What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
ericwbailey.design
What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
1–10 of 236 posts
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#2This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction:
Why is the font so big?
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#3This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
It looks fine in my locale.
Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice at the top of the page.
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#4This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
It looks fine in my locale. Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice at the top of the page.
Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners now.
Now what do I use if something's important?"
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#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". Nothing bad, just unnecessarily confusing (what is an "open ticket"? As opposed to a "closed" one?)
* EasyJet's app does the reverse and makes it much worse. The English version likely says something like "Gate close: xx:xx (am|pm)". They mis-translated this as "Gate chiuso: xx:xx", which actually means "Gate has closed", even though the gate is still open. So you get a small heart attack, notice the actual closing time, curse the translators, and go on with your life.
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#6I went through a lot of these pains. The biggest one was undoing the misuse of localisation tools to display content differently on each geographic region, and misuse of plurals.
I would also add collaboration efforts, how to make localisation work with continuous integration and not go waterfall, where you make a release, and you have to wait 4-6 days to localise half a dozen strings
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks fine in my locale. Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice at the top of the page.
Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners now. Now what do I use if something's important?"
Alert boxes. Can't go wrong!
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners now. Now what do I use if something's important?"
Alert boxes. Can't go wrong!
I typically close those too. The trick is to make them modal and persistent until you enter your email address.
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks fine in my locale. Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice at the top of the page.
Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners now. Now what do I use if something's important?"
The banner on this site is too skinny, and the background color is too dull. It doesn't jump out as anything important, and I skipped right over it as well.
A wider banner with more intense background color would go a long way.
Re: What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
#10> 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 demo environments for each translator though.