51–60 of 236 posts
Another concern: If your app/website is available in a language, customers will expect support in that language.
I do this over Facebook Messenger at least once per fortnight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the issue is many translation databases just hold the English text and then all the translations. So the entry is “Open ticket” and then you just drop in the translation anywhere that phrase shows up. But sometimes “open” is a verb, sometimes a noun. The actual identifier should be something like “Open a ticket (imperative, button)” and then that phrase has translations, including the English “Open ticket”.
Or maybe the translator should get annotated screenshots of the app. Laid out in a story board. If you just hand someone a list of strings to translate, there's no way you'll get sensible results. Also, you should test you translations. Some of the translations that I've seen (even from reputable companies) are so bad that it's pretty obvious no native speaker has ever looked them over.
Testing is a must. Before I fixed + linted it, we often had community-provided translations which would cause the app to crash due to missing/additional format strings.
From IGN's article about the difficulties of game development ( https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-making-g... ): “Planning ahead helps, but nothing will prepare you for German,” [Joe Mirabello] said. “German destroys your best laid plans. German will defeat you. That text field you thought would only ever need a single 10-20 character word? Nope. German has a unique word for that and it’s a hundred…
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/pseudo-l...
> 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…
This is surprising. You really think someone as big as EasyJet would get that right. We're doing a translation now into Japanese and the translator is actually taking the time to look at screenshots and use the app to see the text in context. It makes a huge difference. As you've pointed out, it's one thing to see the string "open" in a XLF file, it's quite another to realize it's intent. This requires setting up dem…
> 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…
> 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…
I set my Android phone to English mostly to avoid badly translated apps. Not so much for the major ones, but you never know if you might get some really bad machine-translated stuff in some apps. As there isn't an easy way to set this per app, it makes more sense to me to just switch the phone entirely to English.
I'm not saying this to bash open source translations (let alone translators) or anything. A good translation takes a lot of work. That's just how things seemed to be last time I tried, and I don't really have the energy to contribute myself nowadays.
Of course there are other reasons for not using a localised desktop especially if you're a technical person, such as better web searchability in case of problems. But the inconsistent quality of translations is probably one of the top reasons for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Open ticket” doesn’t even really make sense in English. Maybe “Buy ticket” or “View ticket” or similar would make sense there. Flux bus is German, I suspect the translation was from German and not English in this case?
In German adjectives and verbs are easily distinguishable without context. The verb "open" would be "öffne" and the adjective "open" would be "geöffnet". So it's unlikely this mistake would happen if you translate from German to Italian. It's common to talk about "opening" files to view them, so I assume that's why the developer chose that term, even tough "view" would have been better.
Though even there your point still stands - they can be easily distinguished from the perfect form ('opened' (geöffnet) vs 'to open' (öffnen) ). So I guess I'm nit-picking a bit.
> 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…
This is something overlooked by devs and PMs sitting comfortably in their chairs.
People using apps in the modern world, especially mobile apps, are tired, stressed, busy, unfocused, and on the move. Small things like that added to the mix can induce a lot of stress.
For many devs/PMs it's just a piece of text. For the user it's much more.
The translations are somehow unappreciated part of the app dev by many people. I know several languages and I checked all new translations in our app each time but few people cared as much.
Another concern: If your app/website is available in a language, customers will expect support in that language.
All of this is so recognizable, but I'd add one more: Make sure the user has a way to switch the translation back to English. I have some sites showing in, say, Chinese, where even the current language is a Chinese glyph. Nothing on such a page is readable for a non-Chinese speaker. So you get to click around randomly until some menu opens where you see the word 'English' which brings you to a page you can read enoug…
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'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 prioritized over English ones. For example, If I search for "the beatles", it will show the Japanese Wikipedia page as the top result before the English version. For some sites (like Discogs) only the Japanese version of the site will show up.
If just set English as my search language, searching in Japanese can bring up results that are entirely in Chinese, even though I've set my preferred languages as English and Japanese (in that order).