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When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone. A major Japanese brand, actually. That was really comical. There was an Australian guy fo

When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone. A major Japanese brand, actually. That was really comical. There was an Australian guy for English, an German guy, an Italian lady, and me for French. What they did prior to the meeting is: * translate from Japanese to English by Japanese people with a poor English level (maybe the software engineers actually) * translate from weird English to other languages by translators who had only the strings, absolutely no context. In the meeting we had all the strings, and one person from the manufacturers who had access to the "super-confidential" unreleased device. More than half of the translations were off because of lack of context. The French guy actually translated "Garbage day" to something like "Shitty day", apparently he thought that was a way to mark in your calendar that you had a really bad day. Pretty often we had sentences like "delete one", and invariably one of us had to ask "One what? I need to know if it's masculine/feminine/neutral". Of course they didn't prepare to that, it was too late to change the code, so they made us do ugly things like "%n item(s)". Also the Australian guy was loosing faith into humanity: - That sentence, it's completely wrong, it just doesn't mean anything in English. People will just go "WTF?" when they read that - We're not allowed to change the English strings, they're already validated - .....

TeMPOraL 12y ago
I don't know why nobody seems to put information like "warning: this phone's UI in <your local language> is total and utter crap". Anyway, what you wrote is exactly why I stick to using all software and webservices - OS, text editors, Facebook, et al. - in en_US instead of my native pl_PL. Because translations are always crappy - even for big players. Lack of context is the key here - translated text often feels out of place, because there usually is some overarching idea behind them that isn't communicated to translators. Then there is lack of consistency. Words in original text often have some site-specific meaning, which tends to also be somehow lost in the translation process. For example, on Facebook the word "like" talks about a well-defined thing, not about the dictionary meaning, so it's totally not ok to randomly replace it with synonyms during translation [0]. I realized at some point that I often look at a crapy translation, guess what was the English original, and then in my mind translate to what it should be in the first place. Because for some strange reason I, the user, have the context, and the paid translation team has not. I guess I'm going to put that into my "Translation issues" file in the "Mysteries of capitalism" drawer, right next to "how on Earth multi-milion media companies can't do a movie translation that isn't a total crap" file. I mean, seriously, you're better off looking for pirated subtitles even if you bought the original because pirates at least seem to have watched the movie they're translating. </rant> [0] - I wish more translators would use the approach Jehovah's Witnesses used when doing their own Bible translation. Since it was designed to be studied and analyzed, they preferred accuracy over aesthetics - therefore one of the translation rules was "as much as possible, let's have any given word in original text be always represented by the same word in English". Adhering to that single rule would eliminate like half of the "context missing" problems with software translations.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  You know what multi-million movie has a translation that isn't total crap? Frozen. They really put resources into that. You can look up random Disney songs on Youtube in different languages, and then look up the Frozen songs, and you can sort of tell that they've done a better job even if you don't speak the language. Even relatively obscure languages like Dutch where they usually just watch English-language movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    Disney generally spend a lot of effort on the translations. Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa also plays the lead in the Broadway musical Wicked. Several translations of Frozen use an actress for Elsa who played the lead in a localized version of Wicked.
  - davvid 12y ago
    For Big Hero 6 we also translated and replaced all of the Japanese text in San Fransokyo with Chinese and Korean for the Chinese and Korean markets. By "text" I mean all of the CG signs, posters, and environmental set dressing in the actual movie (not just the dialogue). We literally had to re-render the entire movie for each translation. Disney Animation takes these translations very seriously :-)
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I agree. Frozen, and other Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks children movies (like Shrek) tend to be of awesome quality in all languages. But I attribute this to the fact that those movies are not translated - they're being localized, which by definition requires much more work and paying much closer attention.
    - bitdestroyer 12y ago
      Not to mention that the context of each line of dialogue is pretty close to unambiguous since you have the source material right in front of you for a movie. I imagine it's still a huge job, but has to be more enjoyable that translating/localizing for us asshole programmers and our magic translation strings.
emcrazyone 12y ago
@eloisant: I work in automotive where I deal with translations for automotive clusters for one of the largest auto makers. Automotive companies are going to what are called reconfigurables which is basically an instrument cluster with no mechanical gauges; just a screen with gauges rendered by 3D engine. Center stacks too. I kid you not, the way we translate is to use Google translate as a first pass and then the screens get reviewed by people who know the language. I guess somethings slip through and we evidently pissed off a lot of Chinese folks because of a similar flub. The folks doing the first pass don't know any other languages. It's quite comical but also a real pain. One of the things I had to work into our code was the left-to-right vs. the right-to-left; you would think it would be just a C-style string but we have to know for text justification semantics. I don't actually do translations but work on the HMI where the text is displayed. Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space.
- julenx 12y ago
  > Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space. As a rule of thumb, if you're using English strings to design your UI, you should account for 30% more space so other languages can fit in. Of course, sometimes this might not be enough.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I can totally imagine that. Recently I've been helping a guy with tweaking his integrated car navigation/radio/media player and I spent some time browsing through its firmware and file system. I saw the translation strings and man, they were horrible. Also half of the stuff wasn't even translated (though it didn't show anywhere on the UI). BTW. half of the files and directories were named in Chinese which made my work very "fun", but that's another story...
- bcbrown 12y ago
  I worked for a place that used German as the "placeholder text", to avoid the problem of text longer than the allotted space. German is supposedly about 1.5 times as long as English, so if you can fit the German version, you won't have any problems with other translations being longer than the space.
jdcryans 12y ago
> and me for French > The French guy actually translated "Garbage day" to something like "Shitty day" So you translated it to "jour de merde"?
- mcphage 12y ago
  The commenter wasn't the translator, they were the proof-reader: > When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone.
  - jdcryans 12y ago
    Ah that makes more sense, thanks.
- eloisant 12y ago
  That's the other way around, the guy who did the translation without context wrote "jour de merde", and I saved them from releasing that in their phone calendar app during my one-day job paid in cash.
  - jdcryans 12y ago
    Well you really... saved the day!
ademarre 12y ago
Your experience speaks to this observation: With very few exceptions, consumer hardware companies are bad at software.
- mark-r 12y ago
  Yes, I've noticed that since forever. Has anybody ever tried to come up with an explanation?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I don't know why nobody seems to put information like "warning: this phone's UI in <your local language> is total and utter crap". Anyway, what you wrote is exactly why I stick to using all software and webservices - OS, text editors, Facebook, et al. - in en_US instead of my native pl_PL. Because translations are always crappy - even for big players. Lack of context is the key here - translated text often feels out of place, because there usually is some overarching idea behind them that isn't communicated to translators. Then there is lack of consistency. Words in original text often have some site-specific meaning, which tends to also be somehow lost in the translation process. For example, on Facebook the word "like" talks about a well-defined thing, not about the dictionary meaning, so it's totally not ok to randomly replace it with synonyms during translation [0]. I realized at some point that I often look at a crapy translation, guess what was the English original, and then in my mind translate to what it should be in the first place. Because for some strange reason I, the user, have the context, and the paid translation team has not. I guess I'm going to put that into my "Translation issues" file in the "Mysteries of capitalism" drawer, right next to "how on Earth multi-milion media companies can't do a movie translation that isn't a total crap" file. I mean, seriously, you're better off looking for pirated subtitles even if you bought the original because pirates at least seem to have watched the movie they're translating. </rant> [0] - I wish more translators would use the approach Jehovah's Witnesses used when doing their own Bible translation. Since it was designed to be studied and analyzed, they preferred accuracy over aesthetics - therefore one of the translation rules was "as much as possible, let's have any given word in original text be always represented by the same word in English". Adhering to that single rule would eliminate like half of the "context missing" problems with software translations.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
You know what multi-million movie has a translation that isn't total crap? Frozen. They really put resources into that. You can look up random Disney songs on Youtube in different languages, and then look up the Frozen songs, and you can sort of tell that they've done a better job even if you don't speak the language. Even relatively obscure languages like Dutch where they usually just watch English-language movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Disney generally spend a lot of effort on the translations. Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa also plays the lead in the Broadway musical Wicked. Several translations of Frozen use an actress for Elsa who played the lead in a localized version of Wicked.
- davvid 12y ago
  For Big Hero 6 we also translated and replaced all of the Japanese text in San Fransokyo with Chinese and Korean for the Chinese and Korean markets. By "text" I mean all of the CG signs, posters, and environmental set dressing in the actual movie (not just the dialogue). We literally had to re-render the entire movie for each translation. Disney Animation takes these translations very seriously :-)
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I agree. Frozen, and other Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks children movies (like Shrek) tend to be of awesome quality in all languages. But I attribute this to the fact that those movies are not translated - they're being localized, which by definition requires much more work and paying much closer attention.
  - bitdestroyer 12y ago
    Not to mention that the context of each line of dialogue is pretty close to unambiguous since you have the source material right in front of you for a movie. I imagine it's still a huge job, but has to be more enjoyable that translating/localizing for us asshole programmers and our magic translation strings.

emcrazyone 12y ago

@eloisant: I work in automotive where I deal with translations for automotive clusters for one of the largest auto makers. Automotive companies are going to what are called reconfigurables which is basically an instrument cluster with no mechanical gauges; just a screen with gauges rendered by 3D engine. Center stacks too. I kid you not, the way we translate is to use Google translate as a first pass and then the screens get reviewed by people who know the language. I guess somethings slip through and we evidently pissed off a lot of Chinese folks because of a similar flub. The folks doing the first pass don't know any other languages. It's quite comical but also a real pain. One of the things I had to work into our code was the left-to-right vs. the right-to-left; you would think it would be just a C-style string but we have to know for text justification semantics. I don't actually do translations but work on the HMI where the text is displayed. Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space.

julenx 12y ago
> Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space. As a rule of thumb, if you're using English strings to design your UI, you should account for 30% more space so other languages can fit in. Of course, sometimes this might not be enough.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I can totally imagine that. Recently I've been helping a guy with tweaking his integrated car navigation/radio/media player and I spent some time browsing through its firmware and file system. I saw the translation strings and man, they were horrible. Also half of the stuff wasn't even translated (though it didn't show anywhere on the UI). BTW. half of the files and directories were named in Chinese which made my work very "fun", but that's another story...
bcbrown 12y ago
I worked for a place that used German as the "placeholder text", to avoid the problem of text longer than the allotted space. German is supposedly about 1.5 times as long as English, so if you can fit the German version, you won't have any problems with other translations being longer than the space.

jdcryans 12y ago

> and me for French > The French guy actually translated "Garbage day" to something like "Shitty day" So you translated it to "jour de merde"?

mcphage 12y ago
The commenter wasn't the translator, they were the proof-reader: > When I was in Japan I did proof reading for a Japanese feature phone.
- jdcryans 12y ago
  Ah that makes more sense, thanks.
eloisant 12y ago
That's the other way around, the guy who did the translation without context wrote "jour de merde", and I saved them from releasing that in their phone calendar app during my one-day job paid in cash.
- jdcryans 12y ago
  Well you really... saved the day!

ademarre 12y ago

Your experience speaks to this observation: With very few exceptions, consumer hardware companies are bad at software.

mark-r 12y ago
Yes, I've noticed that since forever. Has anybody ever tried to come up with an explanation?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]