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+1, especially when it comes to localizing UI text. The trick with UI text is that in many languages it's not grammatically correct to begin with (GUI labels ar
by potatolicious 4y ago
+1, especially when it comes to localizing UI text. The trick with UI text is that in many languages it's not grammatically correct to begin with (GUI labels are rarely expressed in full sentences), and the terseness introduces vast amounts of ambiguity in meaning.
Like take a "Submit" button - it can mean anything from "send this request in" to "grovel in front of me" depending on context. Human localizers struggle with this, especially when the source files they're provided with do not have sufficient context (and they cannot see the GUI in-context) to infer meaning. Existing translation engines are worse.
- koreth1 4y ago> Human localizers struggle with this, especially when the source files they're provided with do not have sufficient context (and they cannot see the GUI in-context) to infer meaning. And sometimes the lack of context is self-inflicted. My company just started evaluating translation services and as part of that process, we sent some of our strings to the candidate companies. Many of our strings are in Java properties files, which we've annotated with comments to give context. Yesterday I got a request back from one of them: please convert the strings to a JSON file. Which is on some level the equivalent of, please strip out all the comments you added for our benefit. Yes, I get that our strings will be fed into translation software. But still, we made the effort to give them context and they told us to get rid of it.