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It's impossible to provide enough context for translation strings. You need links to mockups, designs, or any other visual aid so that translators don't make hu
by patates 1y ago
It's impossible to provide enough context for translation strings. You need links to mockups, designs, or any other visual aid so that translators don't make huge mistakes. Even then, they'll eventually find that the programmatic parameters are insufficient for returning the correct translation, and they'll have to duplicate strings because the same sentence has different translations in different contexts. It's a never-ending job.
Turkish is especially funny here, but not even close to how creative you might need to get for some other Asian as well as Slavic languages.
Lucky that you never had to translate Ekşi Sözlük, how do you even translate "şükela" :)
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoWould you have an example for Slavic languages? (ideally non-Cyrillic ones)
- patates 1y agoRussian having singular, few (2-4), and plural (5+) forms is one from the top of my head. I can't remember any specific examples from non-cryllic ones but remember we having to duplicate a lot of translation keys to make them more context specific.
- TomaszZielinski 1y agoAlso things like: _('There are:') _('%d items', count=len(items)) —-which look correct until you want to translate them into a language with a different order of words in a sentence.
- Patryk27 1y agoNot the parent commenter, but -- days of week in Polish are a nice example, IMO. `Środa` means `Wednesday`, but depending on the grammatical case it's going to be translated either to `środa` or `środę` (or five more, but somewhat less likely to appear in UI [1]). - Next <Wednesday> is 2018-01-03. = Najbliższa <środa> przypada na 2018-01-03. - This event happens on <Wednesday>. = To zdarzenie ma miejsce w <środę>. If you mix the variants, it's going to sound very off (but it will be understandable, so there's that). What's more, days of week have different genders, which affects qualifiers: - <this> Wednesday = <ta> środa (Wednesday is a "she") - <this> Monday = <ten> poniedziałek (Monday is a "he") ... together with the grammatical cases affecting the qualifiers: - <This> Wednesday is crazy. = <Ta> środa jest szalona. - <This> Thursday is crazy. = <Ten> czwartek jest szalony. - I'm busy <this> Wednesday. = Jestem zajęty w <tę> środę. - I'm busy <this> Thursday. = Jestem zajęty w <ten> czwartek. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C5%9Broda https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C5%9Broda
- encom 1y agoThis is fascinating, thank you. The intricacies of languages is so interesting. I especially love the insane way we danes spell out numbers. 59 == nioghalvtredssindstyve 59 == 9 [ni] + [og] ((3 [treds] - 0,5 [halv]) * [sinds] 20 [tyve]) So 9+2,5*20 == 59 Halvtreds means half third, or halfway to three. There's also halvfjerds and halvfems for 3,5 and 4,5. Exercise: spell out 79.
- kpil 1y agoI once worked with translating an application to polish, and found out we had to have separate placeholders for "name" for persons (nazwisko) and for things (nazwa). Which is a simple example why you need context. All UI frameworks should have a "translate" mode, where all labels and static text can be right-clicked and modified...
- esafak 1y agoDo you think any i8n library (in any language) gets it right?
- patates 1y agohttps://projectfluent.org/ https://projectfluent.org/ comes close. The syntax is hard to read though. I guess you can't have the cake and eat it too.