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".

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Jann Horn 1d 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)

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Frederik Braun �1d 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… :)

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Chris Palmer 1d 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.

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Alison Chaiken

@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.