17 ms·

It’s probably never going to work in German

155 points by mikejb 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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stevoski 8y ago
As per the article, internationalisation and localisation are harder than they seem at first. But take the time to do them right and you can outsell your competitors in certain lucrative markets. My product has many competitors. In the US, the UK, and other English-speaking regions it is a struggle to compete. But our team has experience with languages and translation so that gives us the edge in markets outside the Anglo-sphere.
atemerev 8y ago
My take on internationalization is that I want to see less of it. I am Russian living in Switzerland, where people speak French, (Swiss) German, Italian and Romansh. I often travel to Barcelona, where people speak Catalan and Spanish. I don’t want any of these languages, I want all sites in English. This is hard to achieve, as nearly everybody uses geolinked internationalization. It is awful. Especially here in Switzerland — almost every site tries to show me the German version by default (most of Swiss cantons are German-speaking, but mine speaks French). Please just use English. Or if you must, enable language selection in users profile, do not try to detect it from geographic location.
- avar 8y ago
  This is a good idea in theory, but completely unworkable in practice. Most users do not have the skills or know-how to navigate whatever Accept-Language setting their device is exposing. But yeah, sites should have a way to sticky it once you have a profile and log in etc., but most users aren't going through that path for most sites.
  - jfoucher 8y ago
    In Firefox: Preferences -> Language and appearance -> Language
    - Tomte 8y ago
      Exactly. That's too complicated for a large portion of browser users. I'm not kidding and I'm not dissing them. They shouldn't have to fiddle with language settings. That's a tech failure.
      - zdragnar 8y ago
        Isn't the default value whatever the OS is set to? Your "average user" shouldnt need to fiddle anyway.
      - gnud 8y ago
        What is actually a tech failure, is assuming I understand Spanish if I happen to be in Spain. That sort of ham-handed, short-sighted approach drives me nuts. You only need "fiddling with language settings" if you want something other than how your operating system is configured.
        cmg 8y ago
        Google actually did this at one point. I was in the Netherlands when I signed up for Google+. I don't speak Dutch and hadn't changed any of my language settings - the only way they knew was via my IP address. The UI was mostly in English, but all my circles (or whatever they were called) were named in Dutch.
        JoeMalt 8y ago
        I get the weirdest language bugs with Google: - The info box on the right hand side of the search results intermittently shows up in German - A suggested event (a football match) in the UK (where I am) had both team's names transliterated into Cyrillic - An airport on Maps consistently shows up in either French or Finnish (or both!)
- jfoucher 8y ago
  I never understood why sites try to do geo based localization. Every browser in capable of setting the requested language in the request headers so why not use that ? Technically much simpler as well. And the user can just change the browser preferences and all sites would magically switch to the right language. Hey I can dream right ?
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    A number of reasons I work for major conglomerate which has over 200 brands and operates in getting on for 200 countries. In the USA for one brand they sell different products to the UK than the USA for another brand they use a different brand entirely in the USA to the rest of the world. There are also legal reasons why you might need to geo target.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      That displays different content, but the Accept-Language header (with locale specialization) isn't about the content, its about the language the content is displayed in.
    - teddyh 8y ago
      That’s not localization, though. That’s market segmentation based on location detection, which is a different thing, strictly speaking. I mean, they could still show me the UK-only site if they determine that I am in the UK, but show me the UK site in German, with German units, dates and time codes, etc., because that’s what my browser might tell them that I prefer.
      - C1sc0cat 8y ago
        Have you any idea how much work that is and how many things can go wrong I might have a dozen or more locales / languages and if you then want to see any locale in any language that's a huge amount of different urls Ok so you want German content in the UK do I show you the German locale and products legally available in Germany? the UK locale and products legally available in the UK translated into German? And do I age gate you based on German law or English what happens if I show you a BOGOF offer do I obey German law or English What happens if google messes up. What happens if your in Quebec and I accidently show you an illegal competition What T&C's do I show you
- deleted 8y ago
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- zdragnar 8y ago
  Geographic location is incredibly ineffective anyway depending on your ISP and other factors. Rather than defaulting to English, why not default to whatever the browser's OS is set to? At least for JS apps, there's navigator.languages, and there's an Accept-Language header for both language and locale for standard server-rendered plain ol' websites. Geographic location really does seem like the worst possible option to use.
  - atemerev 8y ago
    Yet Google, Microsoft and Apple use it. :( At least with Google, you can usually log in to your profile and set it to English; with Microsoft and Apple, you are out of luck.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      That's one big problem on the web, IMO. Google in particular does a lot of things that are questionable UX-wisely, to put it charitably, and then a lot of web shops try to copy those things without giving them any critical thought.
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    Is it really the worst possible option? It’s often a pretty good guess, and accept-language is similarly unreliably set and can be fiddled with by intermediaries. Navigator.language doesn’t help you until you’ve already served and run JavaScript. The right solution I think is to make a reasonable guess and then allow the user to control it. None of these guesses are going to work for everybody on their own.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      I'm unaware of any intermediaries that fiddle with accept-language, so I can't really speak to how reliable it is. I can say that due to the ISP I use geolocation typically gets my location wrong by somewhere between 650 - 1600 km (400 and 1000 miles).
  - cdtwoaway 8y ago
- Kim_Bruning 8y ago
  Presumably you'd be fine with Russian too, but by the sound of it you've given up on ever seeing THAT. ;-) (personally English is also often first choice, especially for tech documentation. Translations often seem to be an afterthought and can be pretty random. You need to translate randomly picked words back to the original jargon as best you can and hope you didn't miss anything. )
  - davnicwil 8y ago
    Yeah tech documentation is a really interesting edge case for translation, as a good chunk of it will be new vocab and/or simply invented vocab for most native English speakers reading it anyway, so it's actually a pretty philosophical question about language itself if/how that stuff can be translated to other languages at all.
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  This is fromt he point of view of someone that is fluent in English. I assure you that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, etc... this is true but for a small percentage of the population. It makes no business sense for a company not to localize a website or a service, if your market has a substantial number of non-English speakers. But yes, for my own convenience (unironically), I wish that every website had a base English version that you could access with a single click. For example I was looking at some Microsoft webpage with troubleshooting or API information (can't remember). By default it was shown traslated based on my location, but there was a prominent "Read this in English" switch at the top. Top marks.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The problem is not the localization. It's choosing the default language based on anything other than explicit info provided by user-agent - that is, URL and Accept-Language, in that order.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    French here. Yes, the english level is terrible in my country. Unfortuntly, translation is imperative if you want to enter the market. Which sucks, because it's a huge waste. There is not benefit to it: a UI is not like a book, you don't lose some quality in translation. In fact, most UI are worse once translated because english is a short and to the point language, which is what you want for buttons and menus.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    How many people in France have their computer / browser set to English, but don't understand English? I could see that being more common in the early 2000s, when it was probably easier to find a pirate version of Windows in English, but now...?
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      I can't speak about France, but my experience in the U.S. is that recent immigrants who can't speak English still set their computers to English. For some it's because they're so used to the non-English versions of web pages being so bad or abbreviated that having an English page they can half read is often better than the truncated "good enough" version provided in their native tongue.
- xorand 8y ago
  It's because a huge number of people just discovered the net and they don't surf as we are used to, like they don't search as we do etc. I don't want to sound elitist, many of them don't have the experience of it. They are going to repeat all behaviors and fall in all traps since we were new on the net. I see this in the way my kids use their phones.
- K0nserv 8y ago
  I use a VPN for all traffic, using an exit server in Finland. I don't speak a word of finnish. I have chatted with people who work on internationalization about IP based detection. The explanation I've always heard is that `Accept-Language` is all but useless. For a significant number of users the value is, incorrectly, `en-US`. Because of how unreliable `Accept-Language` is, IP based detection is unfortuantely has a much lower false positive rate.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    In general, I expect a web site, if it's available in more than one language, to offer me a menu where I pick the language I want. It's easy to do and it works for everyone. Usually the languages will also be accompanied by a little flag for extra non-ambiguity. See the "Change region" menu at the top of https://www.nintendo.com https://www.nintendo.com, or the obvious "English" selector amidst the gibberish at the top of https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ . Given how easy and robust this is... what exactly is the problem with using Accept-Language as your first guess? Maybe if more sites honored Accept-Language, users would start setting it.
    - K0nserv 8y ago
      You still have to pick a default region/language unless you want to force the user to make a selection before they get anywhere which is a mess UX-wise
      - Technetium_Hat 8y ago
        Ikea still uses such a landing page if you go directly to ikea.com .
  - pinum 8y ago
    If it's specifically that value that's a problem then I'd suggest the following heuristic: Use geolocation if `Accept-Language` is `en-US`, otherwise respect the header. Technical users in Switzerland/Japan/wherever who want to see English pages can set their header to "en-GB" or "en-AU" to avoid getting caught in the heuristic. Edit: I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, of course- l10n isn't my job and I don't want to be this guy https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
- infimum 8y ago
  I live in Switzerland too and especially Youtube never seems to know whether to serve me ads in German, French or Italian (even though Google should know I almost exclusively consume English content). So I can sometimes watch several videos in a row, where I get served the same ad in a different language.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - Svip 8y ago
    But don't ads on YouTube follow the more classic advertisement 'demographics', where location is more relevant than language? And it may just be cheaper and easier to just target all of Switzerland?
  - Leherenn 8y ago
    This is where I feel a bit better about targeted advertising, if they're not able (as in at least not cheaply enough to be worth it) to serve me an ad in a language I understand, they still have a long way to go. And that's in Switzerland where people have a lot of disposable income and thus must be more attractive to advertisers than most places, despite being relatively small.
- sveme 8y ago
  Yes! When I head to docs.microsoft.com they show me a really bad machine-translated site of the C# API. And it is hard to change to the original English site. I am a software developer; I know English, thank you very much!
  - w-m 8y ago
    One of the few things where Google Search is really awful for me personally. I've set it up to get search results in German (country of residence) and English (everything else). But I haven't found a way to communicate to it that for anything technical, I have a very strong preference for the English results. If I search for "std::vector", I get https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the first result and https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the second. The German translation is just awful and completely trips you up if you know English. I don't understand why it keeps pushing them up.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      My previous job had me traveling between Germany and China; during that time, Google's ridiculous localization of search results was becoming unbearable. I ended up permanently overriding my default search engine to point to this URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s. (It broke auto-suggesting search terms in the omnibar, but the actual search results are again sane.)
    - AnabeeKnox 8y ago
      Me too. I've had to start using DuckDuckGo, NOT for privacy reasons, but it get around Google's lunatic forced geolocated search.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      You cut to the core of the problem; user-preferred language for content is arbitrarily context-dependent.
      - 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
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- sametmax 8y ago
  My pet peeve is when I have an application crash and the error message has been translated. Now googling it is extra fun, not to mention bug reporting. Fortunatly with Linux, I usually can get the proper message with "LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8" if I can, and desire, repeat the exact same error. Now I understand that this is done for openess and diversity. But technical terms should not be translated. I'm french, and I accept that english has won as the business language, and the IT language. Let's move on. Honestly, we are wasting humanity potential for not having a common language. I really, really wish we would all learn english as the second language, and that all laws, forms, labels and signs would be translated to english everywhere (as an addition to the local lang, not a replacement). It's an imperfect language, but it won half of the world, and the other half will have an easier time learning it that us learning theirs. Plus it has a very simple alphabet, and is already used for science, business and international politics. At this stage, I would gladly agree for all the french books and movies being burned and lost forever if it means one language, any language really, becomes magically the main one for humanity. We have too many communication problems. But since magic doesn't exist, what about getting off the ego train and just adopt the imperfect status quo and make something awesome with it for a change ?
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    English in terms of number of speakers has already reached the point where the number of ESL speakers outstrips the number of native ones by a good margin. The simple alphabet is a plus. I wish the spelling wasn't so godawful.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Yeah but I don't know any language used by hundred of millions of people that doesn't have many gotchas. Could be worse. The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D
      - CPLX 8y ago
        > The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D You're saying this like it isn't already happening.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  I think your comment is kinda funny. Reminds me of California, a lot of effort goes into to providing public services in languages people best understand[1]. Not the local language or the default language of country of origin. Someone from South America might not actually speak Spanish. They might speak Quechua for instance. Brings up the point, 'internationalization' as a concept is utterly broken. People speak languages not countries. Also very likely that the non default language users may also be most in need. Probably should be a list of falsehoods programmers think about language. [1] Local school district I think at one time listed 43 languages.
- retromario 8y ago
  Yes, as an English speaker living in Germany, this is also something that drives me up the wall, but has also gotten better recently. My personal favorites, the cream of the crop: * Netflix: full site in English, subtitles (and audio tracks) for all shows available in German, English and several other languages. Only a few edge cases where the source (written) material appearing on-screen has already been hard-translated in. * Amazon: will let you turn on full English experience, up to and including...English speaking support (both written and verbal). This is truly the cream of the crop in terms of quality of experience. I really appreciate any German-oriented site that offers English as a possible language in spite of knowing my location. And if somewhere on your servers you already have English available, you would be silly to not make that available world-wide (where it makes sense). Of course, these are two of the biggest tech companies, so perhaps that speaks to the cost of internationalization.
  - Markoff 8y ago
    pff this is nothing, German and English are quite similar languages, try living as foreigner in China, very enjoyable experience online /s
- zebraflask 8y ago
  Sounds more like you'd prefer an agreed upon lingua franca.
- avip 8y ago
  The worse offender here is nba.com, which Geo-redirects you to some local TV channel based on X-Forwarded-For header.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  My original compilers had error messages in English, German, French, and Japanese. It was a fair amount of work to make that work. I was pretty proud of it. Turns out that I couldn't find anyone who ever used the non-English messages. Everyone preferred the English messages, because everything else with programming was in English. So I abandoned worry about that, and haven't heard anything about it since. (Though the compiler uses UTF-8 strings for all text.)
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    One problem with the translated GCC messages was that GCC didn't use error numbers at the time (still doesn't, I think, I didn't notice anyway), so it was basically impossible to reference the error except by full error message. MSVC on the other hand always includes a warning/error number, so there less issues talking about a particular error independent of language.
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      Since I gave up on translated error messages, using search and the error message string works fine (much better than a catalog of error codes).
- iagooar 8y ago
  > Please just use English Excuse me, sir. I would rather prefer it to always be German. Or French. Or Spanish. Or Italian. Not everybody speaks English, so it's perfectly fine to try and guess the person's language first - and allow to change it later. Also, once the UK has left the EU, English is not even going to be an official language here anymore - so I can see no reason why English should be the default in Europe.
  - not2b 8y ago
    Ireland isn't leaving, so English will still be an official language.
    - iagooar 8y ago
      Not true - each European country can only choose one language - and Ireland chose Gaelic, since Britain chose English ;)
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  You are an edge case. Go to the site in English, remove the root URL from your history. So it always suggests the English version ( URL) of the website. Best practise of a website ( eg. Google) don't suggest redirection based on an IP, which means a correct URL or cookie would suffice in most cases
guitarbill 8y ago
> The task force produced a book, basically. The book was on how Japanese text layout works. Was this ever released publically/does anybody know the title or ISBN? Would love to pick up a copy.
- GuiA 8y ago
  Not certain, but perhaps: https://www.w3.org/2007/02/japanese-layout/docs/aligned/japanese-layout-requirements-en.html https://www.w3.org/2007/02/japanese-layout/docs/aligned/japa...
  - guitarbill 8y ago
    Thanks for digging that up! Finally a W3 document I enjoy reading; the illustrations are superb.
  - Technetium_Hat 8y ago
    this seems to require a log in for me.
- Wildgoose 8y ago
  So would I.
crazygringo 8y ago
> Internationalization is not a feature, it’s an architecture... It’s not something extra. It doesn’t take longer. It doesn’t require additional engineers. That feels like the wrong way to convince people. Having worked with i18n and l10n before, it absolutely is extra, takes longer, and on a very large team can absolutely bump up to an additional engineer. Producing dynamic strings becomes much more involved and requires more testing. Handling RTL languages and layouts is another layer of things to worry about and test. Giving the translators sufficient context for each string is plenty of work, as is adjusting the design to fit strings that are longer than you'd expected. Etc. etc. That isn't to say don't do it. It's just yet another cost-benefit calculation taking into account ease-of-use and market size. But pretending the cost isn't there doesn't fool anyone -- it just makes them think you're bad at producing realistic estimates and makes them less likely to trust you generally.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  And it also causes compromises in the design of the English language version. For example in https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030929-02/?p=42363 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030929-02/?p=... Raymond Chen talks about how when a taskbar is docked vertically, the "Start" text disappears because while you can rotate English text to appear vertically, other languages are more problematic. In the same post, he also states that internationalization is why you have "1 folder(s)" "2 folder(s)" instead of "1 folder" and "2 folders".
  - Markoff 8y ago
    this still doesn't work for languages with multiple plurals like Slavic languages, so how you write one word in three or more forms this way? the best thing i come over years it's abbreviating to the core, it doesn't look nice but it works "n fold." will always work unlike changing syntax to "Folders: n" which just can't be used within sentence. only way to make it right would provide different strings for multiple plurals based on value of variable and the best part it's in each language it differ, good luck with that, abbreviation it is...
Symbiote 8y ago
> What makes a good i18n and l10n expert Another pet peeve of mine: using lazy abbreviations like "i18n", "w/" or "w/out". These aren't even understood by many native English speakers.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  I would call them more a term of art in our industry than an abbreviation.
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    Fun fact: These are more specifically called "numeronyms". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym
- Markoff 8y ago
  maybe they wanna avoid another S/Z issue so this it's their solution?
kasperni 8y ago
> Likewise, you can’t just assume that people will always use a.m. and p.m. because some countries use 24-hour clocks. As in 90-95 % of the countries in the world..... https://i.stack.imgur.com/43dwH.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/43dwH.jpg
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  roughly 80% by population
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  Including many English speakers. Please don't force me to use 12-hour time, it hurts.
emiliobumachar 8y ago
Lots of the comments here are about preferring the version in English and being frustrated by software in other languages, pushed based on geography or some-such. These are valid experiences, I certainly learned from the comments and share some of the frustration. But let's all keep in mind that this is an English-language forum. Contributions, even more than readership, are from people with fluent or nearly fluent English. So, biased sample and all that. Generalize at your own risk.
medecau 8y ago
Offtopic but how do I subscribe to the paperback copy of Increment magazine? At the time I got a free sample of their 5th issue - Programming Languages - and asked about getting a copy of previous issues and subscribing to future ones but never heard back from them.
anotheryou 8y ago
As a german who used to do front-end, I'd have loved to delay those problems in to the first i18n. A "Cart" is a "Warenkorb" or an "Einkaufswagen" and both can't be shortened at all. Oh and did you know the correct spelling for a price would be "1.999,00 €"? (with a space (which even germans find ugly), comma/dot swap and the currency behind the number).
- anoncake 8y ago
  "Korb"/"Wagen"?
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - currysausage 8y ago
    I'm not usually an advocate of icons, but in that case, an icon of a cart would still be preferable. "Korb" looks like I can buy a basket and "Wagen" alone usually means car. These meanings may not even make sense in the specific context, but with Kruger's Fact of Life #1 in mind ("We don’t read pages. We scan them."), the first connotation is actually what matters.
    - anoncake 8y ago
      > I'm not usually an advocate of icons, but in that case, an icon of a cart would still be preferable. I think on most shopping sites, the cart button has both an icon and a label anyway. > These meanings may not even make sense in the specific context, but with Kruger's Fact of Life #1 in mind ("We don’t read pages. We scan them."), the first connotation is actually what matters. The first connotation depends on the context though. If you add an icon to the cart button and put it in the top right corner where people expect it, I predict that people may find it harder to identify the correct meaning than if you used "Einkaufswagen" or "Warenkorb", but only minimally.
      - zrobotics 8y ago
Torwald 8y ago
Amiga OS 3.0 did it right, anyone else here remembers?
- bhaak 8y ago
  Unless you mean something else, locale support was already introduced in AmigaOS 2.1. And I'm not sure what you exactly mean by "did it right". i18n and localization support is now in every OS and almost any UI framework available today. It was really great for its time but I wouldn't know of any feature it had that isn't standard today.
  - Torwald 8y ago
    I never had a 2.1 machine, so I was mistaken there. Thanks for correcting that. To the point, I think the way the Amiga let a third party provide a localization file was easier than in todays OS more end user friendly. It was open and standardized across the OS. Not every app was cooking it's own format.
TomK32 8y ago
The quote from the article's title refers to copy and yes, with English being a rather short-ish language, translated copy will fail to stay within design constraints in pretty much all other languages. On the other hand, except for Russians (and the dozen or so Canadians and France which owns land in almost every timezone on the planet) pretty much every country on the planet has just one timezone. So creating an app for the US market brings that nasty problem.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
I integrate German, French, English and Dutch from the start. They are all languages used in Belgium, English as a developer. I've gotten it pretty productive. My database doesn't require extra tables and it's fully customizable per client ( 1 extra table). Because my clients, also want to label things differently according to their use-case. I control the translations ( the default and custom ones). As long as it's logical. I agree. I stop them when they don't use general words and try to create another use-case for it. That would break the app functionality or changes expectations ( eg. Stupid example: Label Completed as invoiced because that's their end state of a ticket). Then they need to adjust to the application workflow. I have custom parsers for languages stored in the database ( description is a multilingual column in the database for example). According to what I know, I'm the only person I've met who goes that deep from the start. And I have real advantages with it, as long as it's an application that "my clients" own clients use. Language doesn't stop and culture, but it's also niche and even "company behavior" related. For integrating multiple languages... If you live in America, it's an after thought. If you live in Belgium, it's the first thing you run into. If you're an SMB, you need to go deeper to differentiate. To me, the title only makes sense to me when you're mother tongue is a dominant language in the world ( reach for the stars). What I haven't run into yet is right-to-left and Arabic, Chinese,.. ( non Latin based languages) currently. Using USD, pounds and EUR is handled within the frameworks I use. Dot Net uses it extensively and yes, I use resx files ( which I don't like a lot, but I've wrapped them and use them as default translations of a language, clients can adjust them). I don't need translators in the start. I can handle French, Dutch, English myselve mostly. My German isn't very good though.. ( which sucks because of the title here :p ) Ps. Yes, Changing translations is billable per hour.
- draw_down 8y ago
  > What I haven't run into yet is right-to-left and Arabic Yeah, well, the game changes significantly when you do. I18n is pretty easy when it’s just English and a few European languages. But it turns out that’s not particularly “international”.
TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
This is one of the benefits of diversity on a team: you better understand the diversity of your customers.
mfritsche 8y ago
Microsoft seems to increasingly use machine translation for their user interfaces (really caught my eye in Azure DevOps). It mostly works... until it doesn't, and the translation gives a word that's close, but not right in context. It's annoying and makes me feel like they just didn't care enough. Frankly, I'd prefer an English user interface over one that tells me "Yeah, we checked the box, but couldn't care less!"

155 points by mikejb 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

As per the article, internationalisation and localisation are harder than they seem at first. But take the time to do them right and you can outsell your competitors in certain lucrative markets. My product has many competitors. In the US, the UK, and other English-speaking regions it is a struggle to compete. But our team has experience with languages and translation so that gives us the edge in markets outside the Anglo-sphere.

atemerev 8y ago

My take on internationalization is that I want to see less of it. I am Russian living in Switzerland, where people speak French, (Swiss) German, Italian and Romansh. I often travel to Barcelona, where people speak Catalan and Spanish. I don’t want any of these languages, I want all sites in English. This is hard to achieve, as nearly everybody uses geolinked internationalization. It is awful. Especially here in Switzerland — almost every site tries to show me the German version by default (most of Swiss cantons are German-speaking, but mine speaks French). Please just use English. Or if you must, enable language selection in users profile, do not try to detect it from geographic location.

avar 8y ago
This is a good idea in theory, but completely unworkable in practice. Most users do not have the skills or know-how to navigate whatever Accept-Language setting their device is exposing. But yeah, sites should have a way to sticky it once you have a profile and log in etc., but most users aren't going through that path for most sites.
- jfoucher 8y ago
  In Firefox: Preferences -> Language and appearance -> Language
  - Tomte 8y ago
    Exactly. That's too complicated for a large portion of browser users. I'm not kidding and I'm not dissing them. They shouldn't have to fiddle with language settings. That's a tech failure.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      Isn't the default value whatever the OS is set to? Your "average user" shouldnt need to fiddle anyway.
    - gnud 8y ago
      What is actually a tech failure, is assuming I understand Spanish if I happen to be in Spain. That sort of ham-handed, short-sighted approach drives me nuts. You only need "fiddling with language settings" if you want something other than how your operating system is configured.
      - cmg 8y ago
        Google actually did this at one point. I was in the Netherlands when I signed up for Google+. I don't speak Dutch and hadn't changed any of my language settings - the only way they knew was via my IP address. The UI was mostly in English, but all my circles (or whatever they were called) were named in Dutch.
        JoeMalt 8y ago
        I get the weirdest language bugs with Google: - The info box on the right hand side of the search results intermittently shows up in German - A suggested event (a football match) in the UK (where I am) had both team's names transliterated into Cyrillic - An airport on Maps consistently shows up in either French or Finnish (or both!)
jfoucher 8y ago
I never understood why sites try to do geo based localization. Every browser in capable of setting the requested language in the request headers so why not use that ? Technically much simpler as well. And the user can just change the browser preferences and all sites would magically switch to the right language. Hey I can dream right ?
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  A number of reasons I work for major conglomerate which has over 200 brands and operates in getting on for 200 countries. In the USA for one brand they sell different products to the UK than the USA for another brand they use a different brand entirely in the USA to the rest of the world. There are also legal reasons why you might need to geo target.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    That displays different content, but the Accept-Language header (with locale specialization) isn't about the content, its about the language the content is displayed in.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    That’s not localization, though. That’s market segmentation based on location detection, which is a different thing, strictly speaking. I mean, they could still show me the UK-only site if they determine that I am in the UK, but show me the UK site in German, with German units, dates and time codes, etc., because that’s what my browser might tell them that I prefer.
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Have you any idea how much work that is and how many things can go wrong I might have a dozen or more locales / languages and if you then want to see any locale in any language that's a huge amount of different urls Ok so you want German content in the UK do I show you the German locale and products legally available in Germany? the UK locale and products legally available in the UK translated into German? And do I age gate you based on German law or English what happens if I show you a BOGOF offer do I obey German law or English What happens if google messes up. What happens if your in Quebec and I accidently show you an illegal competition What T&C's do I show you
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zdragnar 8y ago
Geographic location is incredibly ineffective anyway depending on your ISP and other factors. Rather than defaulting to English, why not default to whatever the browser's OS is set to? At least for JS apps, there's navigator.languages, and there's an Accept-Language header for both language and locale for standard server-rendered plain ol' websites. Geographic location really does seem like the worst possible option to use.
- atemerev 8y ago
  Yet Google, Microsoft and Apple use it. :( At least with Google, you can usually log in to your profile and set it to English; with Microsoft and Apple, you are out of luck.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That's one big problem on the web, IMO. Google in particular does a lot of things that are questionable UX-wisely, to put it charitably, and then a lot of web shops try to copy those things without giving them any critical thought.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  Is it really the worst possible option? It’s often a pretty good guess, and accept-language is similarly unreliably set and can be fiddled with by intermediaries. Navigator.language doesn’t help you until you’ve already served and run JavaScript. The right solution I think is to make a reasonable guess and then allow the user to control it. None of these guesses are going to work for everybody on their own.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    I'm unaware of any intermediaries that fiddle with accept-language, so I can't really speak to how reliable it is. I can say that due to the ISP I use geolocation typically gets my location wrong by somewhere between 650 - 1600 km (400 and 1000 miles).
- cdtwoaway 8y ago
Kim_Bruning 8y ago
Presumably you'd be fine with Russian too, but by the sound of it you've given up on ever seeing THAT. ;-) (personally English is also often first choice, especially for tech documentation. Translations often seem to be an afterthought and can be pretty random. You need to translate randomly picked words back to the original jargon as best you can and hope you didn't miss anything. )
- davnicwil 8y ago
  Yeah tech documentation is a really interesting edge case for translation, as a good chunk of it will be new vocab and/or simply invented vocab for most native English speakers reading it anyway, so it's actually a pretty philosophical question about language itself if/how that stuff can be translated to other languages at all.
Kurtz79 8y ago
This is fromt he point of view of someone that is fluent in English. I assure you that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, etc... this is true but for a small percentage of the population. It makes no business sense for a company not to localize a website or a service, if your market has a substantial number of non-English speakers. But yes, for my own convenience (unironically), I wish that every website had a base English version that you could access with a single click. For example I was looking at some Microsoft webpage with troubleshooting or API information (can't remember). By default it was shown traslated based on my location, but there was a prominent "Read this in English" switch at the top. Top marks.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The problem is not the localization. It's choosing the default language based on anything other than explicit info provided by user-agent - that is, URL and Accept-Language, in that order.
- sametmax 8y ago
  French here. Yes, the english level is terrible in my country. Unfortuntly, translation is imperative if you want to enter the market. Which sucks, because it's a huge waste. There is not benefit to it: a UI is not like a book, you don't lose some quality in translation. In fact, most UI are worse once translated because english is a short and to the point language, which is what you want for buttons and menus.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  How many people in France have their computer / browser set to English, but don't understand English? I could see that being more common in the early 2000s, when it was probably easier to find a pirate version of Windows in English, but now...?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I can't speak about France, but my experience in the U.S. is that recent immigrants who can't speak English still set their computers to English. For some it's because they're so used to the non-English versions of web pages being so bad or abbreviated that having an English page they can half read is often better than the truncated "good enough" version provided in their native tongue.
xorand 8y ago
It's because a huge number of people just discovered the net and they don't surf as we are used to, like they don't search as we do etc. I don't want to sound elitist, many of them don't have the experience of it. They are going to repeat all behaviors and fall in all traps since we were new on the net. I see this in the way my kids use their phones.
K0nserv 8y ago
I use a VPN for all traffic, using an exit server in Finland. I don't speak a word of finnish. I have chatted with people who work on internationalization about IP based detection. The explanation I've always heard is that `Accept-Language` is all but useless. For a significant number of users the value is, incorrectly, `en-US`. Because of how unreliable `Accept-Language` is, IP based detection is unfortuantely has a much lower false positive rate.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  In general, I expect a web site, if it's available in more than one language, to offer me a menu where I pick the language I want. It's easy to do and it works for everyone. Usually the languages will also be accompanied by a little flag for extra non-ambiguity. See the "Change region" menu at the top of https://www.nintendo.com https://www.nintendo.com, or the obvious "English" selector amidst the gibberish at the top of https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ . Given how easy and robust this is... what exactly is the problem with using Accept-Language as your first guess? Maybe if more sites honored Accept-Language, users would start setting it.
  - K0nserv 8y ago
    You still have to pick a default region/language unless you want to force the user to make a selection before they get anywhere which is a mess UX-wise
    - Technetium_Hat 8y ago
      Ikea still uses such a landing page if you go directly to ikea.com .
- pinum 8y ago
  If it's specifically that value that's a problem then I'd suggest the following heuristic: Use geolocation if `Accept-Language` is `en-US`, otherwise respect the header. Technical users in Switzerland/Japan/wherever who want to see English pages can set their header to "en-GB" or "en-AU" to avoid getting caught in the heuristic. Edit: I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, of course- l10n isn't my job and I don't want to be this guy https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
infimum 8y ago
I live in Switzerland too and especially Youtube never seems to know whether to serve me ads in German, French or Italian (even though Google should know I almost exclusively consume English content). So I can sometimes watch several videos in a row, where I get served the same ad in a different language.
- deleted 8y ago
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- Svip 8y ago
  But don't ads on YouTube follow the more classic advertisement 'demographics', where location is more relevant than language? And it may just be cheaper and easier to just target all of Switzerland?
- Leherenn 8y ago
  This is where I feel a bit better about targeted advertising, if they're not able (as in at least not cheaply enough to be worth it) to serve me an ad in a language I understand, they still have a long way to go. And that's in Switzerland where people have a lot of disposable income and thus must be more attractive to advertisers than most places, despite being relatively small.
sveme 8y ago
Yes! When I head to docs.microsoft.com they show me a really bad machine-translated site of the C# API. And it is hard to change to the original English site. I am a software developer; I know English, thank you very much!
- w-m 8y ago
  One of the few things where Google Search is really awful for me personally. I've set it up to get search results in German (country of residence) and English (everything else). But I haven't found a way to communicate to it that for anything technical, I have a very strong preference for the English results. If I search for "std::vector", I get https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the first result and https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the second. The German translation is just awful and completely trips you up if you know English. I don't understand why it keeps pushing them up.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    My previous job had me traveling between Germany and China; during that time, Google's ridiculous localization of search results was becoming unbearable. I ended up permanently overriding my default search engine to point to this URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s. (It broke auto-suggesting search terms in the omnibar, but the actual search results are again sane.)
  - AnabeeKnox 8y ago
    Me too. I've had to start using DuckDuckGo, NOT for privacy reasons, but it get around Google's lunatic forced geolocated search.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    You cut to the core of the problem; user-preferred language for content is arbitrarily context-dependent.
    - 8y ago
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sametmax 8y ago
My pet peeve is when I have an application crash and the error message has been translated. Now googling it is extra fun, not to mention bug reporting. Fortunatly with Linux, I usually can get the proper message with "LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8" if I can, and desire, repeat the exact same error. Now I understand that this is done for openess and diversity. But technical terms should not be translated. I'm french, and I accept that english has won as the business language, and the IT language. Let's move on. Honestly, we are wasting humanity potential for not having a common language. I really, really wish we would all learn english as the second language, and that all laws, forms, labels and signs would be translated to english everywhere (as an addition to the local lang, not a replacement). It's an imperfect language, but it won half of the world, and the other half will have an easier time learning it that us learning theirs. Plus it has a very simple alphabet, and is already used for science, business and international politics. At this stage, I would gladly agree for all the french books and movies being burned and lost forever if it means one language, any language really, becomes magically the main one for humanity. We have too many communication problems. But since magic doesn't exist, what about getting off the ego train and just adopt the imperfect status quo and make something awesome with it for a change ?
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  English in terms of number of speakers has already reached the point where the number of ESL speakers outstrips the number of native ones by a good margin. The simple alphabet is a plus. I wish the spelling wasn't so godawful.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Yeah but I don't know any language used by hundred of millions of people that doesn't have many gotchas. Could be worse. The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D
    - CPLX 8y ago
      > The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D You're saying this like it isn't already happening.
Gibbon1 8y ago
I think your comment is kinda funny. Reminds me of California, a lot of effort goes into to providing public services in languages people best understand[1]. Not the local language or the default language of country of origin. Someone from South America might not actually speak Spanish. They might speak Quechua for instance. Brings up the point, 'internationalization' as a concept is utterly broken. People speak languages not countries. Also very likely that the non default language users may also be most in need. Probably should be a list of falsehoods programmers think about language. [1] Local school district I think at one time listed 43 languages.
retromario 8y ago
Yes, as an English speaker living in Germany, this is also something that drives me up the wall, but has also gotten better recently. My personal favorites, the cream of the crop: * Netflix: full site in English, subtitles (and audio tracks) for all shows available in German, English and several other languages. Only a few edge cases where the source (written) material appearing on-screen has already been hard-translated in. * Amazon: will let you turn on full English experience, up to and including...English speaking support (both written and verbal). This is truly the cream of the crop in terms of quality of experience. I really appreciate any German-oriented site that offers English as a possible language in spite of knowing my location. And if somewhere on your servers you already have English available, you would be silly to not make that available world-wide (where it makes sense). Of course, these are two of the biggest tech companies, so perhaps that speaks to the cost of internationalization.
- Markoff 8y ago
  pff this is nothing, German and English are quite similar languages, try living as foreigner in China, very enjoyable experience online /s
zebraflask 8y ago
Sounds more like you'd prefer an agreed upon lingua franca.
avip 8y ago
The worse offender here is nba.com, which Geo-redirects you to some local TV channel based on X-Forwarded-For header.
WalterBright 8y ago
My original compilers had error messages in English, German, French, and Japanese. It was a fair amount of work to make that work. I was pretty proud of it. Turns out that I couldn't find anyone who ever used the non-English messages. Everyone preferred the English messages, because everything else with programming was in English. So I abandoned worry about that, and haven't heard anything about it since. (Though the compiler uses UTF-8 strings for all text.)
- blattimwind 8y ago
  One problem with the translated GCC messages was that GCC didn't use error numbers at the time (still doesn't, I think, I didn't notice anyway), so it was basically impossible to reference the error except by full error message. MSVC on the other hand always includes a warning/error number, so there less issues talking about a particular error independent of language.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Since I gave up on translated error messages, using search and the error message string works fine (much better than a catalog of error codes).
iagooar 8y ago
> Please just use English Excuse me, sir. I would rather prefer it to always be German. Or French. Or Spanish. Or Italian. Not everybody speaks English, so it's perfectly fine to try and guess the person's language first - and allow to change it later. Also, once the UK has left the EU, English is not even going to be an official language here anymore - so I can see no reason why English should be the default in Europe.
- not2b 8y ago
  Ireland isn't leaving, so English will still be an official language.
  - iagooar 8y ago
    Not true - each European country can only choose one language - and Ireland chose Gaelic, since Britain chose English ;)
NicoJuicy 8y ago
You are an edge case. Go to the site in English, remove the root URL from your history. So it always suggests the English version ( URL) of the website. Best practise of a website ( eg. Google) don't suggest redirection based on an IP, which means a correct URL or cookie would suffice in most cases

guitarbill 8y ago

> The task force produced a book, basically. The book was on how Japanese text layout works. Was this ever released publically/does anybody know the title or ISBN? Would love to pick up a copy.

GuiA 8y ago
Not certain, but perhaps: https://www.w3.org/2007/02/japanese-layout/docs/aligned/japanese-layout-requirements-en.html https://www.w3.org/2007/02/japanese-layout/docs/aligned/japa...
- guitarbill 8y ago
  Thanks for digging that up! Finally a W3 document I enjoy reading; the illustrations are superb.
- Technetium_Hat 8y ago
  this seems to require a log in for me.
Wildgoose 8y ago
So would I.

crazygringo 8y ago

> Internationalization is not a feature, it’s an architecture... It’s not something extra. It doesn’t take longer. It doesn’t require additional engineers. That feels like the wrong way to convince people. Having worked with i18n and l10n before, it absolutely is extra, takes longer, and on a very large team can absolutely bump up to an additional engineer. Producing dynamic strings becomes much more involved and requires more testing. Handling RTL languages and layouts is another layer of things to worry about and test. Giving the translators sufficient context for each string is plenty of work, as is adjusting the design to fit strings that are longer than you'd expected. Etc. etc. That isn't to say don't do it. It's just yet another cost-benefit calculation taking into account ease-of-use and market size. But pretending the cost isn't there doesn't fool anyone -- it just makes them think you're bad at producing realistic estimates and makes them less likely to trust you generally.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
And it also causes compromises in the design of the English language version. For example in https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030929-02/?p=42363 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030929-02/?p=... Raymond Chen talks about how when a taskbar is docked vertically, the "Start" text disappears because while you can rotate English text to appear vertically, other languages are more problematic. In the same post, he also states that internationalization is why you have "1 folder(s)" "2 folder(s)" instead of "1 folder" and "2 folders".
- Markoff 8y ago
  this still doesn't work for languages with multiple plurals like Slavic languages, so how you write one word in three or more forms this way? the best thing i come over years it's abbreviating to the core, it doesn't look nice but it works "n fold." will always work unlike changing syntax to "Folders: n" which just can't be used within sentence. only way to make it right would provide different strings for multiple plurals based on value of variable and the best part it's in each language it differ, good luck with that, abbreviation it is...

Symbiote 8y ago

> What makes a good i18n and l10n expert Another pet peeve of mine: using lazy abbreviations like "i18n", "w/" or "w/out". These aren't even understood by many native English speakers.

mattmanser 8y ago
I would call them more a term of art in our industry than an abbreviation.
- CharlesW 8y ago
  Fun fact: These are more specifically called "numeronyms". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym
Markoff 8y ago
maybe they wanna avoid another S/Z issue so this it's their solution?

kasperni 8y ago

> Likewise, you can’t just assume that people will always use a.m. and p.m. because some countries use 24-hour clocks. As in 90-95 % of the countries in the world..... https://i.stack.imgur.com/43dwH.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/43dwH.jpg

jiveturkey 8y ago
roughly 80% by population
TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
Including many English speakers. Please don't force me to use 12-hour time, it hurts.

emiliobumachar 8y ago

Lots of the comments here are about preferring the version in English and being frustrated by software in other languages, pushed based on geography or some-such. These are valid experiences, I certainly learned from the comments and share some of the frustration. But let's all keep in mind that this is an English-language forum. Contributions, even more than readership, are from people with fluent or nearly fluent English. So, biased sample and all that. Generalize at your own risk.

medecau 8y ago

Offtopic but how do I subscribe to the paperback copy of Increment magazine? At the time I got a free sample of their 5th issue - Programming Languages - and asked about getting a copy of previous issues and subscribing to future ones but never heard back from them.

anotheryou 8y ago

As a german who used to do front-end, I'd have loved to delay those problems in to the first i18n. A "Cart" is a "Warenkorb" or an "Einkaufswagen" and both can't be shortened at all. Oh and did you know the correct spelling for a price would be "1.999,00 €"? (with a space (which even germans find ugly), comma/dot swap and the currency behind the number).

anoncake 8y ago
"Korb"/"Wagen"?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- currysausage 8y ago
  I'm not usually an advocate of icons, but in that case, an icon of a cart would still be preferable. "Korb" looks like I can buy a basket and "Wagen" alone usually means car. These meanings may not even make sense in the specific context, but with Kruger's Fact of Life #1 in mind ("We don’t read pages. We scan them."), the first connotation is actually what matters.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > I'm not usually an advocate of icons, but in that case, an icon of a cart would still be preferable. I think on most shopping sites, the cart button has both an icon and a label anyway. > These meanings may not even make sense in the specific context, but with Kruger's Fact of Life #1 in mind ("We don’t read pages. We scan them."), the first connotation is actually what matters. The first connotation depends on the context though. If you add an icon to the cart button and put it in the top right corner where people expect it, I predict that people may find it harder to identify the correct meaning than if you used "Einkaufswagen" or "Warenkorb", but only minimally.
    - zrobotics 8y ago

Torwald 8y ago

Amiga OS 3.0 did it right, anyone else here remembers?

bhaak 8y ago
Unless you mean something else, locale support was already introduced in AmigaOS 2.1. And I'm not sure what you exactly mean by "did it right". i18n and localization support is now in every OS and almost any UI framework available today. It was really great for its time but I wouldn't know of any feature it had that isn't standard today.
- Torwald 8y ago
  I never had a 2.1 machine, so I was mistaken there. Thanks for correcting that. To the point, I think the way the Amiga let a third party provide a localization file was easier than in todays OS more end user friendly. It was open and standardized across the OS. Not every app was cooking it's own format.

TomK32 8y ago

The quote from the article's title refers to copy and yes, with English being a rather short-ish language, translated copy will fail to stay within design constraints in pretty much all other languages. On the other hand, except for Russians (and the dozen or so Canadians and France which owns land in almost every timezone on the planet) pretty much every country on the planet has just one timezone. So creating an app for the US market brings that nasty problem.

NicoJuicy 8y ago

I integrate German, French, English and Dutch from the start. They are all languages used in Belgium, English as a developer. I've gotten it pretty productive. My database doesn't require extra tables and it's fully customizable per client ( 1 extra table). Because my clients, also want to label things differently according to their use-case. I control the translations ( the default and custom ones). As long as it's logical. I agree. I stop them when they don't use general words and try to create another use-case for it. That would break the app functionality or changes expectations ( eg. Stupid example: Label Completed as invoiced because that's their end state of a ticket). Then they need to adjust to the application workflow. I have custom parsers for languages stored in the database ( description is a multilingual column in the database for example). According to what I know, I'm the only person I've met who goes that deep from the start. And I have real advantages with it, as long as it's an application that "my clients" own clients use. Language doesn't stop and culture, but it's also niche and even "company behavior" related. For integrating multiple languages... If you live in America, it's an after thought. If you live in Belgium, it's the first thing you run into. If you're an SMB, you need to go deeper to differentiate. To me, the title only makes sense to me when you're mother tongue is a dominant language in the world ( reach for the stars). What I haven't run into yet is right-to-left and Arabic, Chinese,.. ( non Latin based languages) currently. Using USD, pounds and EUR is handled within the frameworks I use. Dot Net uses it extensively and yes, I use resx files ( which I don't like a lot, but I've wrapped them and use them as default translations of a language, clients can adjust them). I don't need translators in the start. I can handle French, Dutch, English myselve mostly. My German isn't very good though.. ( which sucks because of the title here :p ) Ps. Yes, Changing translations is billable per hour.

draw_down 8y ago
> What I haven't run into yet is right-to-left and Arabic Yeah, well, the game changes significantly when you do. I18n is pretty easy when it’s just English and a few European languages. But it turns out that’s not particularly “international”.

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago

This is one of the benefits of diversity on a team: you better understand the diversity of your customers.

mfritsche 8y ago

Microsoft seems to increasingly use machine translation for their user interfaces (really caught my eye in Azure DevOps). It mostly works... until it doesn't, and the translation gives a word that's close, but not right in context. It's annoying and makes me feel like they just didn't care enough. Frankly, I'd prefer an English user interface over one that tells me "Yeah, we checked the box, but couldn't care less!"