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> I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese. I'm curious why. Do users not know how to change th

> I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese. I'm curious why. Do users not know how to change the user interface language? Or did they learn how to use the computer from, say, an English reference and are now just accustomed to an English user interface?

raverbashing 10y ago
Short answer: because translations used to suck, especially error messages, so if you had a problem you would end up with an error message that was indecipherable and non-googlable
- Manishearth 10y ago
  (this is the oft forgotten reason why error codes are useful)
contravariant 10y ago
I take it you never had to figure out how to translate your OS to allow you to google your issue and then figure out how to translate the solution back? Add to this that most computer concepts haven't existed long enough to have one unique clear translation in either language, and you're in for a fun afternoon of interlingual troubleshooting.
- yorwba 10y ago
  This reminds me of the time I helped someone with a problem that involved a verbose error message being displayed in Chinese. There were some English keywords in there that I googled, but when I clicked on a link that looked promising, Microsoft decided to show me the German version of that page instead. Translating the instructions for changing the settings was fun and frustrating at the same time, especially since the menu organization was subtly different between the German and Chinese localizations.
  - bobthepanda 10y ago
    As someone who works at my university's IT and has seen a fair amount of computers in foreign languages, Google Translate's ability to translate text from images has really been a life saver.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    The nice thing about open source software is that the translation files are usually indexed by search engines. So if you search the string you're likely to be able to find the source language (usually English) string along with how to substitute the variables.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
nolemurs 10y ago
The vast majority of users in any country don't know how to change those sorts of settings and won't figure it out unless they absolutely have to. In the US is just happens that everything we get comes correctly configured for us, so it's not an issue.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  When you set up a PC does the OS not ask you what language it should be in? I recall being asked a ton of questions by Windows when I first turned my laptop on. I think I went through a similar process installing Ubuntu. Surely the desired language is the first part of any setup procedure.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- juiyout 10y ago
  > The vast majority of users in any country don't know how to change those sorts of settings and won't figure it out unless they absolutely have to. I have quite the opposite experience. 1. In Taiwan and Japan, phones and pc comes correctly configured UI language for us. But I switch it to English anyway. 2. UI Language is usually not something people can just try to use and "get by". Languages are almost always immediately switched user's prefered one upon recieving product in my experience.
developer2 10y ago
Blame Microsoft for creating this problem. If you have a Windows license from one country and use it elsewhere where the nationally recognized languages are not the same, chances are you cannot set Windows to use your preferred language. In Windows XP, Microsoft locked each license down to a subset of allowed languages based on the country the license was sold in. You can download a "Language Pack" for any language, but these only provide a half-assed superficial layer of support. A "Language Pack" only translates some aspects of the OS, falling short of being the equivalent to choosing that language as a native OS setting with the appropriate license. A quick Google shows that "Language Packs" are still a thing in Windows 7, Vista, and 10. Perhaps they now offer complete support, or perhaps they are still a crippled aftermarket solution refusing to meet the expectations of any paying customer. tldr; Many people in non-English countries are using Windows' licenses bought from English markets (such as the US). Even if these users know where to change the OS's language setting, odds are their native language isn't listed as an option.
- int_19h 10y ago
  I've used language packs for my mother's Surface, and I didn't find any UI that it did not translate, ever since Win7.
juiyout 10y ago
My native language is Mandarin. My interface langauge is English. Being in a tech job, when resolving issues with interface with international user base, taking screenshots in english, for example, has the most far-reaching benefit. More people can understand it. Also many companies (including Microsoft) have poor translations. Using English interface bypass this issue.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  On a related note, part of the reason that I've had my computers configured to use English language is that it's easier to find solutions, both in terms of searching for problems like clicking foo does not produce bar to following guides for how to do something with a document in LibreOffice, a picture in GIMP or Inkscape, a 3D model in Blender etc. Aside from that, like many others I also find the English interfaces to be far superior in quality to localized interfaces which will often have errors in their translation. Furthermore some choices of words in translations just look plain dumb to me even though they are correct.
  - netsharc 10y ago
    One of the greatest (in the sarcastic meaning of the word) work of localisation is Excel translating function names. So =SUM() is =SUMME() in German. Luckily opening the file works in different languages.
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      Excel deserves a special place in hell for its atrocious approach to localisation. If you were to give a Dutch Excel user a perfectly valid CSV file (i.e., comma-separated values), their Excel will fail to see it as tabulated data when they double-click the file and stuff everything in a single column. This is because someone at some point decided that in Dutch, tabulated data is (apparently) separated by a semi-colon instead of a comma, so (obviously) a file containing comma-separated values should have its values separated by semi-colons. So if you mail a Dutch person a CSV file that follows RFC 4180, chances are they can't open it properly because of Excel. A surprisingly large number of otherwise capable people get stuck at this point. (OpenOffice/LibreOffice is smart enough to recognise tabulated data when it sees it, and will simply present you with the import screen for tabulated data with its helpful live preview of the columns.)
astrobe_ 10y ago
I perfectly know how to do that and I speak a language that isn't uncommon, but generally translations introduce minor/annoying bugs, like text overflowing textboxes etc., and the quality of the translation can be an issue too (spelling errors, technical terms translated in strange ways,...). Also, the material found on the web for that software (help, tutorials, etc.) also come in English as well. Trivial example: in multiplayer games knowing the English name for items, locations etc. helps with communication with other players. So I tend to set the interface to English even when it is auto-detected correctly.
interfixus 10y ago
I have been running English language interfaces for as long as I have owned computing devices, somewhat more than thirty years. A lot of software gets poorly translated. And worse: A lot doesn't get translated, but relies partly on the interface language of the OS. You get horrors in the pattern of "Would you like to answer this question? Ja/Nej". Windows up to and including 3.11 in my local flavour (Danish), I could deliberately crash from various selection boxes, because someone hadn't bothered to think the translation procecess through.
- skummetmaelk 10y ago
  Don't forget the brilliant Microsoft Excel translation of "power" as in "2 to the power 10" to the danish equivalent of "2 to the current (flow) 10".
raquo 10y ago
Personally I prefer English UI because original is better than even professional translation, never mind half assed translation. As the most trivial example, software UI tends to use words that are short in English, e.g. "User" and "Account". In Russian these are typically translated as "Пользователь" and "Учетная запись", much longer than the original. Do your buttons stretch properly for such long words? Even if they are technically responsive to longer text, they still probably look weird. Now imagine an on/off toggle that prints "On" or "off" inside itself. In Russian that is 8+ characters without abbreviation. If you stick with this design, you have to provide enough context to the translator so that they abbreviate translations to something sensible. Speaking of context, "on" has quite a few different meanings in different cases. Does your translation pipeline support multiple translations for the same string? And do you provide the desired meaning to the translator? And don't get me started on sentences. You can't compile a sentence "A B C" by providing separate translations for A, B, and C and then just slap them together. Grammar and sentence structure in other languages does not always match English. Unfortunately translations for even AAA software often leave a lot to be desired, either stylistically, grammatically or semantically. It's a lot of effort to get it right.
- jwilk 10y ago
  I can't stand localized software/websites either. I suspect it's partially because I'm much better at noticing bad $NATIVELANGUAGE than bad English.
  - chx 10y ago
    Don't even get me started. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia now and my English is pretty good -- I got maximum on English knowledge in the immigration scoring for example -- but Hungarian is my native language and to make it much, much worse I was a columnist and an editor at a magazine for eight years. I can look at a sea of Hungarian text and find the mistakes much faster than I will comprehend it! And translating computer lingo is very, very hard with different "schools" of how it should be done -- now let me note the magazine I worked for was a computer magazine, I literally was in the front lines waging this translation war and it's futile. I can't even look at a page written about computers and not want to run screaming. So please, god, don't give me pages in Hungarian if at all possible even when I am visiting there. And at the same time could we just agree not to translate any of that? I speak if quite well, thanks much and Google Translate sucks horribly with an agglutinative language.
spacehunt 10y ago
Actually, why does the UI language have to be the same as the contents' language? Why can't they be different? I often prefer them to be different.
int_19h 10y ago
It's the other way around - when people do not know how to change the UI language, it will usually be localized according to whatever country they're in. It's people who specifically do not want to have it localized, who find out how to switch it to English (or deliberately request English OS when buying, or install one themselves). The reason why power users generally prefer English is because many terms are poorly or awkwardly translated (and some of those translations are historical, and are not going to change now); because English is often shorter, making the UI more compact / neater; because it's easier to find instructions, error messages etc on Google; or because they're developers, and they work in English most of the time anyway, and don't want the unnecessary overhead of dealing with two languages on the screen (I assume there are other fields in which English similarly dominates, but this is the one that I know from personal experience).
Manishearth 10y ago
It's a non trivial process to set up a Firefox language pack, and involves googling the right things and navigating pages in English. Some languages have official downloads which you can choose on the download page, but not all. My language -- the 19th most spoken -- does not have this option, for example. These days the textual UI of the browser isn't too important (the icons are what matter for day to day usage) so people just live with it.
ACS_Solver 10y ago
I'm a native Latvian speaker, always set every UI to English, for many reasons. One is that I started using computers before any mainstream software was available in Latvian, so I am used to English being the language of all computers. Another major reason is the translations themselves, which take two dramatically different approaches. There are official Latvian translations for computer terms, as suggested by the language academy. These translated terms are very much "designed" - they're decided on at committee meetings and, while linguistically sound, I find many of them very unnatural, and their meaning impossible to guess without learning the term explicitly. I won't bother with examples here as there's probably no Latvian speaker reading this anyway. So using those official terms is one approach, and it's followed by, for instance, Microsoft. The other approach (used by most open-source localizations) uses more natural vocabulary with more English borrowings, and only some of the academically-defined terms. Even if I wanted to use Latvian UIs, I would constantly be looking at two fairly different sets of vocabulary. Of course the translations themselves are also poor and often incomplete, unsurprising for such a small language. Some programs automatically show up in Latvian after installation (thanks to, once again, bad use of regional settings), and I will usually see a Latvian/English mix right away because much of the text isn't translated. I've had the misfortune of briefly using the Latvian UI for Windows XP, and it was full of typos and inconsistencies. But above all, by now it's just a matter of habit. I am as comfortable in English as in my native language, and would have no incentive to use a non-English UI even given a perfect translation.
- keldaris 10y ago
  As a fellow Latvian speaker, I agree completely. Personally, I'm glad translations are terrible and/or absent entirely, this motivated me to learn English as a kid and the benefits of an effectively ubiquitous (among computer-literate users, anyway) global lingua franca are immense.
  - ACS_Solver 10y ago
    To offer a counterpoint though, translations are important for the older generations. I notice that, compared to many other European countries, we have far fewer computer/technology users that are older, say 60+. Latvians in that age group typically know no English whatsoever, so their only chance of using software is if it has a reasonable translation. Even an iPad isn't that easy to use if you don't understand a word!

raverbashing 10y ago

Short answer: because translations used to suck, especially error messages, so if you had a problem you would end up with an error message that was indecipherable and non-googlable

Manishearth 10y ago
(this is the oft forgotten reason why error codes are useful)

contravariant 10y ago

I take it you never had to figure out how to translate your OS to allow you to google your issue and then figure out how to translate the solution back? Add to this that most computer concepts haven't existed long enough to have one unique clear translation in either language, and you're in for a fun afternoon of interlingual troubleshooting.

yorwba 10y ago
This reminds me of the time I helped someone with a problem that involved a verbose error message being displayed in Chinese. There were some English keywords in there that I googled, but when I clicked on a link that looked promising, Microsoft decided to show me the German version of that page instead. Translating the instructions for changing the settings was fun and frustrating at the same time, especially since the menu organization was subtly different between the German and Chinese localizations.
- bobthepanda 10y ago
  As someone who works at my university's IT and has seen a fair amount of computers in foreign languages, Google Translate's ability to translate text from images has really been a life saver.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  The nice thing about open source software is that the translation files are usually indexed by search engines. So if you search the string you're likely to be able to find the source language (usually English) string along with how to substitute the variables.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

nolemurs 10y ago

The vast majority of users in any country don't know how to change those sorts of settings and won't figure it out unless they absolutely have to. In the US is just happens that everything we get comes correctly configured for us, so it's not an issue.

Houshalter 10y ago
When you set up a PC does the OS not ask you what language it should be in? I recall being asked a ton of questions by Windows when I first turned my laptop on. I think I went through a similar process installing Ubuntu. Surely the desired language is the first part of any setup procedure.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
juiyout 10y ago
> The vast majority of users in any country don't know how to change those sorts of settings and won't figure it out unless they absolutely have to. I have quite the opposite experience. 1. In Taiwan and Japan, phones and pc comes correctly configured UI language for us. But I switch it to English anyway. 2. UI Language is usually not something people can just try to use and "get by". Languages are almost always immediately switched user's prefered one upon recieving product in my experience.

developer2 10y ago

Blame Microsoft for creating this problem. If you have a Windows license from one country and use it elsewhere where the nationally recognized languages are not the same, chances are you cannot set Windows to use your preferred language. In Windows XP, Microsoft locked each license down to a subset of allowed languages based on the country the license was sold in. You can download a "Language Pack" for any language, but these only provide a half-assed superficial layer of support. A "Language Pack" only translates some aspects of the OS, falling short of being the equivalent to choosing that language as a native OS setting with the appropriate license. A quick Google shows that "Language Packs" are still a thing in Windows 7, Vista, and 10. Perhaps they now offer complete support, or perhaps they are still a crippled aftermarket solution refusing to meet the expectations of any paying customer. tldr; Many people in non-English countries are using Windows' licenses bought from English markets (such as the US). Even if these users know where to change the OS's language setting, odds are their native language isn't listed as an option.

int_19h 10y ago
I've used language packs for my mother's Surface, and I didn't find any UI that it did not translate, ever since Win7.

juiyout 10y ago

My native language is Mandarin. My interface langauge is English. Being in a tech job, when resolving issues with interface with international user base, taking screenshots in english, for example, has the most far-reaching benefit. More people can understand it. Also many companies (including Microsoft) have poor translations. Using English interface bypass this issue.

eriknstr 10y ago
On a related note, part of the reason that I've had my computers configured to use English language is that it's easier to find solutions, both in terms of searching for problems like clicking foo does not produce bar to following guides for how to do something with a document in LibreOffice, a picture in GIMP or Inkscape, a 3D model in Blender etc. Aside from that, like many others I also find the English interfaces to be far superior in quality to localized interfaces which will often have errors in their translation. Furthermore some choices of words in translations just look plain dumb to me even though they are correct.
- netsharc 10y ago
  One of the greatest (in the sarcastic meaning of the word) work of localisation is Excel translating function names. So =SUM() is =SUMME() in German. Luckily opening the file works in different languages.
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    Excel deserves a special place in hell for its atrocious approach to localisation. If you were to give a Dutch Excel user a perfectly valid CSV file (i.e., comma-separated values), their Excel will fail to see it as tabulated data when they double-click the file and stuff everything in a single column. This is because someone at some point decided that in Dutch, tabulated data is (apparently) separated by a semi-colon instead of a comma, so (obviously) a file containing comma-separated values should have its values separated by semi-colons. So if you mail a Dutch person a CSV file that follows RFC 4180, chances are they can't open it properly because of Excel. A surprisingly large number of otherwise capable people get stuck at this point. (OpenOffice/LibreOffice is smart enough to recognise tabulated data when it sees it, and will simply present you with the import screen for tabulated data with its helpful live preview of the columns.)

astrobe_ 10y ago

I perfectly know how to do that and I speak a language that isn't uncommon, but generally translations introduce minor/annoying bugs, like text overflowing textboxes etc., and the quality of the translation can be an issue too (spelling errors, technical terms translated in strange ways,...). Also, the material found on the web for that software (help, tutorials, etc.) also come in English as well. Trivial example: in multiplayer games knowing the English name for items, locations etc. helps with communication with other players. So I tend to set the interface to English even when it is auto-detected correctly.

interfixus 10y ago

I have been running English language interfaces for as long as I have owned computing devices, somewhat more than thirty years. A lot of software gets poorly translated. And worse: A lot doesn't get translated, but relies partly on the interface language of the OS. You get horrors in the pattern of "Would you like to answer this question? Ja/Nej". Windows up to and including 3.11 in my local flavour (Danish), I could deliberately crash from various selection boxes, because someone hadn't bothered to think the translation procecess through.

skummetmaelk 10y ago
Don't forget the brilliant Microsoft Excel translation of "power" as in "2 to the power 10" to the danish equivalent of "2 to the current (flow) 10".

raquo 10y ago

Personally I prefer English UI because original is better than even professional translation, never mind half assed translation. As the most trivial example, software UI tends to use words that are short in English, e.g. "User" and "Account". In Russian these are typically translated as "Пользователь" and "Учетная запись", much longer than the original. Do your buttons stretch properly for such long words? Even if they are technically responsive to longer text, they still probably look weird. Now imagine an on/off toggle that prints "On" or "off" inside itself. In Russian that is 8+ characters without abbreviation. If you stick with this design, you have to provide enough context to the translator so that they abbreviate translations to something sensible. Speaking of context, "on" has quite a few different meanings in different cases. Does your translation pipeline support multiple translations for the same string? And do you provide the desired meaning to the translator? And don't get me started on sentences. You can't compile a sentence "A B C" by providing separate translations for A, B, and C and then just slap them together. Grammar and sentence structure in other languages does not always match English. Unfortunately translations for even AAA software often leave a lot to be desired, either stylistically, grammatically or semantically. It's a lot of effort to get it right.

jwilk 10y ago
I can't stand localized software/websites either. I suspect it's partially because I'm much better at noticing bad $NATIVELANGUAGE than bad English.
- chx 10y ago
  Don't even get me started. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia now and my English is pretty good -- I got maximum on English knowledge in the immigration scoring for example -- but Hungarian is my native language and to make it much, much worse I was a columnist and an editor at a magazine for eight years. I can look at a sea of Hungarian text and find the mistakes much faster than I will comprehend it! And translating computer lingo is very, very hard with different "schools" of how it should be done -- now let me note the magazine I worked for was a computer magazine, I literally was in the front lines waging this translation war and it's futile. I can't even look at a page written about computers and not want to run screaming. So please, god, don't give me pages in Hungarian if at all possible even when I am visiting there. And at the same time could we just agree not to translate any of that? I speak if quite well, thanks much and Google Translate sucks horribly with an agglutinative language.

spacehunt 10y ago

Actually, why does the UI language have to be the same as the contents' language? Why can't they be different? I often prefer them to be different.

int_19h 10y ago

It's the other way around - when people do not know how to change the UI language, it will usually be localized according to whatever country they're in. It's people who specifically do not want to have it localized, who find out how to switch it to English (or deliberately request English OS when buying, or install one themselves). The reason why power users generally prefer English is because many terms are poorly or awkwardly translated (and some of those translations are historical, and are not going to change now); because English is often shorter, making the UI more compact / neater; because it's easier to find instructions, error messages etc on Google; or because they're developers, and they work in English most of the time anyway, and don't want the unnecessary overhead of dealing with two languages on the screen (I assume there are other fields in which English similarly dominates, but this is the one that I know from personal experience).

Manishearth 10y ago

It's a non trivial process to set up a Firefox language pack, and involves googling the right things and navigating pages in English. Some languages have official downloads which you can choose on the download page, but not all. My language -- the 19th most spoken -- does not have this option, for example. These days the textual UI of the browser isn't too important (the icons are what matter for day to day usage) so people just live with it.

ACS_Solver 10y ago

I'm a native Latvian speaker, always set every UI to English, for many reasons. One is that I started using computers before any mainstream software was available in Latvian, so I am used to English being the language of all computers. Another major reason is the translations themselves, which take two dramatically different approaches. There are official Latvian translations for computer terms, as suggested by the language academy. These translated terms are very much "designed" - they're decided on at committee meetings and, while linguistically sound, I find many of them very unnatural, and their meaning impossible to guess without learning the term explicitly. I won't bother with examples here as there's probably no Latvian speaker reading this anyway. So using those official terms is one approach, and it's followed by, for instance, Microsoft. The other approach (used by most open-source localizations) uses more natural vocabulary with more English borrowings, and only some of the academically-defined terms. Even if I wanted to use Latvian UIs, I would constantly be looking at two fairly different sets of vocabulary. Of course the translations themselves are also poor and often incomplete, unsurprising for such a small language. Some programs automatically show up in Latvian after installation (thanks to, once again, bad use of regional settings), and I will usually see a Latvian/English mix right away because much of the text isn't translated. I've had the misfortune of briefly using the Latvian UI for Windows XP, and it was full of typos and inconsistencies. But above all, by now it's just a matter of habit. I am as comfortable in English as in my native language, and would have no incentive to use a non-English UI even given a perfect translation.

keldaris 10y ago
As a fellow Latvian speaker, I agree completely. Personally, I'm glad translations are terrible and/or absent entirely, this motivated me to learn English as a kid and the benefits of an effectively ubiquitous (among computer-literate users, anyway) global lingua franca are immense.
- ACS_Solver 10y ago
  To offer a counterpoint though, translations are important for the older generations. I notice that, compared to many other European countries, we have far fewer computer/technology users that are older, say 60+. Latvians in that age group typically know no English whatsoever, so their only chance of using software is if it has a reasonable translation. Even an iPad isn't that easy to use if you don't understand a word!