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What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

ericwbailey.design

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Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#61

Post by Blikkentrekker »

lou1306 wrote: post #5

> 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 always use the English version of everything simply because error messages in Dutch or any amount of troubleshooting isn't going to helpful at all.

In the Netherlands, almost anyone who has about any device he owns configured in Dutch is almost certainly technically illiterate. People keep everything English not even because the Dutch translation is inferior but because any online documentation one will find is based on the English version. This is so entrenched that any notes I even keep to myself on my computer are in English rather than my native language without even giving it any second thought.

It is honestly somewhat strange and awkward to read technical documentation in Dutch. Many of the translated words they use take a moment for me to figure out since I never heard them in Dutch.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#62

Post by jakub_g »

brigandish wrote: post #30
hyperman1 wrote: post #17

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…

BTW re:google products, sometimes this is really annoying and not easy to find where to change lang in UI.

A trick that often works: add ?hl=en to the URL.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#63

Post by asveikau »

lou1306 wrote: post #5

> 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…

> translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto"

I have a good example. I won't name names. I saw an Italian localization on a "like" count in social posts that localized "N people like this" as "N persone come questa" [N people like this one]

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#64

Post by dharmab »

jakub_g wrote: post #58
lou1306 wrote: post #5

> 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…

> So you get a small heart attack 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 p…

Tom Scott used an example of a phone system for results of an STI test to demonstrate this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZM9YdO_QKk

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#65

Post by manuel_w »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #57
yarcob wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't German UI conventions follow the convention of using infinitive verbs for commands normally? ('öffnen' instead of 'öffne'?) [the only exception I know is the adjective "rückgängig" for "undo" ] 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.

Native german speaker here.

Have no clue about UI conventions nor grammar, but I'd expect either "Öffne Ticket" or "Ticket öffnen". "Öffnen Ticket" is wrong, just as "Ticket öffne".

I suppose the Flixbus app was made by native German speakers coding in English language. That would explain why they chose "open ticket" rather than "view ticket" or similar. As some of the parent posts said, you also "open files" here, so they probably just did what they assumed is right.

Denglish (Deutsch-Englisch) is full of this.

Happened to me as well; for most of my life I used "eventually" incorrect, thinking it means "maybe".

  * German "eventuell" = English "maybe"
  * German "schlussendlich" = Englisch "eventually", "at last"

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#66

Post by Lex-2008 »

Pinus wrote: post #54
TrueGeek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Heck, Microsoft got it wrong — Swedish versions of Windows used to have a folder called "Vanliga filer" (Ordinary files). This was, of course, the "Common files" folder, but the translator, probably having no context, picked the wrong meaning of "common", and chose a Swedish word which does not have the "shared" meaning.

Another data point:

When Windows 10 just came out, many of apps in start menu had a label next to them, which in Russian version said "Создать" (~Create). It took me some time to figure out that it's a poor translation of "New" (~Recently added). Proper Russian translation would be "Новое".

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#67

Post by crote »

> 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 speaker of English. Having a page with both languages interspersed is completely acceptable! Don't "helpfully" translate everything which isn't in the configured language - you're only making things worse.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#68

Post by yarcob »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #57
yarcob wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't German UI conventions follow the convention of using infinitive verbs for commands normally? ('öffnen' instead of 'öffne'?) [the only exception I know is the adjective "rückgängig" for "undo" ] 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.

Oops, you are right, now that I think about it it would be weird to see a button labelled "öffne" instead of "öffnen".

I just thought that it was unlikely that the verb/adjective confusion comes from German->Italian translation, it's more likely from English->Italian.

It's a common mistake that I've already seen in software translated from English to German as well, it's just what happens when you translate English strings without context.

Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

#69

Post by sofixa »

kakkun wrote: post #60
brigandish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've had issues with Google's localization choices for a long time. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue with other language combinations. 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 prioritize…

Yep. I'm trilingual English/French/Bulgarian, and i have all three as languages in Google search, and they're mixed up too often. I can understand Google proposing the French spelling of an English word and results for it, but almost every time when i search something in Bulgarian i get results in Russian, even when i use words that don't exist in Russian. The languages aren't even that close, and they aren't the only Cyrillic ones...
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