3 ms·

I appreciate the article and data, had a couple of thoughts from my own experience localizing: * Punting on localization can make a lot of sense. It helps to d

I appreciate the article and data, had a couple of thoughts from my own experience localizing: * Punting on localization can make a lot of sense. It helps to do localization up front and plan for it, but that's when opportunity cost is at its greatest. It's also a marginal "multiplier" effect, and so it's not a make-or-break engineering item usually. * I doubt localization to Russian is as good as Spanish, very often. * Definitely agree that translations from actual users are leagues ahead of professional translator services, good thought to cultivate that. * You can do it incrementally, and localize your app description prior to the app itself, which doesn't have the same engineering requirements.

larsiusprime 12y ago
Despite my obvious pro-localization stance, I must say I agree a lot with this first point. Localization is NOT easy, and developers should be very wary about doing it in their first app.
tehabe 12y ago
"Definitely agree that translations from actual users are leagues ahead of professional translator services, good thought to cultivate that." Not really. In recent month I was very active in translating software and web site from English to German and found a lot of weird and partially wrong translations. Some of those are due to the context free way translation sometimes works. You get the original string and you have to translate it. For example "Sync", but is that a verb or a noun? In English it might not matter but in German it does. Also sometimes you get people with a dialect in, which use different words and even a different word order which might only be used by a small minority but it is not consensus in the language. I think the best approach would be to do both. Get professional translators and use direct feedback from users.
tehabe 12y ago
"Definitely agree that translations from actual users are leagues ahead of professional translator services, good thought to cultivate that." Not really. In recent month I was very active in translating software and web site from English to German and found a lot of weird and partially wrong translations. Some of those are due to the context free way translation sometimes works. You get the original string and you have to translate it. For example "Sync", but is that a verb or a noun? In English it might not matter but in German it does. Also sometimes you get people with a dialect in, which use different words and even a different word order which might only be used by a small minority but it is not consensus in the language. I think the best approach would be to do both. Get professional translators and use direct feedback from users.

larsiusprime 12y ago

Despite my obvious pro-localization stance, I must say I agree a lot with this first point. Localization is NOT easy, and developers should be very wary about doing it in their first app.

tehabe 12y ago

"Definitely agree that translations from actual users are leagues ahead of professional translator services, good thought to cultivate that." Not really. In recent month I was very active in translating software and web site from English to German and found a lot of weird and partially wrong translations. Some of those are due to the context free way translation sometimes works. You get the original string and you have to translate it. For example "Sync", but is that a verb or a noun? In English it might not matter but in German it does. Also sometimes you get people with a dialect in, which use different words and even a different word order which might only be used by a small minority but it is not consensus in the language. I think the best approach would be to do both. Get professional translators and use direct feedback from users.

tehabe 12y ago