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So you spend a lot of time and effort choosing terminology and phrasing these messages, then you need to translate it to N languages, and you are mostly out of

So you spend a lot of time and effort choosing terminology and phrasing these messages, then you need to translate it to N languages, and you are mostly out of luck. I tried to translate back one (of several thousand) of carefully phrased messages from a third party translation into English, and it was nowhere close. Was this a problem with google translate? Is it some limitation in the language? Who knows. In the end I realized that the product has a consistent and well thought out language only for the languages the development team speaks, and that will never be very many. I guess the takeaways is this: If you can, an application in the language it was developed in, even if there is a translation to a language you master better. Because after a certain limit the importance is how well the developers master the language, not you.

trinix912 4y ago
Hold up, are you really relying on Google Translate for that? Hiring an actual translation team solves this problem.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  No, I am not google translating. I was just doing that as a "reverse test" to see what the translators had actually written. We are using translators who are proficient in the domain and speak 2 languages at least (English plus the target language). But they are still "external" to the team. They have some domain knowledge, but they don't have the true conceptual knowledge about what things are called in the program. Translators inside the development team (for the couple of languages covered by the developers) don't make the mistake of picking an incorrect synonym. The external translators might, despite good domain knowledge. The problem with it is: We don't notice. Because we don't speak the language! E.g. if you make an architectural program, you might call things "floor", "level", or "storey". In an editor you might have "object", "entity" and so on) and all of these might exist and mean different things in the program. Language wise they may well be synonymous, but in the "domain language" of the program they might be very different.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    As a frustrated non-English user of recent widespread degradation in software translations, I can verify that you're completely correct in your observations. Recent advents of "I give you lists of short gibberish to make guesses on but I don't listen for excuses because they're short" platforms like Crowdin are starting to put toils on i18n users, just as you have been finding out from the other side. Basically it has to be bunch of screenshots or has to be tweet-long sentences, and it always had been, until someone ignorant in power started forcing that naivety.
carlosjobim 4y ago
Google translate is garbage level quality and can not be relied upon for any task. You should use DeepL for translation and you will be fine. Contract professionals to double check.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Google translate was only used by me to try to check what the professional translators had done, and see whether the phrasing is what I expect.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Google Translate is unreliable for that use. You'll need another professional translator to check that with certainty. DeepL is much better than Google translate, and also free.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      I know. So it's just a creeping suspicion. But the "need a different translator" still doesn't help. Because of the same reason the first one didn't help. Unless the person knows the semantics of the program, and not just the domain and the languages involved, we can't be sure they are making the right translation. It doesn't matter how many translators you throw at it (or how many tools). The closest thing would be to simply sit down with translators+developers and go through it. But that's also prohibitively expensive for specialist software (I.e. software where the number of languages times the number of translated texts is easily 100x the total number of users).

trinix912 4y ago

Hold up, are you really relying on Google Translate for that? Hiring an actual translation team solves this problem.

alkonaut 4y ago
No, I am not google translating. I was just doing that as a "reverse test" to see what the translators had actually written. We are using translators who are proficient in the domain and speak 2 languages at least (English plus the target language). But they are still "external" to the team. They have some domain knowledge, but they don't have the true conceptual knowledge about what things are called in the program. Translators inside the development team (for the couple of languages covered by the developers) don't make the mistake of picking an incorrect synonym. The external translators might, despite good domain knowledge. The problem with it is: We don't notice. Because we don't speak the language! E.g. if you make an architectural program, you might call things "floor", "level", or "storey". In an editor you might have "object", "entity" and so on) and all of these might exist and mean different things in the program. Language wise they may well be synonymous, but in the "domain language" of the program they might be very different.
- numpad0 4y ago
  As a frustrated non-English user of recent widespread degradation in software translations, I can verify that you're completely correct in your observations. Recent advents of "I give you lists of short gibberish to make guesses on but I don't listen for excuses because they're short" platforms like Crowdin are starting to put toils on i18n users, just as you have been finding out from the other side. Basically it has to be bunch of screenshots or has to be tweet-long sentences, and it always had been, until someone ignorant in power started forcing that naivety.

carlosjobim 4y ago

Google translate is garbage level quality and can not be relied upon for any task. You should use DeepL for translation and you will be fine. Contract professionals to double check.

alkonaut 4y ago
Google translate was only used by me to try to check what the professional translators had done, and see whether the phrasing is what I expect.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Google Translate is unreliable for that use. You'll need another professional translator to check that with certainty. DeepL is much better than Google translate, and also free.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I know. So it's just a creeping suspicion. But the "need a different translator" still doesn't help. Because of the same reason the first one didn't help. Unless the person knows the semantics of the program, and not just the domain and the languages involved, we can't be sure they are making the right translation. It doesn't matter how many translators you throw at it (or how many tools). The closest thing would be to simply sit down with translators+developers and go through it. But that's also prohibitively expensive for specialist software (I.e. software where the number of languages times the number of translated texts is easily 100x the total number of users).