Mastodawn

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".

Show thread

Jann Horn 9h ago

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)

Show thread

Frederik Braun �9h 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… :)

Show thread

Jann Horn

@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?