4 ms·

That's an error only an amateur translator would make. Guess who makes free software translations... A professional translator makes sure to check the context

That's an error only an amateur translator would make. Guess who makes free software translations... A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context.

reidrac 12y ago
To be fair it was a beta of the "Ubuntu Netbook Remix" and that bug was shortly fixed. I took some screenshots because I really liked the interface, but none of them show the bug because I usually stick to en_GB and the problem was spotted in my wife's netbook (she's Spanish teacher and likes to have the OS interface in Spanish to amuse the kids).
- psykovsky 12y ago
  Not attacking free software translators. I'm one myself. As amateur as I can be. When one can't code, it can at least translate ;)
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    I only mention this because it occurs in both of your comments in the thread, but... When one can't code, it can at least translate ;) In this context the pronoun "it" would make more sense as "one"; "it" is very rarely used to refer to a person in English. A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context. Again, in this context, "it doesn't" might make more sense as "he or she doesn't", or less formally, "they don't". Hope this helps with your translations :-)
- Fuxy 12y ago
  Am I the only one that gets confused on what the menus and other things on a non English computer or device actually mean when translated. This coming from someone doesn't speak English as their first language. I speak Romanian, Hungarian and English perfectly but my devices are always in English since it would be harder to figure out what they mean otherwise unless you have the structure memorized already.
  - userulluipeste 12y ago
    All things being equal, I guess that's because you accept to pay the necessary price of learning English interfaces of your devices, but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      > but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages One problem is that English is the language majority of technology is created in, and it has developed agreed-on terms for a lot of things. Everyone calls their tabs "tabs" in English, but when it comes to translating, every other app uses a different word. Even if names are consistent within the app, they are inconsistent between each other. This leads to a lot of problems if say, an app reports an error that's related to some OS thing, and calls it with a different translated name than the OS translation does. EDIT: And I'm not making this up. I worked on a localized Ubuntu for a very short while before switching back to English because messages I got in my command line were painfully inconsistent with each other and with agreed-upon proper translations in my language.
  - entropy_ 12y ago
    You are definitely not alone in that. My native language is Arabic, but if I switch my phone or computer to Arabic I wouldn't be able to use it. I dread testing translations of apps I'm working on because it forces me to switch to Arabic. It doesn't help that there's a lot of jargon that just doesn't translate that well. For example, the translation of "Tap" to Arabic is the equivalent of either "Peck" or "Perforate". It's just that that's what's generally agreed on as the proper translation and everybody uses it, however, if I didn't know that it would take me a while to figure it out for myself.
ygra 12y ago
Ah, that's why Word 2007 ended up with »Keine Gliederung« (»no (document) outline«) for the setting where you can select a shape outline colour ... In all seriousness, translators make mistakes by getting the context wrong all the time; this applies to both professional translators and amateurs, perhaps in different severity. But in my eyes that's not really a problem of the translators, but rather of the tools we use. A long list of strings that have maybe only a vague context is a horribly UX for the translator. Who would fault them to translate »outline« as »Gliederung« in a word processing application? A string table is probably the most convenient format for programmers, but not very much so for those maintaining translations. Qt gets a bit of this right. If the translator has access to the source code and uses Qt Linguist, at least the strings that are directly in .ui files are shown with a mock-up of the respective window where the control with that text is highlighted [0]. That already helps a lot with context errors. Of course, it does nothing for text in the source code, and so our translator went ahead and translated »Breite« (line width) with »latitude« because the application in question was, after all, related to maps, geography and GPS; it just happened to have a setting to change the width of certain lines, which, in German, then mapped to the same word. Qt also has a nice way of handling plurals in that both Linguist and the QTranslator class are aware of the languages and the special rules concerning plural forms in them. You create a translatable string like »Searched %n directories« and then create translations for that. English, German and lots of others just map to two forms (1, rest). Russian gets three, I think (1/21/31/..., 2/22/32/..., 11/12/rest), and so on. Downside is that you only get to handle a single plural in a string [1], and you have to create an en→en translation as well (to account for multiple forms in the source language). But generally it's a quite nice implementation. Gettext has something similar where you can write your own plural form matching rules somehow, but most translators I met don't really want to write math. Visual Studio with Windows Forms has a mode of creating the string tables for translation where you can just change the language in the Form's properties and then proceed to change each control text. This nicely solves the context problem in that the translator edits the window directly and it looks like it normally does. But it also creates a whole bunch of other problems: Translators need VS, they need to edit the project directly and can accidentally mess up the UI with a mouse twitch when selecting a button to translate. They also might miss things that are buried in menus since there is no real measurement of completion and what's still missing. I've seen various projects, especially in web environments adopt a similar custom-written approach, though, where you can edit the UI directly in the application to translate it. Still with the problem that translators might miss hard-to-find and buried strings (one might argue that you should get rid of buried and obscure places in your UI anyway, though). Long ramblings ... it was a topic I considered for my Diploma thesis while studying. But I couldn't think of a good way that could retain context for the translator in a general case, or at least most of the time. I thought about replacing each and every translatable string in a program with a custom identifier and then later trying to find those again via UI Automation or maybe screenshots and OCR to be able to map strings to parts of screenshots of the program. Would have required running the program once with those custom identifiers and once in normal mode and somehow matching up identifiered screenshots, normal screenshots and the string tables. And still with the problem that you'd need to manually go down each and every dialog and menu, including context menus, messages that only appear in certain states, etc. Perhaps there just is no good solution, except maybe for developers to properly annotate each translatable string they use. In the »Breite«/»width«/»latitude« case I went through the source and added translator comments detailing the meaning of the word for every instance, but with large applications having thousands of translatable strings that could become unwieldy quickly. __________ [0] http://geoinformatics.fsv.cvut.cz/wiki/images/thumb/3/39/Qt_Linguist.png/900px-Qt_Linguist.png http://geoinformatics.fsv.cvut.cz/wiki/images/thumb/3/39/Qt_... [1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/5348990/73070 http://stackoverflow.com/q/5348990/73070
BjoernKW 12y ago
An amateur error perhaps but hardly limited to free software. In a particularly expensive piece of enterprise software for the finance sector that was translated into German a form field was labelled 'Hauptstadt', which translates back into 'capital (city)' as in Washington, D.C. Now, this kind of geographic information doesn't make sense at all in financial software but the well-paid developer (who had to double as the software's translator because hiring a proper translator would of course have been too expensive ...) simply couldn't be bothered to look up the different words 'capital' translates to in German, one of which also is the right choice in that case: 'Kapital' (meaning 'capital' as in 'asset).
- anonymousDan 12y ago
  Or the classic: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm
  - paol 12y ago
    See also: restaurant sign during the Chinese Olympic games http://craphound.com/images/translateservererror.jpg http://craphound.com/images/translateservererror.jpg
  - blywi 12y ago
    My favorite is still this one: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/feb/08/diesel-fuel-no-smoking-arabic http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/feb/08/diese...
    - HCIdivision17 12y ago
      There's a certain schadenfreude to be had where the failed translation is also typo'd - but only once. These sorts of things are especially embarassing, as it not only shows no effort was used proofing, but nothing tripped a sanity check at all.
    - ufmace 12y ago
      That's a head-smacker. Some guy somewhere must have actually painted that on the trailer - does that guy not think "Hey, this doesn't really make sense. Are you sure they didn't want somebody to translate this to Arabic?" Or maybe he did and his boss told him to shut up and do as he's told. Or he thought - "Screw this, I wanna go home on time. I'm not gonna bother to find an Arabic translator now. I'll just paint exactly what it says, and they can't get me in much trouble for that."
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context. From my experience with both software and movies, that's exactly what a professional, paid translator does (or is forced to). Amateurs at least watch the movie/run the software before translating things, which is something I definitely cannot say about "professionals" translating movies and software to my language.
- JanezStupar 12y ago
  From my experience with professional translators I would have to go out of my way to specify context if I wanted a good translation, because professional translators are too technologically illiterate to get stuff right. Not to mention the difficulty in getting them to use Virtaal or PoEdit properly.
- psykovsky 12y ago
  The problem you describe is one of incompetence. The professionals are not really professionals. And yet, someone is paying them as if they were. That is not the case everywhere, I assure you. A little of anecdata: In Portugal, where foreign stuff is translated and subtitled, the quality of translations/subtitles in english language movies and series in very good. Or at least it used to be, I can't be sure anymore since I don't currently watch TV. I grew up used to reading good translations. Those translations taught me to understand and speak the English language when I was growing up, since age 5. I understand I might be a bit biased because of my personal experience.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    My personal experience comes from Poland, where quality of movie translations has been basically a running joke throughout the years among the population that knows even a little bit of English. I do know personally a few professional translators - they're really smart and competent people, and most of them are even quite tech-savvy. Sadly, they don't get to translate movies.
masklinn 12y ago
> A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context. 1. professional translators are human and make mistakes 2. context may not be available for third-party translators working on e.g. unreleased software strings (see currently top comment by "eloisant")
- dyadic 12y ago
  Somewhat relevant given the topic, don't read "it" at not-human. Not everyone here speaks English as a first language and translating a non-gendered/unknown pronoun to English may result in "it".

reidrac 12y ago

To be fair it was a beta of the "Ubuntu Netbook Remix" and that bug was shortly fixed. I took some screenshots because I really liked the interface, but none of them show the bug because I usually stick to en_GB and the problem was spotted in my wife's netbook (she's Spanish teacher and likes to have the OS interface in Spanish to amuse the kids).

psykovsky 12y ago
Not attacking free software translators. I'm one myself. As amateur as I can be. When one can't code, it can at least translate ;)
- nitrogen 12y ago
  I only mention this because it occurs in both of your comments in the thread, but... When one can't code, it can at least translate ;) In this context the pronoun "it" would make more sense as "one"; "it" is very rarely used to refer to a person in English. A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context. Again, in this context, "it doesn't" might make more sense as "he or she doesn't", or less formally, "they don't". Hope this helps with your translations :-)
Fuxy 12y ago
Am I the only one that gets confused on what the menus and other things on a non English computer or device actually mean when translated. This coming from someone doesn't speak English as their first language. I speak Romanian, Hungarian and English perfectly but my devices are always in English since it would be harder to figure out what they mean otherwise unless you have the structure memorized already.
- userulluipeste 12y ago
  All things being equal, I guess that's because you accept to pay the necessary price of learning English interfaces of your devices, but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages One problem is that English is the language majority of technology is created in, and it has developed agreed-on terms for a lot of things. Everyone calls their tabs "tabs" in English, but when it comes to translating, every other app uses a different word. Even if names are consistent within the app, they are inconsistent between each other. This leads to a lot of problems if say, an app reports an error that's related to some OS thing, and calls it with a different translated name than the OS translation does. EDIT: And I'm not making this up. I worked on a localized Ubuntu for a very short while before switching back to English because messages I got in my command line were painfully inconsistent with each other and with agreed-upon proper translations in my language.
- entropy_ 12y ago
  You are definitely not alone in that. My native language is Arabic, but if I switch my phone or computer to Arabic I wouldn't be able to use it. I dread testing translations of apps I'm working on because it forces me to switch to Arabic. It doesn't help that there's a lot of jargon that just doesn't translate that well. For example, the translation of "Tap" to Arabic is the equivalent of either "Peck" or "Perforate". It's just that that's what's generally agreed on as the proper translation and everybody uses it, however, if I didn't know that it would take me a while to figure it out for myself.

ygra 12y ago

Ah, that's why Word 2007 ended up with »Keine Gliederung« (»no (document) outline«) for the setting where you can select a shape outline colour ... In all seriousness, translators make mistakes by getting the context wrong all the time; this applies to both professional translators and amateurs, perhaps in different severity. But in my eyes that's not really a problem of the translators, but rather of the tools we use. A long list of strings that have maybe only a vague context is a horribly UX for the translator. Who would fault them to translate »outline« as »Gliederung« in a word processing application? A string table is probably the most convenient format for programmers, but not very much so for those maintaining translations. Qt gets a bit of this right. If the translator has access to the source code and uses Qt Linguist, at least the strings that are directly in .ui files are shown with a mock-up of the respective window where the control with that text is highlighted [0]. That already helps a lot with context errors. Of course, it does nothing for text in the source code, and so our translator went ahead and translated »Breite« (line width) with »latitude« because the application in question was, after all, related to maps, geography and GPS; it just happened to have a setting to change the width of certain lines, which, in German, then mapped to the same word. Qt also has a nice way of handling plurals in that both Linguist and the QTranslator class are aware of the languages and the special rules concerning plural forms in them. You create a translatable string like »Searched %n directories« and then create translations for that. English, German and lots of others just map to two forms (1, rest). Russian gets three, I think (1/21/31/..., 2/22/32/..., 11/12/rest), and so on. Downside is that you only get to handle a single plural in a string [1], and you have to create an en→en translation as well (to account for multiple forms in the source language). But generally it's a quite nice implementation. Gettext has something similar where you can write your own plural form matching rules somehow, but most translators I met don't really want to write math. Visual Studio with Windows Forms has a mode of creating the string tables for translation where you can just change the language in the Form's properties and then proceed to change each control text. This nicely solves the context problem in that the translator edits the window directly and it looks like it normally does. But it also creates a whole bunch of other problems: Translators need VS, they need to edit the project directly and can accidentally mess up the UI with a mouse twitch when selecting a button to translate. They also might miss things that are buried in menus since there is no real measurement of completion and what's still missing. I've seen various projects, especially in web environments adopt a similar custom-written approach, though, where you can edit the UI directly in the application to translate it. Still with the problem that translators might miss hard-to-find and buried strings (one might argue that you should get rid of buried and obscure places in your UI anyway, though). Long ramblings ... it was a topic I considered for my Diploma thesis while studying. But I couldn't think of a good way that could retain context for the translator in a general case, or at least most of the time. I thought about replacing each and every translatable string in a program with a custom identifier and then later trying to find those again via UI Automation or maybe screenshots and OCR to be able to map strings to parts of screenshots of the program. Would have required running the program once with those custom identifiers and once in normal mode and somehow matching up identifiered screenshots, normal screenshots and the string tables. And still with the problem that you'd need to manually go down each and every dialog and menu, including context menus, messages that only appear in certain states, etc. Perhaps there just is no good solution, except maybe for developers to properly annotate each translatable string they use. In the »Breite«/»width«/»latitude« case I went through the source and added translator comments detailing the meaning of the word for every instance, but with large applications having thousands of translatable strings that could become unwieldy quickly. __________ [0] http://geoinformatics.fsv.cvut.cz/wiki/images/thumb/3/39/Qt_Linguist.png/900px-Qt_Linguist.png http://geoinformatics.fsv.cvut.cz/wiki/images/thumb/3/39/Qt_... [1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/5348990/73070 http://stackoverflow.com/q/5348990/73070

BjoernKW 12y ago

An amateur error perhaps but hardly limited to free software. In a particularly expensive piece of enterprise software for the finance sector that was translated into German a form field was labelled 'Hauptstadt', which translates back into 'capital (city)' as in Washington, D.C. Now, this kind of geographic information doesn't make sense at all in financial software but the well-paid developer (who had to double as the software's translator because hiring a proper translator would of course have been too expensive ...) simply couldn't be bothered to look up the different words 'capital' translates to in German, one of which also is the right choice in that case: 'Kapital' (meaning 'capital' as in 'asset).

anonymousDan 12y ago
Or the classic: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm
- paol 12y ago
  See also: restaurant sign during the Chinese Olympic games http://craphound.com/images/translateservererror.jpg http://craphound.com/images/translateservererror.jpg
- blywi 12y ago
  My favorite is still this one: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/feb/08/diesel-fuel-no-smoking-arabic http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/feb/08/diese...
  - HCIdivision17 12y ago
    There's a certain schadenfreude to be had where the failed translation is also typo'd - but only once. These sorts of things are especially embarassing, as it not only shows no effort was used proofing, but nothing tripped a sanity check at all.
  - ufmace 12y ago
    That's a head-smacker. Some guy somewhere must have actually painted that on the trailer - does that guy not think "Hey, this doesn't really make sense. Are you sure they didn't want somebody to translate this to Arabic?" Or maybe he did and his boss told him to shut up and do as he's told. Or he thought - "Screw this, I wanna go home on time. I'm not gonna bother to find an Arabic translator now. I'll just paint exactly what it says, and they can't get me in much trouble for that."

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context. From my experience with both software and movies, that's exactly what a professional, paid translator does (or is forced to). Amateurs at least watch the movie/run the software before translating things, which is something I definitely cannot say about "professionals" translating movies and software to my language.

JanezStupar 12y ago
From my experience with professional translators I would have to go out of my way to specify context if I wanted a good translation, because professional translators are too technologically illiterate to get stuff right. Not to mention the difficulty in getting them to use Virtaal or PoEdit properly.
psykovsky 12y ago
The problem you describe is one of incompetence. The professionals are not really professionals. And yet, someone is paying them as if they were. That is not the case everywhere, I assure you. A little of anecdata: In Portugal, where foreign stuff is translated and subtitled, the quality of translations/subtitles in english language movies and series in very good. Or at least it used to be, I can't be sure anymore since I don't currently watch TV. I grew up used to reading good translations. Those translations taught me to understand and speak the English language when I was growing up, since age 5. I understand I might be a bit biased because of my personal experience.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  My personal experience comes from Poland, where quality of movie translations has been basically a running joke throughout the years among the population that knows even a little bit of English. I do know personally a few professional translators - they're really smart and competent people, and most of them are even quite tech-savvy. Sadly, they don't get to translate movies.

masklinn 12y ago

> A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context. 1. professional translators are human and make mistakes 2. context may not be available for third-party translators working on e.g. unreleased software strings (see currently top comment by "eloisant")

dyadic 12y ago
Somewhat relevant given the topic, don't read "it" at not-human. Not everyone here speaks English as a first language and translating a non-gendered/unknown pronoun to English may result in "it".