3 ms·

I speak English natively and Japanese fluently, and in my experience error messages (and other messages) that were translated into Japanese are often of rather

I speak English natively and Japanese fluently, and in my experience error messages (and other messages) that were translated into Japanese are often of rather questionable quality. But you're right, people who don't speak English very well (and aren't too experienced) often don't even notice non-fatal errors. I still think that showing translated error messages isn't very good. 1) Messages are often translated poorly (I won't go into detail here) and sometimes don't even make sense 2) Googling for a translated message won't turn up (m)any results 3) Poor translations might eventually be fixed, but IMO error messages should be considered part of the API I think the best recourse it to display the original message _and_ a translated message, or _maybe_ an (international) error code and a translated message. The great thing about the Japanese language is that with kanji you can make messages extremely concise, e.g.: "Access error: Array index is out of bounds" --> "エラー: 境界外読取/書込" which would make it acceptable IMO to display messages side-by-side. (It's unfortunate that "error" became "エラー" in Japanese)

needle0 7y ago
I don't quite get the reasoning where you talk about the quality of Japanese error messages, then talk about making it even harder to decipher. Sure you can compress meaning into short strings of kanji, but readability definitely takes a hit when you do that, even to a native speaker. It's not like we're displaying this on paper; there could be better ways to show errors to non-English speakers, eg. more descriptive messages like "エラー: 配列の範囲外へアクセスしています" can be shown by default and perhaps the original error message can show up when you mouseover on it or whatever. The "searchability on Stack Overflow" argument may vary depending on language, by the way - Japanese is one of the languages where technical information written in the language is fairly abundant (considering JP natives tend to avoid writing in English themselves and rather stick to writing Japanese), but this may not be true for other languages. Another factor is how likely the speaker of the language is to be English-bilingual.
- ken 7y ago
  > Japanese is one of the languages where technical information written in the language is fairly abundant At least with respect to error messages, that has not been my experience. I've almost never had success googling Japanese error messages. That (and the insanity with remembering how to get java to display English error messages, since it doesn't respect LANG/LC_ALL) is 100% the reason why I gave up on using Japanese on my development system.

needle0 7y ago

I don't quite get the reasoning where you talk about the quality of Japanese error messages, then talk about making it even harder to decipher. Sure you can compress meaning into short strings of kanji, but readability definitely takes a hit when you do that, even to a native speaker. It's not like we're displaying this on paper; there could be better ways to show errors to non-English speakers, eg. more descriptive messages like "エラー: 配列の範囲外へアクセスしています" can be shown by default and perhaps the original error message can show up when you mouseover on it or whatever. The "searchability on Stack Overflow" argument may vary depending on language, by the way - Japanese is one of the languages where technical information written in the language is fairly abundant (considering JP natives tend to avoid writing in English themselves and rather stick to writing Japanese), but this may not be true for other languages. Another factor is how likely the speaker of the language is to be English-bilingual.

ken 7y ago
> Japanese is one of the languages where technical information written in the language is fairly abundant At least with respect to error messages, that has not been my experience. I've almost never had success googling Japanese error messages. That (and the insanity with remembering how to get java to display English error messages, since it doesn't respect LANG/LC_ALL) is 100% the reason why I gave up on using Japanese on my development system.