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Personally I prefer English UI because original is better than even professional translation, never mind half assed translation. As the most trivial example, s

by 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.

by raquo 10y ago

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.