Mastodawn

Jann Horn 6h ago

aah, the reason why the in-app kindle purchase flow in german has a button labeled "Bitte lesen" (which translates to "Please read") for opening the purchased ebook is that someone mistranslated "Read now" as if it was meant in imperative form?

My favorite out-of-context translation fail was some internal status page in Chrome years ago, which described sandboxing status as (translated back to English) "you have trained sufficiently".

I wonder how many tech workers who speak English as a second language actually dogfood their company's stuff in their native language. I have most stuff on my devices configured to have english UI (except stuff like public transport apps which are probably primarily developed with german UI)

Frederik Braun �6h ago

@jann I got into a (mild) argument multiple times with our localizers and gave up. I disagree with them but I also don’t have to live with the feedback they get elsewhere. Firefox in English it is… :)

Chris Palmer 6h ago

@freddy @jann A bunch of years ago, I went on a giant quest to improve translation in Chrome (including getting colleagues to set Chrome to their native languages, which resulted in some 'great' bug reports). Lots of native speakers disagreeing with each other about what words mean. :(

One thing I discovered: Apparently, nobody on the team had ever set their locale to an RTL language. Text flying in every direction all over the place. I fixed as many of them as I could.

Chris Palmer 5h ago

@freddy @jann It is deeply, deeply offensive to me that people have to set their computers to English.

ME: Holy fuck, what if the person doesn't speak English??

PERSIAN TEAMMATE: Yeah, for those people, the internet is not very accessible

ME: FUCK

TEAMMATE: Yeah, well, welcome to our lives

Chris Palmer 5h ago

TURKISH TEAMMATE: Oh, yeah, we call this "Microsoft Turkish." The menu items are syntactically incorrect. This happens all the time

ME: FUCK

TEAMMATE: Yeah, well, welcome to our lives

Jann Horn 5h ago

@fugueish @freddy kinda seems like a bad thing if one likes to have happy users who feel respected

Chris Palmer 5h ago

@jann @freddy I'd go as far as to say that it's very bad

Alison Chaiken 3h ago

@fugueish @freddy @jann My eyesight is not great. When my eyes bother me, I make the cursor, fonts and icons larger. I have found impressively many bugs that way, apparently because the size changes cause GUI items to overlap. UI design is optimized for the average viewer, and alternate locales are likely the most neglected aspect.

Jann Horn 5h ago

@freddy huh. as in, there is insufficient guidance from the feature devs on the semantics of a string and so you disagree with other native german speakers on the correct translation even when seeing it in context?

@jann We are supposed to write all our company code (variables, comments, commit messages, bug reports, etc) in English, just in case someone who is not a speaker of our language joins the team someday. The interface is obviously written in English, with a translation back to our language (just in case etc). We get so used to things being in English that if you asked which language I'm viewing that interface in I'd have to check.

Bram Bonné 5h ago

@jann I do! Encouraging: of all of my dogfood bugs, the internationalization-related ones are the best-triaged. Relatively short time to fix too!
Discouraging: UI elements too often don't fit the text

Bram Bonné 5h ago

@jann
Oh and obviously that often means I just don't get to test certain features, when they launch en-us only.

Sandor Szücs 4h ago

@jann I use the same pattern.
It would be great if the company I work for would allow me to prefer to buy in German, but yeah we can dream if your browser is set to English we redirect to English.

mirabilos 4h ago

@jann same. We all use English because the localisation is horrible.

Todd Knarr 3h ago

@jann Too few, probably because their bosses are in the US and speak only English.

@jann from everything I've experienced as a user, I'm convinced that the official language at the company's headquarters is the one and only language anything is tested in.