4 ms·
I18N is the bane of my existence. It's a horribly thankless task. Apart from that, I work with a company that uses an external translation company for 30+ langu
by _pmf_ 7y ago
I18N is the bane of my existence. It's a horribly thankless task. Apart from that, I work with a company that uses an external translation company for 30+ languages, and at least from cursory checking, most are horribly wrong, to the point where they are either completely nonsensical in the given context or just misleading enough to mean something slightly different in the context, which is even worse, since this is an industrial product that can cause severe damage). It's not my job to check or even correct the translations' content (just that they fit ot to make the changes to the layouts to make them fit), so I'm only reporting the most severe violations. Every correction is a multi-week roundtrip to the translation company, delaying releases.
- mlang23 7y agoI am suspecting that those translation companies actually just use Google Translate or something similar. I recently saw a commercial product for the blind, developed in an english speaking country, where the german translation of the app was so horribly wrong to the point of totally being useless to non-initiated users. Hours -> Stunden Minutes -> Protokoll This is so horribly wrong, that it is very unlikely that it was translated by ahuman.
- mrec 7y agoI remember a lovely example from when I was living in Germany years ago. I got a letter about some upcoming local election, and was very impressed that it was in English for my convenience, but it opened with the marvellous greeting "Dear male voter, dear female voter".
- vetinari 7y ago> most are horribly wrong, to the point where they are either completely nonsensical in the given context or just misleading enough to mean something slightly different in the context, That's because translators will get just a bunch of strings, with no context. Only if they are lucky, they will do partial handbacks and will receive builds with their translation included.
- _pmf_ 7y ago> Only if they are lucky, they will do partial handbacks and will receive builds with their translation included. That's what I ended up doing. We made a Windows version of our (actually our customer's) embedded product and I replaced the translation backend with an Excel table, and an Excel library so the translators could edit and test themselves without needing to recompile / convert anything. Just edit entry in table and restart the application. Implementing this backend was surprisingly easy (half a day); thanks to Qt.