What they don’t tell you when you translate your app • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by sundarurfriend » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

crote wrote: post #67

> 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…

While this is true, as another near-native speaker of English, reading things in my native language always feels easier. There's a slight stress on the mind when reading and using English that I don't even realize exists, except for the 2% of the time when I get to interact with UI in my native language and realize that it feels significantly better this way.

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

#92

Post by sundarurfriend » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

317070 wrote: post #38

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…

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.

In fact, the first external link in TFA is to a whole website [http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...] apparently dedicated to this.

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

#93

Post by sundarurfriend » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

A related pet peeve of mine: if you want us to volunteer time and energy correcting or adding translations for you ("Help with the translation!"), then please make it as low friction as possible. Just linking to some third party website and expecting me to make an account, email-verify, figure out how it works, all to add a couple phrases of translation, is a good way to demotivate people trying to do free work for you.

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

#94

Post by kruuuder » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

What I don't get is why some companies with obviously large marketing budgets have so poorly translated websites. Most recent example I stumbled upon: 1password's German website. It sounds so horribly bad. Everything sounds like a word by word translation of English texts. "Halten Sie Ihre Familie online sicher" - wiebitte? Nobody speaks like that. 1Password immediately feels like a scam when I read those sentences.

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

#95

Post by bartvk » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

copperx wrote: post #45

emilecantin wrote: post #12

One annoying issue with translated apps the author doesn't cover is "googlability", the fact that we often need to google an error message or menu label in order to solve a problem. This leads to a lot of bilingual people running their software in English just in case they need to paste an error message into a search engine.

Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with translated apps.

I've always felt that a popup with an error code should have a "search the web for this code" button.

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

#96

Post by toast0 » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

ziml77 wrote: post #79

toast0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, there's a ton of software that wants to use the english text as the translation key, which leads to all sorts of bad results. Things like Open Ticket used as a verb to create a bug report, or open a bug report, or as an adjective to indicate a bug report is still active. Or similar when ticket means a transportation or entertainment event. If your key is the English text, you can't translate those three usages d…

I was using Qt recently and saw that example code did that English keying. It's good that they're promoting creating translatable UIs, but I don't know if it's the right thing to do if they're encouraging people to do it by using English text as the key.

I think that approach is quick and easy for an English only developer to understand and do, but it's hard to get quality results. A synthetic key tied to the context so the same English text can be translated differently as appropriate.

Tools that show translators the application context are really helpful, too. Bulk translation in a spreadsheet is an OK place to start when there are a lot of new translations to do, but everything needs to be checked where it's used as well. Especially for languages that tend to result in layout issues when added to formerly English only apps, like German (lots of very long compound words) and LTR languages like Arabic.

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

#97

Post by Joker_vD » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #69

kakkun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

Well, those are quite close to each other from the orthographic point of view, I guess: Ukrainian or Serbian are visually very distinct from either Russian or Bulgarian, while to tell the latter two apart you need some actual knowledge about the differences of those languages: say, that the abundance of letter "ъ", words ending in "ът"/"та"/"то" and tons of prepositions (i.e., often repeated two-three letter words) are a pretty good indication of a Bulgarian text.

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

#98

Post by huachimingo » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

Jyaif wrote: post #25

> Translation and localization costs money If you have a fan base, you can leverage it to get some amount of translation done. A lot of users are happy to help the product they like get better. Granted, the quality will not be as good as the quality you get with professional translators. The article also did not talk about the actual the translation process, which in the case of a product that is released but keeps g…

Like Shattered PD with Transifex.

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

#99

Post by Joker_vD » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

bloak wrote: post #50

brigandish wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars and Stripes or a Hinomaru ?

National flags are not in general a very good way of labelling languages. There are far more languages in the world than countries. In any case, since people are looking for a language they understand it's good enough to write each language name in the corresponding language, like Wikipedia does (wikipedia.org). But that's not the question, anyway. The question is how to label the button that lets the user change the…

National flags are actually a very good way of labeling languages for two reasons: first and most important, almost everybody already understands that a flag-looking icon (or two-flags-stacked-on-each-other icon) is used for switching languages. That's already a very strong practical reason to use them. Second, for like 70% of the most popular languages there are flag assignments that won't mortally offend the speakers of those languages — maybe they'd rather see a different flag but generally they'd grumpily agree that "guess it conveys the intent good enough, whatever, I've managed to chose the actual language I want to use".

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

#100

Post by jobigoud » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #77

crote wrote: post #67

> 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…

Exactly! Ironically, the most Anglo-centric assumption of them all is that people are only fluent in exactly one language. Configuring anything to be truly multilingual as opposed to "in another language" has terrible UX.

What do you mean? Having parts of the interface in one language and other parts in another?

I'm fluent in multiple languages (as most European devs) and I've never really heard or thought about this concept so I'm intrigued. What kind of software are you referring to that could have this feature?