5 ms·
I'm still traumatized by the several years of using Windows in my native language. I was yet young and eager, but nonetheless had to spend plenty of cumulative
by aasasd 6y ago
I'm still traumatized by the several years of using Windows in my native language. I was yet young and eager, but nonetheless had to spend plenty of cumulative hours wandering helplessly through the control panel, trying to decipher what they meant by all those attempts at translation.
I've been using only English interfaces for more than a decade, but recently-ish relived the phenomenon with MS Office, and it doesn't get easier with experience.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoSame here. I always set everything to en_US, because that's the native language of computing. Any time I've had to use something in my native language (Polish), the translation was terrible - and the only reason I was not confused was because I could mentally untranslate the Polish text to the most likely English original. Speaking of computing and translations: the most annoying case I've had was not with UIs, but with books. Back in the day, I bought two C++ books by Scott Meyers (Effective C++ and More Effective C++), both published in Polish, and each by a different publisher. In the first one, they translated "template" -> "szablon" and "pattern" -> "wzorzec", and in the other, they translated "template" -> "wzorzec" and "pattern" -> "szablon". Took my teenage mind quite a while to make sense of the confusion.
- phowat 6y agoSame experience here. In college ( portuguese speaking country ), the teachers forbade us to buy translated books. We had to work with the english editions only, and I'm lucky this was the case having seen some of these translated books later.
- tinus_hn 6y agoI think excel used to have a translated macro language, so if you used the Dutch Excel you’d have to use Dutch words for ‘if’, ‘then’ ‘else’ etcetera. Truly insane.
- emteycz 6y agoThat's still the case today.
- tinus_hn 6y agoI presume this is the ‘legacy’ macro language and there is also the Visual Basic thing which is plain English, right?
- emteycz 6y agoI am talking about the formula language you're using in spreadsheets for calculations etc, I don't think that is legacy. I don't think I know anyone using the Visual Basic thing, I actually thought that's not part of Excel anymore except for compatibility support, but yes I guess Visual Basic stays in English.
- aasasd 6y agoIndeed, that's one problem I had with it recently—with formulas. I search the web on how to do some thing, and then have to stare at the list of functions to find the same ones in my language. Doesn't help that functions are named like it's the 80s, with arbitrary abbreviations.
- imperistan 6y agoIt still is that way. And whats even more maddening: you have to replace the commas in the formulas with semicolons. Probably because the comma is used in numbers in Dutch. It has driven me nuts more than once though!
- beefield 6y agoI think there would be a compromise in making if US gave up imperial units and Europe would give up the decimal comma. Or at least I would like that kind of compromise. The next hurdle would be to all agree to use ISO date format...