28 ms·

Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English

• andyjohnson0 3y ago
  I'm late to this discussion, but a datapoint: On the two Windows 11 machines that I have access to, one Pro and one Home, and both set to UK English, the file compression option says "Compress to Zip file". I've never seen "postcode file" in the Windows UI.
  • cubefox 3y ago
    This indeed seems to be an old thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/12cwylk/microsoft_has_mistranslated_zip_files_as_postcode/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/12cwylk/microsoft... It's odd that apparently nobody on HN bothered to personally check this story, except you. (Is a lesson somewhere for the coming wave of AI fake news?)
• alkonaut 3y ago
  How does that even happen? I mean for localizing software - any software - you need some kind of Lookup key for each resource and then you can do a lookup for that key and a language, to get the resource (An image, a text string, whatever). So the function is (key, language) -> resource. E.g. ("filetype:zip", "en-US") -> "Zip file". Since any term can be used in multiple places and words can have multiple meanings, you can't localize software as a mapping from one language to another. Especially not english.
  • progval 3y ago
    A lot of software does it gettext-style, where the code contains one language (typically English) and wrap it _() so it's picked up by the translation system. For example: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Preparing-Strings.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Prepar... You can add context this way, but programmers often forget, translators don't look for context, and seemingly no one reviews the final product in other languages.
    • alkonaut 3y ago
      That's exactly my point: using gettext and hoping to hard-code one language (typically english) as the "key" language and then sending it to translators who will try to map context-less strings to a different language is just not a good way of localizing software. I think the key design flaw is that it's the best solution to an unviable problem: the idea of adding i18n to software as a simple transform from one language to another (i.e. an afterthought). The proper solution again, is using keys that provide the context. A special syntax for these neutral strings (e.g. prefix, uppercase, whatever) will quickly show where a translation is missing. Translating is then a mapping from keys to english, or keys to french and so on and never english -> french, even with gettext. Instead of "Zip file" you'd have to hard code ":filetype_zip".
• TheUndead96 3y ago
  Not going to lie, this is quite cute
• xinayder 3y ago
  I have worked with volunteer translations for Valve using the now defunct Steam Translation Server (and Crowdin very rarely nowadays) and discussing problems like these with other people from the community, the mods agreed that this is a lack of context issue. Then, I started playing World of Warcraft and realized how bad the localization is. I mean, the translation isn't bad per se, I really appreciate that they tried to adapt the game to my country's culture and that is totally awesome. But seeing Blizzard pay a ton of money for some people that don't even play the game to verify if their translation is correct or makes sense is just astonishing to me. When Blizz released the new UI for WoW, there was an option called "snap" which meant "snap to grid". The amazing translator team, having no context and not even the decency of checking the context in game, translated this option as "estalo", which, in portuguese, means "snap (sound)", as in a finger snap. Another example is that when they added minimap sizing to the UI editor, there's an option that allows the name of the zone to be below the minimap. The brilliant translator team translated it in portuguese to "abaixo cabeçalho" (literally under header) or something very silly which you could literally see that they put no effort in the translation.
• AmenBreak 3y ago
  [flagged]
• samstave 3y ago
  In Japan, they are simply called .prefecture
• popcalc 3y ago
  Can someone report back on whether it returns a .postcode archive :)
• TechBro8615 3y ago
  I've always wondered why "Shopping Cart" isn't called "Shopping Trolley" in the checkout flows of British websites...
  • ddek 3y ago
    It is on Argos.
    • benbristow 3y ago
      Argos is great. Like Amazon but you can walk in (at least before they started closing loads of their stores and merging them into Sainsbury's) Same day delivery online before Amazon started doing it with Prime Now too. Their app update release notes used to be hilarious too but they've stopped doing them, I think the person responsible left. https://thecircular.org/argoss-hilarious-app-updates/ https://thecircular.org/argoss-hilarious-app-updates/
  • _oyks 3y ago
    It's often called Basket to navigate this
  • sys_64738 3y ago
    You find a lot of British-English terms are different from what we use in the US.
    • devnullbrain 3y ago
      'isn't' means the same though
  • BasedAnon 3y ago
    because most people don't care that much, i've lived in the uk my whole life but my english is extremely americanized due to my use of the internet growing up
  • evolving-silica 3y ago
    The very first thing we do, when we create a new e-commerce website is to change "cart" to "basket" everywhere we can find it. Without that - as our manager says - we wouldn't sell anything on UK market
• mikestew 3y ago
  When I worked at Microsoft as a localization lead, we had actual human beings that would look over this stuff before calling machine translation good (of course, we had actual human translators back then, too). But that was a long time ago, back when Microsoft had human software testers, too. And what options are available when I right click on a .zip/.postcode file? Say, perhaps I wished to uncompress it?
  • LordShredda 3y ago
    Still, any machine translator worth your time would know what the phrase zip file is, unless it's not a machine but someone manually changing it.
    • seszett 3y ago
      Since translation is given less and less thought, the underlying system is also becoming more basic and less context-aware. I don't remember exact occurrences but I've noticed quite a few similar problems on macOS that are just the result of words being translated out of context. On a popular forum software I used to do support for, "flag" (for moderation) was translated in French as "drapeau" for example. Which is technically correct I suppose, drapeau does mean flag, but the wavy kind of flag that countries like to use as symbols. Nothing else. And it's not a verb. In this case, there is simply the string "zip" somewhere that is used both in some address forms and for the file type, and the translator just happened to translate the first occurrence probably without even knowing that is was also used in another context as well. Or without any means to ask the dev team to separate them into two terms. Which might not even be possible if they used too simplistic a translation system.
      • londons_explore 3y ago
        The programmers and the translators are different people who have probably never met eachother. Translators usually just get to see the string they are translatinbg, and if they're lucky a 1 sentence explanation written by a programmer. With no context, a "Zip file" might indeed mean a "postcode file" - perhaps it is a file for storing all the zip codes, and now it will be used for storing all the postcodes?
• blibble 3y ago
  guess they've got their amazing AI doing the translations now
• paavope 3y ago
  This feels like such a Microsoft thing to do
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• veave 3y ago
  Using software in a language other than US English has always been a pain.
  • crickey 3y ago
    Since when?
    • louthy 3y ago
      Since forever according to the OP
    • veave 3y ago
      Misspellings, mistranslations, strings that don't fit in the label/button, harder to google errors in other languages, etc.
      • Findecanor 3y ago
        What GUI toolkit are you using in 2023 where a widget doesn't adjust its size the size of its text label?
        • crazygringo 3y ago
          Literally any fixed-size dialog box ever. Which seems to still be mostly the norm for apps in any desktop OS for things like preferences/settings dialogs.
        • BasedAnon 3y ago
          Alot of UIs just can't deal with the size of a box being resized, so they instead adjust the size of the text, but for languages like Arabic and Japanese this can easily make text unreadable because characters often rely on finer details to be understood
        • stinos 3y ago
          There are so many other ways this can happen that it's really not surprising this happens. Like: started 20 years ago with the UI toolkit in English and a junior dev hence fixed size then suddenly got a growing customerbase in another language and slammed on a translation only to realize it would be a pretty large effort to track down and change each label to resize. Or even just: things adjusting size can simply be a big no depending on software (and you'd use truncation+toltip), because one doesn't want to waste space and/or keeps things aligned so it's easier to learn where everything is. Your browser tabs probably don't adjust size to text, just to name one thing.
• kpw94 3y ago
  Idk what's happening to the Windows/file explorer teams, this is embarrassing. Another issue I've had in newest file explorer, (probably a bug, unless they're trying to get rid of ".txt" files), is this one also reported on Twitter by "MittringMartin": https://twitter.com/MittringMartin/status/1663782020055728129 https://twitter.com/MittringMartin/status/166378202005572812... can't do "right click" > "New" > "Text document". Happens on my system too, a stock windows install on a surface laptop, for which I've never messed around with any obscure settings. It's also gone from the "shift right click" menu (aka the good old menu)...
  • NoPicklez 3y ago
    Regardless of the menu problem. Why could he just heard for Notepad in the start menu and open it there? Rather than going through the process of gutting out a publisher file.
  • Strom 3y ago
    This smells like a bug. I have Windows 11 Pro and I'm seeing weird behavior in this menu. 1. Historically it used to contain a bunch of blank file types, including .txt files. 2. Now it only has a Folder, Shortcut, WinRAR archive. That's right, only three items. This has to be a bug.
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      You got WinRAR installed? Is it still alive or are you doing archeology?
      • fredoralive 3y ago
        He's got to get value of money out of it, after all registering WinRAR it isn't cheap.
      • hulitu 3y ago
        There were a lot of programs distributed as rar archives.
      • 3y ago
• rts_cts 3y ago
  Next level Clbuttic [1] mistake [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic
  • mablopoule 3y ago
    Thank you for the term, I didn't knew about it. Another very ironic example of that is this recent Reddit post [1], where the name "Nasser" was censored in-game to become "N***er", making it look much, much worse. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/znfw7y/my_name_is_nasser_the_game_is_censoring_the_word/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/znfw7y/my_name_is_n...
  • jjoonathan 3y ago
    My favorite is when google translate translates the Chinese word for product/item/thing as "baby." You shop for babies, babies go on sale, here, have a coupon for $2 off any baby! If it doesn't work out there's always the "return defective baby" button!
    • petepete 3y ago
      This reminded me of the song "All that she wants" by Ace of Base. The mistranslation of the word "baby" makes the song sound like it's about a woman who wants more kids, rather than a woman who wants a lover. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrwlFTqS_bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrwlFTqS_bg
    • bitwize 3y ago
      Reminds me of the gourmet cuisine to be had at Translation Server Error.
    • jabbany 3y ago
      I'm guessing this is for Taobao? They do stylize the term they use for products. The more accurate translation would have be "precious/treasure" -- i.e., Shop for [Treasure]. (Taobao lit. means to [Pan] for [Treasure]) In common colloquial usage, though, the term would indeed refer to "baby" in the same sense as "my precious/darling".
• perihelions 3y ago
  To save you a query: - "The name "zip" (meaning "move at high speed") was suggested by [Phil] Katz's friend, Robert Mahoney.[4]. They wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.[4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)#History
  • OJFord 3y ago
    I could've sworn it was named for the authors - took a while to find with nothing more to go on, but I was thinking of Lempel-Ziv (and I suppose Ziv became ZIP, sorry Ziv). I must be using a lossy compression for memory.
  • ambicapter 3y ago
    That's funny, I always pictured it as "zipping up" like closing up some sort of container.
    • Timon3 3y ago
      It's funny how well that would fit tar.
    • heywhatupboys 3y ago
      to quote the famous bash.org: "What should I give my sister for unzipping?" "20 bucks?" "no like, for files and stuff"
      • paulddraper 3y ago
        Hahaha
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • Groxx 3y ago
      Quite a lot of zip application icons used this imagery, so that's not particularly surprising
• fredoralive 3y ago
  Another British English oddity is with Mac OS. Classic Mac OS had a British version until circa Mac OS 8, which called the Trash the Wastebasket. But the icon wasn't changed, so was still visually a dustbin. British English returned at some point with recent Mac OS X versions, but now the icon really is a wastebasket, they called it the Bin. (If anyone has this British English Windows 11, is it still the Recycle Bin, or the more British Recycling Bin?)
  • mig39 3y ago
    Gives new meaning to putting my shell scripts in /usr/local/bin :-)
  • BenFeldman1930 3y ago
    I check out what's under the bonnet.
  • bobbyi 3y ago
    Recycling Bin is the normal name in US English too. I'm in the US and when I search google for "Recycle Bin" (https://www.google.com/search?q=recycle+bin https://www.google.com/search?q=recycle+bin), the results (in order) are * "Recycling Bins" from Home Depot * "Recycling Bins" from Amazon * "Find the Recycle Bin" from Microsoft * "Recycling Bins" from Lowes.com * "Recycle Bins" from Target * "Recycling Bins" from Walmart
  • Kwpolska 3y ago
    It's still Recycle Bin in the British version of Windows.
    • zamadatix 3y ago
      On Windows, I think it has always been "Recycle Bin" in any English dialect since the beginning. I guess that leaves a question I never thought of: what do the British call a recycling bin?
      • zabzonk 3y ago
• troad 3y ago
  I've honestly just given up using British / Commonwealth English localisations in software. You run into constant little bugs and annoyances, and it's not like I can't decypher the US English version. Please always remember to let your users change regional settings separately and individually for currency, measures, first day of the week, etc.
  • pathartl 3y ago
    ZIP Code was a service mark owned by the USPS. The generic term is a postal code. I've personally seen more and more software use the term postal code, especially anything that handles international addresses.
  • toyg 3y ago
    Ironically, colour (like a few other ou-isms) is actually a modern French influence that took root in Britain but not "in the colonies".
    • stevesimmons 3y ago
      In the "colonies" of Australia and New Zealand, "colour" is the accepted spelling.
      • hunter2_ 3y ago
        Many places have states (for example, Mexico) but "the states" typically refers to the ones in the USA. Perhaps the same applies to "the colonies"?
        • brigandish 3y ago
          If you're American, who are generally seen as incredibly parochial (especially by the British), then that may be the case. If you're British, then the colonies really could be any of 75% of the world. As a Brit, I think it's a tad unfair on the yanks to see them as that parochial. As a test, ask any Brit moaning about the NHS and railing against the US private system (these complaints often come together from people who would never consider themselves parochial) whether the health services of Germany, France or the Netherlands are private. They won't have the first clue. Just shows you, all that consumption of worldly and international news by worldly and international types remains strangely parochial, and that's just one example.
• Dudester230602 3y ago
  I am skipping Windows 11, but have no idea what could possibly force Microsoft to make Windows 12 user-friendly again.
  • hulitu 3y ago
    They shall implement the Windows 2000 GUI and Control Panel.
    • wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Fun fact: the Windows 2000 Control Panel (debuting in Windows 95, iirc) was largely HTML-based. Everything old is new again.
      • fredoralive 3y ago
        Not really? Windows 95 pre-IE4 has no HTML stuff in the shell, so the core Control Panel UI and applets dating back to then are native. The main HTML bits in Explorer of the era once it was glued in was the waste of space side bars. I guess some newer applets might be HTML, but the main ones weren’t.
  • Akronymus 3y ago
    a mass switch to linux.
    • esskay 3y ago
      If only that was on the cards. MS really needs something to give them a good kick up the arse so they stop pumping out crummy software. Sadly I dont see it happening any time soon.
    • vinaypai 3y ago
      Is it the Year of the Linux Desktop?
  • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Fix all the bugs they introduced by trying to rewrite stuff that worked fine like the taskbar, stop changing functionality that works like the taskbar, remove the telemetry and need for an MS account, and give back users control over updates. That's basically it.
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  It's not a trash can but a rummage bin! And I love how the English called filets fill-its but when it comes to eggplants it's aubergine! What a colourful language.
  • superluserdo 3y ago
    I've never heard of a rummage bin, maybe you misheard "rubbish bin"? I prefer not to have to rummage through it!
    • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      Yeah my bad it's rubbish bin. Phone posting is a curse.
    • ralferoo 3y ago
      A rummage bin is where they put the discounted items in shops.
      • aembleton 3y ago
        That's a bargain bin
• ssl232 3y ago
  How has this happened? It was always correctly called "zip file" in Windows <11 - did they not just copy existing translations over to 11?
  • TonyTrapp 3y ago
    I've seen a lot of translations breaking lately also in Windows 10 - I guess someone is just eager to rework a lot of things that have been working perfectly to get a raise.
• noodlesUK 3y ago
  What's very funny to me is that there is a very important "file" called the postcode address file in the UK, which is Royal Mail's mapping of postcodes to addresses.
• kbrackbill 3y ago
  We had an almost identical bug, also at Microsoft, when I was working on Hotmail (it may have been Outlook.com by then, I can't remember): POP, the email protocol, was localized into UK English as DAD.
  • hermitdev 3y ago
    I find POP->DAD a little odd, because I've never (as an American) heard anyone say 'pop' referring to their father. 'pops'? yes. Now, POP->SODA, would not surprise me in the least.
    • vram22 3y ago
      It's an older generation thing. See Pop Tate in Archie comics [1], for example; the soda fountain guy. Guessing it's probably derived from Papa, like Pa, Paw (hillbillies), etc. ("Hillbillies" not meant derogatorily.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Comics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Comics
    • lmm 3y ago
      "Soda" is even more of an americanism than "pop". ("Fizzy drink" is the only term I've ever heard used in the UK).
      • firstlink 3y ago
        It's always confused me why Wikipedia calls its UK language version "simple English".
      • udp 3y ago
        “Pop” gets used in the UK sometimes but I’ve only heard it in northern England. Never heard Soda anywhere in the UK though, apart from the specific case of cream soda.
      • physicsguy 3y ago
        Pop is common where I live in the Midlands
    • 3y ago
• dagw 3y ago
  I remember reading an interview with a British author, it might have been Neil Gaiman. He was just about to get his first book published in the US, and the American publisher contacted him and asked if it was OK if they changed a couple of British words to American, like "flat" to "apartment". Not wanting to risk the publishing deal, they said sure. A couple of month later they got the first edition of the US version back and found lines like. "He looked out over the apartment landscape" and "'Come with me', he said apartmently"
  • wly_cdgr 3y ago
    When I'm feeling down, reading about stuff like this always gives me an elevator
  • ChrisRR 3y ago
    That definitely must've been early. I would've thought Gaiman of all people knows how easily English humour can get lost in translation. Often even when not changing the text
  • 2-718-281-828 3y ago
    the irony being that many readers probably attributed this to neil's sense of humor. i would have. "he said apartmently? what? aaah ... now i get it - haha - good one!"
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Clbuttic mistake!
  • perihelions 3y ago
    - "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment." - "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..." - "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught." - "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me." https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])
• nottorp 3y ago
  This is true AI!
• attah_ 3y ago
  I thought AI would fix the context-awareness of automatic translators, but apparently not.
  • Detrytus 3y ago
    I guess it was a simple "search/replace", no intelligence involved, human or artificial.
• astrange 3y ago
  This kind of mistake isn't that amazing, it's actually very common in translation because translators often don't get enough context - they just see a string with no comments. But you're supposed to find it in QA after that.
  • Crespyl 3y ago
    That'd be easier if they hadn't got rid of all their QA people years ago.
    • mostlysimilar 3y ago
      Did they really do this? How can they possibly justify that? Are their users so held hostage that broken software isn't enough to get them to leave?
      • moffkalast 3y ago
        Nah they just outsourced their QA department to the users, it's the modern thing to do.
        • midoridensha 3y ago
          It's the right thing to do, for Microsoft. Their users aren't going to leave them, no matter what, so why waste money on QA staff and testing? It's better for the company's profit margin to just let the users deal with those problems, and the users agree since they're happy to keep using MS products and paying for them.
      • wizzwizz4 3y ago
        Yes? People have been joking about Microsoft's buggy software for longer than some of my friends have been alive. Backwards-compatibility is a hell of a drug; combine it with "every time my computer changes, it's really hard to figure out how to use it, so I don't want to change OS", and it's unstoppable.
      • toast0 3y ago
• Animux 3y ago
  Related: Is there already a .postcode toplevel domain?
• comprev 3y ago
  Reminds me of the Scunthorpe problem :-)
  • sn_master 3y ago
    or the Nasser problem :-) https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1605337499873660928?lang=en https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1605337499873660928?lang=...
• rejectfinite 3y ago
  Must be machine translated and then not looked over by a human. Actually sad.
• notum 3y ago
  There we go, Google's TLD fiasco resolved. Thank you, Microsoft!
• ipkpjersi 3y ago
  That's hilarious. Talk about AI/automation gone wrong.
• kotaKat 3y ago
  I've heard from sources that this ticket has been sitting stale at MSFT for at least a couple weeks now. Surely they could have avoided the embarrassment of pushing this to prod?
• AHOHA 3y ago
  Can’t wait for 7postcode x64 installer!
• dusted 3y ago
  That's _AWESOMELY_ british.
  • seba_dos1 3y ago
    Rather Microsoftish. Similar things are commonly happening in Windows translations to other languages.
• skissane 3y ago
  Vaguely related, I’ve noticed before manuals in which tech writers provide expansions of acronyms - but they don’t realise that in the context of that manual the acronym means something different. I remember one z/OS manual saying AIX stood for “Advanced Interactive eXecutive”-which is true if we are talking about the Unix, but this manual was talking about a VSAM AIX (Alternative IndeX) - a secondary index for the VSAM flat file database system. Another example was USS being wrongly expanded as “UNIX System Services” when in the context it was actually a reference to VTAM’s “Unformatted System Services” (the part of VTAM which handles the initial LOGIN command, I think “Unformatted” because it is plain EBCDIC not 3270) In Windows, there is an account flag called “UF_MNS_LOGON_ACCOUNT”. A lot of people claim “MNS” stands for “Majority Node Set” - even one MS doc - see MNSLogonAccount in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedirectory/set-adaccountcontrol?view=windowsserver2022-ps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedi... - however, while it is true that’s what the acronym stands for in the context of Windows clustering, I’m pretty sure in the context of Windows user accounts it actually means “Microsoft Netware Services”-this flag was used by Microsoft’s 1990s era software which enabled Windows NT to pretend to be a Netware server, and the unrelated Windows clustering “MNS” has never used that account flag. “Microsoft Netware Services” was renamed to “Microsoft Services for Netware” (MSN-but not that MSN!-hence MSFN or SNW), no doubt for trademark law reasons, but the name of this flag got stuck with the original acronym. I don’t think it actually does anything unless you have that old stuff installed, which probably doesn’t work on newer versions of Windows. I suppose that being an effectively disused flag, there is nothing stopping people from stealing it for their own purposes, and probably someone out there has.
• johnwalkr 3y ago
  A couple of years ago, Turkey/Türkiye had a campaign to get people to use Türkiye in English. At that time I flew Turkish airlines, which had a promotional video about this, and with all mentions of Turkey in safety cards, magazines and the seat back screen changed to Türkiye. Then when browsing for a tv show to watch on my seat back screen, I came across an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond with a description something like “on thanksgiving day, Raymond burns the Türkiye“
  • xps 3y ago
    Should Turkey decide how their country is called in other languages? America is "Měiguó" in Chinese. I'm pretty sure the Chinese decide for themselves what they want to call America.
    • mcv 3y ago
      Sometimes, sometimes not. Everybody changed Peking to Beijing when China requested that. But living in Netherland, I shake my head at all the languages insisting on pluralising the name of my country. And that's not even addressing "Dutch".
    • kevincox 3y ago
      In general I think yes. People should be able to decide what they want to be called. I think it is really strange that we assign names to countries. Imagine if I asked you what your name was then ignored what you said and pronounced that I would be called you Frank. That would be quite rude.
      • archerx 3y ago
        That's the story of my life, unless you speak French you will probably pronounce my name wrong, no matter how many times I repeat it and help people pronounce it, I don't get mad nor think it's rude, it's kind of amusing actually. Once I realize they can't handle it I just tell people to call me by my last name which is very easy to say in English. There are too many interesting things in life to get hung up on a petty detail like a name.
• kristofferR 3y ago
  Playstation used the equivalent of "Store/archive/stock 20%" on the PSN Store for years in Norway instead of "Save 20%", because they translated Save without realizing that we have different words for saving money and saving things.
• supermatt 3y ago
  Probably an issue during localization, where someone saw "zip" and assumed it meant "zip code" and so "translated" it to "postcode". This is a perfect example of why its important to also supply the context instead of just the raw strings you need translated! It also brings to mind a translation issue from my home country, wales, where road signs must be bilingual (english and welsh). A request was sent to a welsh translation service asking for the translation for a specific phrase. The signwriters received the response, completed the sign and it was then erected. The problem: it was an out-of-office auto-reply! https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffic-sign/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffi...
  • coin 3y ago
    zip doesn’t translate to postal code. ZIP does.
    • supermatt 3y ago
      I dont think you understand how localization works. They have a localization file and they send them off to a translation service. The translation service goes through the file and translates the individual strings (or string fragments). Either the translators made a mistake, and thought it was referring to a ZIP (regardless of capitalization) and translated accordingly, or a developer used the wrong key when assembling the string references - i.e. he used the equivalent of (this is pseudocode as I dont know how they handle localizations): localize("CompressToArchive", localize("Zip"), localize("File")) - i.e. with a reference to localization of "Zip" (or ZIP, or zip - the dev likely just searched for a string that matched what he wanted to localize) instead of localize("CompressToArchive", "Zip", localize("File")) - i.e. with a string of "Zip" where the strings are defined as: CompressToArchive: Compress to %1.%2 (same for us and uk) Zip: ZIP (us) or postcode (uk) File: File (same for us and uk)
• NeoTar 3y ago
  I especially object to the case of zip-code being used internationally, because this isn’t a case of a sensible alternative usage, but rather one very specific US term being interpreted as universal. Please, for internalisation sake, use the generic term ‘postal code’ in English , then regionalise as appropriate (e.g. Post Code in the UK, Eircode in Ireland, Postal Index Number in India, Zip code in the US, etc.)
• mabbo 3y ago
  This is the most 2023 answer possible but I wonder if LLM translation will help handle this sort of situation better. An LLM first translates to tokens in more of a "concept space", then translates to other languages. So it would translate "zip file" to something completely different than "zip code", and translate to UK English correctly, or at least better I would hope. They may not solve all problems, but maybe this one?
  • wizzwizz4 3y ago
    This is, in fact, the task that transformers (the technology currently branded as "LLMs") do well. It was the task they were invented for: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
  • chrsjxn 3y ago
    There's like two main ways this kind of mistake happens. One is a programmer using the wrong string ID. Probably a mistake when searching a translation file/db. The second is missing context. The word "zip" has multiple meanings in software, so you need more information to disambiguate when translating. "Zip code" and "zip file" is probably sufficient, but you could imagine them also having a templated translation for file types like "{} file". I could see an unspecialized LLM translation working well for whole sentences or paragraphs, because that kind of text isn't really likely to run into either of these problems. And if you have the context you need to avoid the second problem for small snippets, then human translation is also pretty unlikely to fail.
  • numpad0 3y ago
    So, such LLM still would have to be informed that this is referring to a zip compressed archive, not a postcode file, whatever such file might be. This is basically the same thing as LLM hallucination, in that it comes from lack of constraints in latent space, if I dare use that buzzword. Without context, a “zip” or “zip file” still can be anything. Could even be “zip [this] file” as a command.
• layer8 3y ago
  Windows localizations have been getting worse and worse over the past decade and a half. And now apparently they are further degrading to automated translations? Who could possibly think this is a good idea?
  • InCityDreams 3y ago
    >I like a clean install and ripping out all the non-english languages takes a while. I also trawl through programs and extensions and get rid of the unnecessarily installed [for me] languages. Additionally, any os images - backgrounds, ms logos etc get reduced to 10*10 pixels. I don't need eight versions of the same wallpaper. And ss for themes...
• MartijnBraam 3y ago
  Windows is a goldmine of horrible translations. Since the introduction of the Windows Fax & Scan tool the dutch translation has the translation "Zoeken" for the button to start the scan. This translates back to "Search". In dutch we actually just call it scan, just like in english.
• pavlov 3y ago
  In England they call a zipper a postcodemonger.
• mfuzzey 3y ago
  Reminds me of the time I used my French bank card in a ticket machine in the UK. The machine detected it was a French card and switched the interface to French (fine). It then asked me to "entrez votre broche" as a prompt for my PIN. In the context of electronics "pin" (as in on a component) translates to French as "broche" but it makes no sense for a pincode!
  • devsda 3y ago
    I was initially confused and thought why you would use pincode at ATM, then realized you meant the card's PIN. In India pincode refers to zipcode or postalcode. the pin in pincode means Postal Index Number. It would be interesting to know if similar bug exists for the locale en_IN.
    • sn_master 3y ago
      Many gas stations in the US still ask for the zip/postal code instead of the actual card PIN code :|
  • kalleboo 3y ago
    I saw a kiosk in the UK which cycled through languages inviting you to interact with a "t touch screen to start!" The Swedish translation said "The touchscreen that starts!"
• gmac 3y ago
  Reminds me of this, where they similarly inappropriately went for ‘ticked’ instead of ‘checked’: https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1547894728447778818 https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1547894728447778818
• haolez 3y ago
  I wonder if we could get a sane Windows experience if ReactOS was a little bit more advanced in its drivers support. Microsoft's incentives with Windows are clearly not aligned with the customers'.
• Detrytus 3y ago
  Well, my take here is that English language should be renamed to "American", and Brits should be forbidden to speak it, because they make it sound ridiculous. Honestly, speaking as a foreigner, who has been learning English one way or another for half of his life, I cannot even attempt to speak in British accent without feeling like I'm doing a stand-up comedy. How can Brits speak with a straight face?
  • InCityDreams 3y ago
    How can you type in English with your foreign accent? I can barely make out a word, and your pronunciation is terrible.
  • ncr100 3y ago
    Sigh ... unpostcodes (from Twitter)
• raffraffraff 3y ago
  Epic. L18n via sed.
• Dalewyn 3y ago
  This is an example of why everything, including Windows, is trying to move over to icons and just icons for everything. Don't need to translate/localize anything when there's no text to translate/localize. Presumably that's easier.
  • ClassyJacket 3y ago
    I hate that design trend. Text is far faster to recognize and clearer than icons in most cases.
• morugam 3y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• noAnswer 3y ago
  There are keys for locks (Schlüssel*) and keys on keyboards (Tasten*). Guess which word VMWare uses for its special keys menu in the *German translation. :-)
• kmeisthax 3y ago
  Given the .zip domain kerfuffle maybe we should just accept this and change all archive software to save .postcode files in the PKPOSTCODE format.
• ksec 3y ago
  It is rather obvious they dont give a flying flamingo over it.
• nojs 3y ago
  I was browsing Airbnb the other day and noticed a sentence in a listing containing “P[SENSITIVE CONTENTS HIDDEN]. Turns out the word was “Pagoda”.
• ZeroWidthJoiner 3y ago
  This was initially reported over 2 months ago when it first showed up in canary builds. Microsoft, at the time: "This is an issue in the latest Canary Channel build and the loc folks are working on a fix" (https://twitter.com/JenMsft/status/1643599284120723456 https://twitter.com/JenMsft/status/1643599284120723456)
• r3trohack3r 3y ago
  The scope and scale of translation work has always seemed daunting to me. I can’t imagine a way to make it any more efficient, without sacrificing significant accuracy by missing context, than to do manual translation of everything. I can’t imagine if, every time I added a button to a UI, an entire team of localization translators mobilizing to make sure the right context came through in every language the UI supported. Not to mention the tools that support that workflow of passing context to translators, compiling the translations, and binding them all into a data structure I can use to populate my UI. And that’s just for language. Iconography and colors have their own localizations.
  • numpad0 3y ago
    Screenshots are all you ever need. Just give a screenshot or terminal output to a bilingual SME and have it double checked. It’s not like translators must be given sweat and blood of engineers just for their motivations. A screenshot of just the dropdown menu could have been generated in CI and could have easily prevented the “postcode file”, so long the translator was presented that image along the string and had recognized that Windows dropdown.
• coin 3y ago
  It’s not even the same word, one is a word the other is an acronym
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kazinator 3y ago
  Why would you even localize an American operating system for the UK? Most of the concepts in an OS are named by Americans. If I were using a UK-made OS, I'd happily live with "dustbin" rather than a "trash can". Unless you have your head inserted in your ass, you know some UK words if you're North American and vice versa.
  • sn_master 3y ago
    Apple and Google do the same calling the Recycle/Trash as "bin".
• ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  So... how many crisps does your motherboard have?
• usr1106 3y ago
  All software is buggy. By translating it more bugs will be introduced. So I try to avoid using any translated software. I remember in Windows 95 (that's been a while) a little binary, probably ipconfig.exe was broken in the Finnish version we had on our home computer. I copied the binary from the English version we had at work and it worked.
• TuringTest 3y ago
  No shit. In the Spanish version, the column in Explorer showing the 'link target' of shortcuts is translated to the equivalent of 'connect the goal'.
• otikik 3y ago
  It was less prioritary than putting the kardassians on the Start Menu.