactly the same meaning. It's a contraction of "não é" ('isn't it') and is used in a way akin to German "nicht wahr".

Which, incidentally, is almost certainly where the usage in Ender's Game comes from.

The author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card) spent two years in Brazil on a religious mission, and there's multiple other Portuguese references in that book.

(This influence is even stronger in "Ender's Game"'s sequel, "Speaker for the Dead")

Re: A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You

#220

Post by mark-r »

ademarre wrote: post #203
eloisant wrote: post #33

When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone. A major Japanese brand, actually. That was really comical. There was an Australian guy for English, an German guy, an Italian lady, and me for French. What they did prior to the meeting is: * translate from Japanese to English by Japanese people with a poor English level (maybe the software engineers actually) * translate from weird English to othe…

Your experience speaks to this observation: With very few exceptions, consumer hardware companies are bad at software.

Yes, I've noticed that since forever. Has anybody ever tried to come up with an explanation?
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