27 ms·

What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

173 points by flowerbeater 5y ago

timw4mail 5y ago
This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?
- TrueGeek 5y ago
  It looks fine in my locale. Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice at the top of the page.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners now. Now what do I use if something's important?"
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Alert boxes. Can't go wrong!
      - TrueGeek 5y ago
        I typically close those too. The trick is to make them modal and persistent until you enter your email address.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      The banner on this site is too skinny, and the background color is too dull. It doesn't jump out as anything important, and I skipped right over it as well. A wider banner with more intense background color would go a long way.
    - thetadot 5y ago
      I saw the banner too but wasn't sure exactly what he meant by "janky" and "updating in the open". I thought it was going to be an example of a problematical translation
- timw4mail 5y ago
  To clarify, 30px size text on a 22" 1080p monitor looks more like a headline that is really long than body copy. I realize that viewing websites on computers is much less the norm than it used to be, but such large text feels really strange.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  Probably because the author is thinking about people with poor vision? IMO, it's poor design for a page to handle accessibility issues that are already built into the browser. (It's trivial to shrink and zoom in a browser.)
  - brigandish 5y ago
    I have to wonder what the complaint can be if it's trivial to shrink text - aren't you simply looking at this from the perspective of someone with better vision?
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  My own recommendation for general web body type in typical English fonts: never go above 20px, and 18px is generally a better upper limit.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    The unspoken assumption here is that you're designing for younger people, which is natural as most designers are younger, but that doesn't make it any better a recommendation than "never go below 18px and 20px is a better lower limit". Surely it depends on your audience and/or those you wish to attract.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      A large part of my recommendation is consistency. For general content sites, it’s not good to be too different from the mean. Font family and size is definitely such a property where you don’t want to deviate too much: twenty years ago, 20px for body type would have been outrageously large; twenty years ago, 11px was definitely on the small side, but not outrageously small as it is now. Conventional sizes have definitely slid upwards, but they’ve peaked in roughly the range 16–20px, and I declare that anything higher than 20px is just too much, pointlessly limiting what you can fit on the screen—any time people go above there, you will see people zooming out because they find it too big. (And this recommendation is designed for desktop-sized displays; on mobile displays, just use 16px, and certainly don’t go above 18px.) I am emphatically not assuming designing for younger people; quite the contrary. You will find me saying “don’t go below 16px, you make things harder for many people”. But once you’re in the range 16–18px, going larger just doesn’t help—the people that want to go larger will (or should) already be used to going larger by zooming in, and you’re making life harder for everyone else by preventing the screen from fitting much content at once.
      - brigandish 5y ago
        > For general content sites, it’s not good to be too different from the mean. The mean is decided by those designing sites and they are overwhelmingly younger people - in fact, usually they're among the youngest of all adult workers - and it shows. If sites were designed for the mean amongst society then the move would be to larger fonts. Personally, I welcome sites that use larger font sizes, I'm not sure why I need to strain my eyes one iota for text in a virtually infinite space. I know I'm not alone (though perhaps for different reasons). Deviating from the mean would work for a substantial part of the population who are currently treated like second class citizens on the web. > But once you’re in the range 16–18px, going larger just doesn’t help—the people that want to go larger will (or should) already be used to going larger by zooming in, I've had to show several oldies how to zoom. They do get used to it because they have to. > and you’re making life harder for everyone else by preventing the screen from fitting much content at once. Do the people who need this not know how to zoom out?
lou1306 5y ago
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothing bad, just unnecessarily confusing (what is an "open ticket"? As opposed to a "closed" one?) * EasyJet's app does the reverse and makes it much worse. The English version likely says something like "Gate close: xx:xx (am|pm)". They mis-translated this as "Gate chiuso: xx:xx", which actually means "Gate has closed", even though the gate is still open. So you get a small heart attack, notice the actual closing time, curse the translators, and go on with your life.
- TrueGeek 5y ago
  This is surprising. You really think someone as big as EasyJet would get that right. We're doing a translation now into Japanese and the translator is actually taking the time to look at screenshots and use the app to see the text in context. It makes a huge difference. As you've pointed out, it's one thing to see the string "open" in a XLF file, it's quite another to realize it's intent. This requires setting up demo environments for each translator though.
  - kalium-xyz 5y ago
    The secret is that you cant verbatim translate into Japanese as well, which forces more attention (also its a bigger economy)
  - Pinus 5y ago
    Heck, Microsoft got it wrong — Swedish versions of Windows used to have a folder called "Vanliga filer" (Ordinary files). This was, of course, the "Common files" folder, but the translator, probably having no context, picked the wrong meaning of "common", and chose a Swedish word which does not have the "shared" meaning.
    - Lex-2008 5y ago
sergioisidoro 5y ago
I went through a lot of these pains. The biggest one was undoing the misuse of localisation tools to display content differently on each geographic region, and misuse of plurals. I would also add collaboration efforts, how to make localisation work with continuous integration and not go waterfall, where you make a release, and you have to wait 4-6 days to localise half a dozen strings
emilecantin 5y ago
One annoying issue with translated apps the author doesn't cover is "googlability", the fact that we often need to google an error message or menu label in order to solve a problem. This leads to a lot of bilingual people running their software in English just in case they need to paste an error message into a search engine.
- copperx 5y ago
  Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with translated apps.
  - bartvk 5y ago
    I've always felt that a popup with an error code should have a "search the web for this code" button.
    - conductr 5y ago
      That’s where “error code” essentially comes from, an actual code you could look up in a manual. Errors have evolved to be more of “error messages” which then have grammar, word choice, and a million other concerns.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    I wonder why message code culture disappeared now.
- maple3142 5y ago
  Totally agrees. FireFox devtools UI language is your browser language, and the error messages are also translated. A really annoying thing is there doesn't seem to have an easy way to only switch devtool language to English. On the other way, Chromium devtools doesn't even have translations so it doesn't have this problem. And the new Edge (Chromium) translates the devtool by default, but there is an option allowing you to switch back to English in devtool only.
eCa 5y ago
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior No, it is not about expectations. In +95% of cases[1] the localized[2] version is objectively worse, to the point where it often only is possible for me to understand by first translating it back to English. If you give me a localized version first, and don’t give me an obvious way to permanently choose English, I’m likely gone. [1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite often they fail too [2] My first language is one of the smaller European languages (<20M speakers), perhaps bigger languages have higher quality.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  I think that's exactly what the author meant.
- tester756 5y ago
  >[1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite often they fail too MS docs I mean they're good when displayed in English, but defaulting to "native_language" is annoying.
hyperman1 5y ago
All of this is so recognizable, but I'd add one more: Make sure the user has a way to switch the translation back to English. I have some sites showing in, say, Chinese, where even the current language is a Chinese glyph. Nothing on such a page is readable for a non-Chinese speaker. So you get to click around randomly until some menu opens where you see the word 'English' which brings you to a page you can read enough to get to your own language.
- asiachick 5y ago
  I've run into this problem but I don't know there is a good solution. Let's say for whatever reason the app guesses the user wants Japanese. The app has no way to know what to present to allow to user to switch languages. Should they put a button that says "Language", how does that help a Chinese language person, a Korean person, a Thai person? Should they put "English"? Same point as above. As you complain, they'll likely put 言語, the Japanese for "language" and only if you click it will you see other languages, and it may be buried under 設定 (settings). Sure it's not useful for you, but neither is "English" or "Language" useful for a large part of the world. I don't know there is a good solution. Checking my iPhone it's 設定ｰ>一般ｰ>言語と地域ｰ>iPhoneの使用言語 so fairly buried in language not useful for someone who doesn't know Japanese. Checking apple.jp, the place to switch is at the bottom right and it just says 日本, no indication that if you click it you'll get a list of countries and if you don't know Japanese you'd likely not know that means "Japan".
  - brigandish 5y ago
    National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars and Stripes or a Hinomaru?
    - david_allison 5y ago
      A few issues: You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open yourself up to political/territorial disputes. Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to maintenance and territorial disputes). Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China flag Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban flag for Pashto (Afghani)? Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our translation platform doesn't have a flag for Cantonese) Flag to language is a many to many mapping. My Android lists ~107 available languages under 'English'.
Jyaif 5y ago
> Translation and localization costs money If you have a fan base, you can leverage it to get some amount of translation done. A lot of users are happy to help the product they like get better. Granted, the quality will not be as good as the quality you get with professional translators. The article also did not talk about the actual the translation process, which in the case of a product that is released but keeps getting updates is not trivial. There are tools that exists, but I personally decided to build a workflow around git, with a python scripts that generates a status of all the translations: https://github.com/jyaif/ppl-i18n#status https://github.com/jyaif/ppl-i18n#status The downside is that contributors need to figure out how to use github to contribute. The upside is that it's free, you get auditability, versioning, and the barrier of entry may actually increase the quality of translations.
- huachimingo 5y ago
  Like Shattered PD with Transifex.
CodesInChaos 5y ago
> A device’s location/IP address isn’t indicative of the language preference of the person using it I really don't understand why this is so popular (google being a major offender). The browser already sends the preferred language(s) as a http header.
- arp242 5y ago
  It's a major PITA as I live in a country where I don't speak the language well. It's even worse when there's no obvious way to just get it in English. It's triple worse if they decide to "localize" content for you based on your location even if you have everything set to a different country anyway. Google really sucks at this; I can set it to English or Dutch all I want, but I still get suggestions and results in Indonesian. Funny enough, the date format is always in the confusingly reverse "month/day/year" in spite of their ham-fisted forcing of everything else.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  Seconded. I'd really love to finally hear from the person at Google that made this decision. There has to be some reason, of all companies I'd trust Google to be both big enough to have a good overview of what it should be (based on complaints, user research, the impact they know this decision has) and engagement testing (since they do a lot of things based on data). Not that I'd know where to complain to, but Google employees have friends so it would reach them in some modicum anyhow if others experience this problem as well. And everyone who ever went to a country whose language they're not very comfortable in will be having this problem.
  - zapzupnz 5y ago
    I must say, I don’t encounter this issue. I live in New Zealand, you would expect English to default to English. Instead, because I use my computers in French, it defaults to French — even when I log in and tell it (repeatedly) to favour English results. (Don’t ask why I use my OS in French but want English results; it’s not that interesting) :-)
feikname 5y ago
I'd like to add being able to switch languages in a website is really heplful for learning another language. I commonly do it with Wikipedia
q_andrew 5y ago
From IGN's article about the difficulties of game development (https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-making-game-everything https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-making-g...): “Planning ahead helps, but nothing will prepare you for German,” [Joe Mirabello] said. “German destroys your best laid plans. German will defeat you. That text field you thought would only ever need a single 10-20 character word? Nope. German has a unique word for that and it’s a hundred and twelve characters long. We even have a native German developer on our team and he refuses to translate our games into German. This is all said tongue-in-cheek, of course, just to illustrate a point, and that is; whatever scaling flexibility you think you’ve planned for in your UI to account for localization? It’s not enough. It’s never enough.”
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  Reminds me of the Pseudo-Locales Windows Vista added that "translate" English strings to things that look like English, but use unusual characters and end up with longer strings in an attempt to catch UI issues before having full localization versions ready. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/pseudo-locales https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/pseudo-l...
- arp242 5y ago
  It's not that German has a "unique word" for things, it's that they use compound words: multiple words written together without space to form a new word. This is a feature found in most Germanic languages except English, because reasons. It's just that German is the most commonly translated of them. So, for example, in Dutch you would write sciencefictiontelevisieserie instead of "science fiction television series"; it's not an "unique word", just four words strung together. There are some examples that can be quite long; the longest in the dictionary is meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornissen, or "multiple personality disorders", although you can easily make it longer by adding more words: meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandeling ("multiple personality disorder treatment") or meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandelaaropleiding ("multiple personality disorder treatment education"). I miss this in English by the way; you can get creative with it and form new compound words quite easily. Sometimes the addition or lack of a space can change something quite a lot, so you can't just insert them because it's convenient. It sure can be annoying fitting these things in boxes at times though. [1]: https://twitter.com/spatiegebruik/status/1434538804883427330 https://twitter.com/spatiegebruik/status/1434538804883427330
bckygldstn 5y ago
Another concern: If your app/website is available in a language, customers will expect support in that language.
- david_allison 5y ago
  For consumer-facing apps, online translation, community support and screenshots work well enough that it's only a minor inconvenience. I do this over Facebook Messenger at least once per fortnight.
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  I've had lots of support conversations where the customer is typing in their own language while I type in English. Google Translate isn't perfect but it gets the ideas across well enough that we can usually resolve their issue.
crote 5y ago
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior Even more, bilingual people exist! A translated version is always worse. With a good human-made translation, it may just be a matter of making things un-Google-able or misrepresenting certain concepts. With an automatic translation, it's usually completely unusable. I'm a native speaker of Dutch. I'm a near-native speaker of English. Having a page with both languages interspersed is completely acceptable! Don't "helpfully" translate everything which isn't in the configured language - you're only making things worse.
- qsort 5y ago
  Exactly! Ironically, the most Anglo-centric assumption of them all is that people are only fluent in exactly one language. Configuring anything to be truly multilingual as opposed to "in another language" has terrible UX.
  - jobigoud 5y ago
    What do you mean? Having parts of the interface in one language and other parts in another? I'm fluent in multiple languages (as most European devs) and I've never really heard or thought about this concept so I'm intrigued. What kind of software are you referring to that could have this feature?
    - qsort 5y ago
      I'm talking more about the behavior of websites or applications. For example, I'm on macOS. I want the OS GUI to be in English and to use the US keyboard layout, because I'm used to that and buttons/labels aren't a big deal anyway. However, most of my communication with my coworkers (for example, MS Teams) happens in Italian, so I'd prefer those programs to display their UI in Italian (so that everyone using the program would be on the same page) and to have Italian spellcheck. When I open Safari to look at docs, Wikipedia or search results, I want those in English. But e-commerce sites like Amazon need to be in Italian. Except if I'm shopping for technical books or manuals: I need those in English. For some of those needs there's a workaround, some I found completely impossible to solve (I can't seem to get the spellchecker to switch reliably, my solution is simply to disable it: I make zero grammar mistakes in Italian and most people are willing to put up with my broken English). Generally speaking, I find that most UIs are downright hostile to "mixed" needs like mine, and I end up defaulting to the US/English locale everywhere because it's the least broken (except for units of measurement. Come on guys, inches? Farhenheit?) The concept of locale itself is broken and wrong: I want it.IT or en.US contextually, neither is the correct one, why should I be asked to definitively pick either? In many cases, localization is downright harmful. Excel comes to mind, but even several ETL tools "helpfully" "translate" decimal points to commas by default! Websites could greatly benefit from this, e.g. social media, where you're likely to be part of both a local community that speaks your native language, and a global community that speaks English.
z3t4 5y ago
Also make sure whoever translate is familiar with the profession nomenclature. To avoid phrases like "save to disk" be translated to "leftover on plate" which will be very confusing.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I tend to try designing the app with as much culturally-neutral iconography as possible (difficult). ISO icons are useful (although many designers hate them). I also try to leave as much as possible to the platform (Apple platforms). Again, designers tend to hate that. The problem is that every custom element requires both a visible string, and at least one "invisible" one (voiceover). It can get a bit dense. It's nice, if I can rely on the built-in Apple versions. I've also been caught out by choosing culturally-biased icons and visual elements. I've used ibabbleon.com, in the past, and I'm told they do a good job. Not too expensive, fast, and technically correct. Nothing beats having the end-users do the translations, though. I have been able to do this, with some of the open-source stuff that I've done. It can be an ... iterative ... process, though, as they can do things like send you translations with illegal characters, or in formats like UTF-8(BOM).
908B64B197 5y ago
One nitpick about localization: If you speak several languages, try setting your device to use one _language_ and keep your locale to US. Now you can spot which developer understands the difference between a language and a locale and which one doesn't (hint: on large enough apps you'll land on pages using the wrong one, ie determines the language using locale). Or the opposite (watch the UI quote you prices in Euro despite your locale being USD).
- dataflow 5y ago
  If someone sets the language to (say) French but keeps their locale as English, do you write a thousand as 1,000 or 1.000? What about the reverse case?
  - david_allison 5y ago
    locale defines decimal formatting
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Congratulation: You just opened the Pandora box of locale vs language! My understanding would be that locale should dictate numerical formatting. But one could argue the opposite and also be right.
    - dataflow 5y ago
      Yeah my understanding is people would classify this as locale too, but it's always seemed weird to me. I guess my question is whether this is about formatting to begin with. Periods mean something different depending on the language, right? It seems less about displaying it differently and more about conveying correct information. But then again, mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy are often exposed as a formatting option...
    - pjscott 5y ago
      I checked the documentation for the ICU Unicode library and Apple's Foundation library, and they both say that numerical formatting is a property of the locale rather than the language. I'd be surprised if other major platforms did otherwise.
drran 5y ago
Wow, 100% of users on English-speaking site said that they prefer to use English language. I suspect that 100% of them are using Internet also.
kuroguro 5y ago
Sometimes I wish we could switch the whole world to a single language. Get rid of timezones and use metric everywhere while we're at it.
- spidersouris 5y ago
  Great way of erasing all cultural differences and putting an end to diversity. Might as well merge all countries together into one and establish a single religion and a single political system while you're at it.
- hombre_fatal 5y ago
  About as tempting as switching all cuisine to Soylent to save us the mild indecision when having to choose a restaurant for date night.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Having just recently been picking a restaurant for an anniversary, I can tell the problem is real and I'm appalled at the sad state of technology for restaurant discovery.
    - conductr 5y ago
      Soylent for two?
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Getting rid of time zones is a nice idea for the first five seconds you think about it.
  - david_allison 5y ago
    Mainland China did mostly. Everything is +8[0] (besides Xinjiang Time[1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
Vinnl 5y ago
Interesting and related: why Mozilla created Fluent, a project to translate software with: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/fluent-1-0-a-localization-system-for-natural-sounding-translations/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/fluent-1-0-a-localization-...
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Not to mention messages are almost impossible to google. In fact, I used to play all my games in english for the same reason: items, places, starts... When you want to know more, the only good wikis and tutorials are in english. I used to write a blog in french, it became super popular. Yet, it's a shadow of what you can achieve woth an english audience.
sundarurfriend 5y ago
A related pet peeve of mine: if you want us to volunteer time and energy correcting or adding translations for you ("Help with the translation!"), then please make it as low friction as possible. Just linking to some third party website and expecting me to make an account, email-verify, figure out how it works, all to add a couple phrases of translation, is a good way to demotivate people trying to do free work for you.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  What would you consider a low friction workflow? For a long time in my open source application I had an ODF spreadsheet with all the translations, people could download it and send back to me. But that caused edit conflicts and was a pain to maintain. I've since moved to Weblate, which is basically what you describe, a third party website where users have to register and figure how it works, and I've got a lot more translations in and it is way easier to manage for me.
  - sundarurfriend 5y ago
    It's about proportional overhead. When I found uBlock (before it was Origin I think) was available in my language, I was willing to create an account because I knew I wanted to use it long term, and planned to work on as many phrases as I could, so it seemed worth the overhead. 99% of the time though, it's a word or two that I wish to correct in a site I might never visit again (just like I might correct a typo in a Wikipedia article that I'll never see again), and the overhead is many times more work than the actual translation. If I was able to (for eg.) hover on the vertical Feedback button that many sites now have, see a Translation Feedback option, and paste in the offending phrase with some context, and the correct translation, I'd be much more likely to do it. That can perhaps then automatically go into the third party website as from some common guest user, maybe even given lower priority since they likely require more processing - you can even warn me with "Register here to ensure your translation is seen" to manage expectations. But this way, the long tail of users that are put off by the friction can still together contribute - many eyes, shallow mistakes, etc. > my open source application My gripe is with the many large (for- and non-profit) organizations that do this though, to be clear. If it's something from a solo developer or a small team, it's understandable that the overhead of processing these might be more than they can bear (though that can be reduced by some categorization on the feedback form).
kruuuder 5y ago
What I don't get is why some companies with obviously large marketing budgets have so poorly translated websites. Most recent example I stumbled upon: 1password's German website. It sounds so horribly bad. Everything sounds like a word by word translation of English texts. "Halten Sie Ihre Familie online sicher" - wiebitte? Nobody speaks like that. 1Password immediately feels like a scam when I read those sentences.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
One aspect not entirely covered in the article is when you have a deeply technical piece of software and the dominant vocabularly of the technical field is in English. We get many requests from users of Ardour (a crossplatform digital audio workstation) to disable automatic translation based on their system language setting, because the terms used in the original/English version are the ones they are used to. It also leads to some hilarious discussions among translators (at least for those of us watching from the outside). The funniest one I recall was the Portugese and Brasilian Portugese translators discussing how to translate the word "Roll" in the context of a DAW's "transport control" (i.e. the "play" button)
obscurette 5y ago
Localization is treated as translation job in whole tech world, but in reality it should be a UI/UX design job. Most of localizations are awful even by translation standards though. And not because it lacks some kind of context etc, but nobody just cares – these are done by big agencies using mostly automatic process and with prices racing to the bottom. PS. I have 10+ years experience with open source localization and tried to make it my job at some point. I escaped industry very quickly.
- hrpnk 5y ago
  +1 to that. If you design UIs, you need to understand concepts like Right-To-Left, one-few-many for numbers and counts, etc. Same for phrases that use different typefaces with an aim of concatenation (e.g. "red" + "apples") where other languages may have more than 2 words or need a reverse order (e.g. "apples in red"). Modern UI design tooling allows for integrations with Localization Management Systems, which will perform automated translation or pseudolocalization in order to allow the designer to preview how their text looks like in another language or length.
hrpnk 5y ago
One problem I stumbled upon frequently is codebases that did not support localized formats, but just assumed a certain format to use, for example through concatenation. There are capabilities built into the programming languages, which allow to format numbers, currencies, etc. with a specific locale. There are also great resources [1] out there that provide all kinds of formats and localized names for countries, currencies, etc. [1] Unicode CLDR: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr
lucb1e 5y ago
In case the author is here: for me, the font size was at a level where I found it was most comfortable to read after zooming out all the way to 50%. And I have neither great eyesight (I should go for new glasses... soon...) nor a retina screen with zoom or anything. Probably looks great on phones, but on desktop for me the font was set uncomfortably large.
muhammadusman 5y ago
I used to work on the localization team at my company. It's a pretty complicated world in itself. I was nodding my head while reading this and I think the biggest surprise I ran into is how not a lot of companies do a great job at localizing for many different regions. I think this is also something where large companies have a huge lead on compared to newcomers.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
That's an obnoxiously large font, especially for a .design website
FalconSensei 5y ago
Apart from the translation itself being bad (plenty of comments here already), this is another thing that also bugs me with apps/software in Brazilian Portuguese: > Words may have radically different lengths in other languages Sometimes the UI gets completely screwed, and I know it'll just look better in English, if the design was originally done with English text
crazygringo 5y ago
> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior There are multiple comments here about how it usually is inferior. But even when it's not, there can still be reasons to stick to English. I've done a lot of work with Brazilian graphic designers, and they all use Photoshop/Illustrator in English -- the Portuguese version is essentially "unusable". Not because the translations are necessarily bad, but because Photoshop has its own bespoke vocabulary. E.g. what's the difference between "image" size and "canvas" size, between auto "tone" and auto "color", between "crop" and "trim", or between "vibrance" and "saturation"? In layperson English these are essentially synonyms, but mean different things in Photoshop. And if you want to follow any Photoshop tutorial, or communicate with any designer, you need to know these "English" terms, just like every programmer needs to know "if" and "then". Translating adds yet another layer of confusion that hinders more than it helps. Of course, this is specific to professional tools that require training -- it doesn't really apply to consumer software intended for a general audience.
- is_true 5y ago
  English is a good choice usually because tutorials are easier to follow, there are way more tutorials in english than in other languages.
- maximus-decimus 5y ago
  It does apply to troubleshooting in other languages though. Tryin to fix my dad's French software issues over the phone when my own computer uses the English version of the software is its own version of hell.
gverrilla 5y ago
I see a lot of bad translations to brazilian portuguese even on big companies/services. It was always obvious to me that they could get better conversion rates if they fixed it. It's tricky, but not that hard compared to the benefit.
aaron695 5y ago
And translators are artists, don't trust them to know what they are doing from an IT perspective. Like using short, close enough phrases. They also might get nationalistic and think they represent their country/culture over your app. And fuck worrying about things like 'Flags are not languages' it's bike shedding. And bullshit about culture and colors and what means yes/no. If they have a phone they know world/Western concepts. These are the least of your worries over formatting and keeping updates and testing on what's now two apps.
chrismorgan 5y ago
Hmm, haven’t come across the language icon before: <http://www.languageicon.org/ http://www.languageicon.org/>. Unfortunately, it looks rather shabbily done and very abandoned. Serving a JPEG for the large image instead of a PNG (to get an alpha channel while still being easily copyable) or SVG (for best results except for most copy-and-paste purposes), speaking of 2013 in the present tense, no HTTPS, claiming “copyright and hassle free” but it’s actually using an extremely problematic barely-specified license (claiming “a CC license” with no link, and a whole bunch of terms so that it’s a poorly-modified CC-BY-SA-NC), claiming you can download “rar or zip” and it includes SVG and more but it’s actually ZIP only with an eclectic mixture of bizarre formats (not including SVG), colours (some obviously wrong) and sizes, the icon itself is not aligned to any sort of sane grid and has been hand-placed and angled… all up it’s an unhappy mess. That’s not the way to go about trying to make a universal language icon that you want adopted. Pity, because the idea is decent (though the original article is quite correct that labels are far better than icons anyway).
- david_allison 5y ago
  https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate is a reasonable alternative to be used with a dropdown selector PNG/SVG available. Under Apache 2.0 [0] [0] https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/...
- lmm 5y ago
  If you actually care about people being able to find the switch language button, use flags. Usability trumps correctness here.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Please don't. Flags are not languages. (http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/) There are many languages which cannot be clearly distinguished with a flag icon -- for example, there are dozens of languages which could be represented by an Indian flag (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Urdu...), and some languages which don't have any clear flag, or whose flag could be politically complicated to display (like Catalan, Romani, or Tibetan). Use the localized name of a language to indicate the language (e.g. English, Español, Svenska, 中文). It's unambiguous and takes very little effort to implement.
jefftk 5y ago
> The web’s Anglocentric-bias exists largely because of where it was originally created At CERN, in Switzerland?
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I live in slovenia... for many cases, it is impossible to even translate stuff directly into our language, because we don't only have singular and plural, we also have "dual" (for two of something). We also have a lot of irregular stuff, where we count beers: - eno pivo (one beer) - dve pivi (two beers) - tri piva (three beers) - štiri piva (four beers) - pet piv (five (or more) beers) How the hell do you put this into strings.xml?!
- MatmaRex 5y ago
  Well, I don't know how to put it into strings.xml specifically, but there are localisation systems that handle it without much fuss. It requires a bit more effort from developers and translators, but it's not that hard in concept. For example, Fluent (https://projectfluent.org/ https://projectfluent.org/, used by Firefox), or MediaWiki's localisation system (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Message_parameters https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Message_paramete...).
- david_allison 5y ago
  CLDR should work https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/37/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html#sl https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/37/supplem...
mastazi 5y ago
Youtube still shows dates for "Premieres on..." in MM/DD/YY, regardless of the locale. Internationalisation and localisation are such hard problems that even the big FAANG companies fail at it.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I would very much be on board for YYYYMMDD universal standard enforced by whatever means necessary to get it done. But why people don’t use JAN / FEB / MAR … DD YYYY, IDK, seems low friction and no one gets confused even if they would rather see 7 JAN 2022
  - mastazi 5y ago
    Yes using JAN FEB etc. would be a very effective quick and dirty fix. I guess the only reason why not many complain in this case, is that "premieres on..." is a feature that almost no one uses on Youtube.
makecheck 5y ago
It’s unfortunate that by default a lot of systems just gather strings into a pile for translation, as if all strings are created equal. But if you have two uses of the same text with different meanings, you have to be careful (e.g. put them in separate translation tables or something). Even for single words, e.g. somewhere there’s a button named “Open” but elsewhere there is a status text indicating that the current state of something is “Open”; lots of things like that. Just because it’s the same in one language, it may not be in another. It would also be nice to have more context besides, say, just a comment. For example, things in toolbars ought to be short (ideally one word), things in menu items might be medium (a few words tops), things in notifications might be medium-to-long, and stuff in a window might have no restrictions at all. When you start from just a string, you do not necessarily know how much space you have and even if your UI can auto-resize, that doesn’t mean you’d want it to in every case.
hrishi 5y ago
I'll add my few experiences. The primitives of UI that we use in English are often untranslatable, or need really verbose translations simply because they've been inducted into English as part of the tech UI lexicon. I speak four languages fluently, and 'OK', 'Abort', 'Retry' and 'Load' are some of the hardest things to translate.
dhosek 5y ago
My first job out of college involved template-based translations for chemical bottle labels (with information printed in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, with different regulations attaching to each language (jurisdictions included the US, Japan, Canada, EU, Germany and UK, each with their own specific requirements). Machine translation was still expensive and unreliable (this was 1991–3) so we had translators build up a phrasal dictionary that we could then apply rules to in order to build up the text that would appear on each label. Thanks to the regulatory regime, there was a lot of care taken in designing the system and with hand-translation of each phrase by actual human translators, no glaring errors. Looking at after the fact attempts at internationalization, there are lots of pitfalls and it's something that needs to be done intentionally. (I'm still thinking about how to best implement the equivalent of LaTeX's \cref for finl. What works for English, doesn't work for other languages (e.g., in Czech, “in sections 3 and 4“ would be renderered “v sekcich 3 a 4” while “see sections 3 and 4” would be “viz sekce 3 a 4” although “see sections 3–10” should be “viz sekci 3–10”.
nicbou 5y ago
A few more based on my own experience: * People don't always speak the language of the country they are in * There are significant regional differences for a given language. As a French Canadian, I couldn't translate a website to French because it would sound wrong to someone in France. For example, we have vastly different sets of English loanwords. * The order of things can be different. For instance, German addresses put the door number after the street name. This can break your layout or even your UX in subtle ways. * You must choose formal or informal pronouns (tu/vous, du/Sie) and use them consistently. * Labels can make no sense if you don't know what the UI is like. Context is important for translators.

173 points by flowerbeater 5y ago

timw4mail 5y ago

This has a lot of good points, but the site it self has a huge distraction: Why is the font so big?

TrueGeek 5y ago
It looks fine in my locale. Serious answer: the author has an "under construction" notice at the top of the page.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Design-me: "wow, people really do skip over top level banners now. Now what do I use if something's important?"
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Alert boxes. Can't go wrong!
    - TrueGeek 5y ago
      I typically close those too. The trick is to make them modal and persistent until you enter your email address.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    The banner on this site is too skinny, and the background color is too dull. It doesn't jump out as anything important, and I skipped right over it as well. A wider banner with more intense background color would go a long way.
  - thetadot 5y ago
    I saw the banner too but wasn't sure exactly what he meant by "janky" and "updating in the open". I thought it was going to be an example of a problematical translation
timw4mail 5y ago
To clarify, 30px size text on a 22" 1080p monitor looks more like a headline that is really long than body copy. I realize that viewing websites on computers is much less the norm than it used to be, but such large text feels really strange.
gwbas1c 5y ago
Probably because the author is thinking about people with poor vision? IMO, it's poor design for a page to handle accessibility issues that are already built into the browser. (It's trivial to shrink and zoom in a browser.)
- brigandish 5y ago
  I have to wonder what the complaint can be if it's trivial to shrink text - aren't you simply looking at this from the perspective of someone with better vision?
chrismorgan 5y ago
My own recommendation for general web body type in typical English fonts: never go above 20px, and 18px is generally a better upper limit.
- brigandish 5y ago
  The unspoken assumption here is that you're designing for younger people, which is natural as most designers are younger, but that doesn't make it any better a recommendation than "never go below 18px and 20px is a better lower limit". Surely it depends on your audience and/or those you wish to attract.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    A large part of my recommendation is consistency. For general content sites, it’s not good to be too different from the mean. Font family and size is definitely such a property where you don’t want to deviate too much: twenty years ago, 20px for body type would have been outrageously large; twenty years ago, 11px was definitely on the small side, but not outrageously small as it is now. Conventional sizes have definitely slid upwards, but they’ve peaked in roughly the range 16–20px, and I declare that anything higher than 20px is just too much, pointlessly limiting what you can fit on the screen—any time people go above there, you will see people zooming out because they find it too big. (And this recommendation is designed for desktop-sized displays; on mobile displays, just use 16px, and certainly don’t go above 18px.) I am emphatically not assuming designing for younger people; quite the contrary. You will find me saying “don’t go below 16px, you make things harder for many people”. But once you’re in the range 16–18px, going larger just doesn’t help—the people that want to go larger will (or should) already be used to going larger by zooming in, and you’re making life harder for everyone else by preventing the screen from fitting much content at once.
    - brigandish 5y ago
      > For general content sites, it’s not good to be too different from the mean. The mean is decided by those designing sites and they are overwhelmingly younger people - in fact, usually they're among the youngest of all adult workers - and it shows. If sites were designed for the mean amongst society then the move would be to larger fonts. Personally, I welcome sites that use larger font sizes, I'm not sure why I need to strain my eyes one iota for text in a virtually infinite space. I know I'm not alone (though perhaps for different reasons). Deviating from the mean would work for a substantial part of the population who are currently treated like second class citizens on the web. > But once you’re in the range 16–18px, going larger just doesn’t help—the people that want to go larger will (or should) already be used to going larger by zooming in, I've had to show several oldies how to zoom. They do get used to it because they have to. > and you’re making life harder for everyone else by preventing the screen from fitting much content at once. Do the people who need this not know how to zoom out?

lou1306 5y ago

> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior As an Italian, I can relate so much to this, because translated apps will happily treat verbs as adjectives and vice versa. A couple example: * Flixbus' app translates "Open ticket" to "Biglietto aperto" (treating "open" as an adjective, not as an imperative verb). Correct translation should be "Apri biglietto". Nothing bad, just unnecessarily confusing (what is an "open ticket"? As opposed to a "closed" one?) * EasyJet's app does the reverse and makes it much worse. The English version likely says something like "Gate close: xx:xx (am|pm)". They mis-translated this as "Gate chiuso: xx:xx", which actually means "Gate has closed", even though the gate is still open. So you get a small heart attack, notice the actual closing time, curse the translators, and go on with your life.

TrueGeek 5y ago
This is surprising. You really think someone as big as EasyJet would get that right. We're doing a translation now into Japanese and the translator is actually taking the time to look at screenshots and use the app to see the text in context. It makes a huge difference. As you've pointed out, it's one thing to see the string "open" in a XLF file, it's quite another to realize it's intent. This requires setting up demo environments for each translator though.
- kalium-xyz 5y ago
  The secret is that you cant verbatim translate into Japanese as well, which forces more attention (also its a bigger economy)
- Pinus 5y ago
  Heck, Microsoft got it wrong — Swedish versions of Windows used to have a folder called "Vanliga filer" (Ordinary files). This was, of course, the "Common files" folder, but the translator, probably having no context, picked the wrong meaning of "common", and chose a Swedish word which does not have the "shared" meaning.
  - Lex-2008 5y ago

sergioisidoro 5y ago

I went through a lot of these pains. The biggest one was undoing the misuse of localisation tools to display content differently on each geographic region, and misuse of plurals. I would also add collaboration efforts, how to make localisation work with continuous integration and not go waterfall, where you make a release, and you have to wait 4-6 days to localise half a dozen strings

emilecantin 5y ago

One annoying issue with translated apps the author doesn't cover is "googlability", the fact that we often need to google an error message or menu label in order to solve a problem. This leads to a lot of bilingual people running their software in English just in case they need to paste an error message into a search engine.

copperx 5y ago
Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with translated apps.
- bartvk 5y ago
  I've always felt that a popup with an error code should have a "search the web for this code" button.
  - conductr 5y ago
    That’s where “error code” essentially comes from, an actual code you could look up in a manual. Errors have evolved to be more of “error messages” which then have grammar, word choice, and a million other concerns.
- fomine3 5y ago
  I wonder why message code culture disappeared now.
maple3142 5y ago
Totally agrees. FireFox devtools UI language is your browser language, and the error messages are also translated. A really annoying thing is there doesn't seem to have an easy way to only switch devtool language to English. On the other way, Chromium devtools doesn't even have translations so it doesn't have this problem. And the new Edge (Chromium) translates the devtool by default, but there is an option allowing you to switch back to English in devtool only.

eCa 5y ago

> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior No, it is not about expectations. In +95% of cases[1] the localized[2] version is objectively worse, to the point where it often only is possible for me to understand by first translating it back to English. If you give me a localized version first, and don’t give me an obvious way to permanently choose English, I’m likely gone. [1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite often they fail too [2] My first language is one of the smaller European languages (<20M speakers), perhaps bigger languages have higher quality.

lucb1e 5y ago
I think that's exactly what the author meant.
tester756 5y ago
>[1] Mostly excluding the big ones (MS, Apple, etc), but quite often they fail too MS docs I mean they're good when displayed in English, but defaulting to "native_language" is annoying.

hyperman1 5y ago

All of this is so recognizable, but I'd add one more: Make sure the user has a way to switch the translation back to English. I have some sites showing in, say, Chinese, where even the current language is a Chinese glyph. Nothing on such a page is readable for a non-Chinese speaker. So you get to click around randomly until some menu opens where you see the word 'English' which brings you to a page you can read enough to get to your own language.

asiachick 5y ago
I've run into this problem but I don't know there is a good solution. Let's say for whatever reason the app guesses the user wants Japanese. The app has no way to know what to present to allow to user to switch languages. Should they put a button that says "Language", how does that help a Chinese language person, a Korean person, a Thai person? Should they put "English"? Same point as above. As you complain, they'll likely put 言語, the Japanese for "language" and only if you click it will you see other languages, and it may be buried under 設定 (settings). Sure it's not useful for you, but neither is "English" or "Language" useful for a large part of the world. I don't know there is a good solution. Checking my iPhone it's 設定ｰ>一般ｰ>言語と地域ｰ>iPhoneの使用言語 so fairly buried in language not useful for someone who doesn't know Japanese. Checking apple.jp, the place to switch is at the bottom right and it just says 日本, no indication that if you click it you'll get a list of countries and if you don't know Japanese you'd likely not know that means "Japan".
- brigandish 5y ago
  National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars and Stripes or a Hinomaru?
  - david_allison 5y ago
    A few issues: You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open yourself up to political/territorial disputes. Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to maintenance and territorial disputes). Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China flag Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban flag for Pashto (Afghani)? Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our translation platform doesn't have a flag for Cantonese) Flag to language is a many to many mapping. My Android lists ~107 available languages under 'English'.

Jyaif 5y ago

> Translation and localization costs money If you have a fan base, you can leverage it to get some amount of translation done. A lot of users are happy to help the product they like get better. Granted, the quality will not be as good as the quality you get with professional translators. The article also did not talk about the actual the translation process, which in the case of a product that is released but keeps getting updates is not trivial. There are tools that exists, but I personally decided to build a workflow around git, with a python scripts that generates a status of all the translations: https://github.com/jyaif/ppl-i18n#status https://github.com/jyaif/ppl-i18n#status The downside is that contributors need to figure out how to use github to contribute. The upside is that it's free, you get auditability, versioning, and the barrier of entry may actually increase the quality of translations.

huachimingo 5y ago
Like Shattered PD with Transifex.

CodesInChaos 5y ago

> A device’s location/IP address isn’t indicative of the language preference of the person using it I really don't understand why this is so popular (google being a major offender). The browser already sends the preferred language(s) as a http header.

arp242 5y ago
It's a major PITA as I live in a country where I don't speak the language well. It's even worse when there's no obvious way to just get it in English. It's triple worse if they decide to "localize" content for you based on your location even if you have everything set to a different country anyway. Google really sucks at this; I can set it to English or Dutch all I want, but I still get suggestions and results in Indonesian. Funny enough, the date format is always in the confusingly reverse "month/day/year" in spite of their ham-fisted forcing of everything else.
lucb1e 5y ago
Seconded. I'd really love to finally hear from the person at Google that made this decision. There has to be some reason, of all companies I'd trust Google to be both big enough to have a good overview of what it should be (based on complaints, user research, the impact they know this decision has) and engagement testing (since they do a lot of things based on data). Not that I'd know where to complain to, but Google employees have friends so it would reach them in some modicum anyhow if others experience this problem as well. And everyone who ever went to a country whose language they're not very comfortable in will be having this problem.
- zapzupnz 5y ago
  I must say, I don’t encounter this issue. I live in New Zealand, you would expect English to default to English. Instead, because I use my computers in French, it defaults to French — even when I log in and tell it (repeatedly) to favour English results. (Don’t ask why I use my OS in French but want English results; it’s not that interesting) :-)

feikname 5y ago

I'd like to add being able to switch languages in a website is really heplful for learning another language. I commonly do it with Wikipedia

q_andrew 5y ago

From IGN's article about the difficulties of game development (https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-making-game-everything https://www.ign.com/articles/turns-out-hardest-part-making-g...): “Planning ahead helps, but nothing will prepare you for German,” [Joe Mirabello] said. “German destroys your best laid plans. German will defeat you. That text field you thought would only ever need a single 10-20 character word? Nope. German has a unique word for that and it’s a hundred and twelve characters long. We even have a native German developer on our team and he refuses to translate our games into German. This is all said tongue-in-cheek, of course, just to illustrate a point, and that is; whatever scaling flexibility you think you’ve planned for in your UI to account for localization? It’s not enough. It’s never enough.”

banana_giraffe 5y ago
Reminds me of the Pseudo-Locales Windows Vista added that "translate" English strings to things that look like English, but use unusual characters and end up with longer strings in an attempt to catch UI issues before having full localization versions ready. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/pseudo-locales https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/pseudo-l...
arp242 5y ago
It's not that German has a "unique word" for things, it's that they use compound words: multiple words written together without space to form a new word. This is a feature found in most Germanic languages except English, because reasons. It's just that German is the most commonly translated of them. So, for example, in Dutch you would write sciencefictiontelevisieserie instead of "science fiction television series"; it's not an "unique word", just four words strung together. There are some examples that can be quite long; the longest in the dictionary is meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornissen, or "multiple personality disorders", although you can easily make it longer by adding more words: meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandeling ("multiple personality disorder treatment") or meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornisbehandelaaropleiding ("multiple personality disorder treatment education"). I miss this in English by the way; you can get creative with it and form new compound words quite easily. Sometimes the addition or lack of a space can change something quite a lot, so you can't just insert them because it's convenient. It sure can be annoying fitting these things in boxes at times though. [1]: https://twitter.com/spatiegebruik/status/1434538804883427330 https://twitter.com/spatiegebruik/status/1434538804883427330

bckygldstn 5y ago

Another concern: If your app/website is available in a language, customers will expect support in that language.

david_allison 5y ago
For consumer-facing apps, online translation, community support and screenshots work well enough that it's only a minor inconvenience. I do this over Facebook Messenger at least once per fortnight.
RandallBrown 5y ago
I've had lots of support conversations where the customer is typing in their own language while I type in English. Google Translate isn't perfect but it gets the ideas across well enough that we can usually resolve their issue.

crote 5y ago

> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior Even more, bilingual people exist! A translated version is always worse. With a good human-made translation, it may just be a matter of making things un-Google-able or misrepresenting certain concepts. With an automatic translation, it's usually completely unusable. I'm a native speaker of Dutch. I'm a near-native speaker of English. Having a page with both languages interspersed is completely acceptable! Don't "helpfully" translate everything which isn't in the configured language - you're only making things worse.

qsort 5y ago
Exactly! Ironically, the most Anglo-centric assumption of them all is that people are only fluent in exactly one language. Configuring anything to be truly multilingual as opposed to "in another language" has terrible UX.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  What do you mean? Having parts of the interface in one language and other parts in another? I'm fluent in multiple languages (as most European devs) and I've never really heard or thought about this concept so I'm intrigued. What kind of software are you referring to that could have this feature?
  - qsort 5y ago
    I'm talking more about the behavior of websites or applications. For example, I'm on macOS. I want the OS GUI to be in English and to use the US keyboard layout, because I'm used to that and buttons/labels aren't a big deal anyway. However, most of my communication with my coworkers (for example, MS Teams) happens in Italian, so I'd prefer those programs to display their UI in Italian (so that everyone using the program would be on the same page) and to have Italian spellcheck. When I open Safari to look at docs, Wikipedia or search results, I want those in English. But e-commerce sites like Amazon need to be in Italian. Except if I'm shopping for technical books or manuals: I need those in English. For some of those needs there's a workaround, some I found completely impossible to solve (I can't seem to get the spellchecker to switch reliably, my solution is simply to disable it: I make zero grammar mistakes in Italian and most people are willing to put up with my broken English). Generally speaking, I find that most UIs are downright hostile to "mixed" needs like mine, and I end up defaulting to the US/English locale everywhere because it's the least broken (except for units of measurement. Come on guys, inches? Farhenheit?) The concept of locale itself is broken and wrong: I want it.IT or en.US contextually, neither is the correct one, why should I be asked to definitively pick either? In many cases, localization is downright harmful. Excel comes to mind, but even several ETL tools "helpfully" "translate" decimal points to commas by default! Websites could greatly benefit from this, e.g. social media, where you're likely to be part of both a local community that speaks your native language, and a global community that speaks English.

z3t4 5y ago

Also make sure whoever translate is familiar with the profession nomenclature. To avoid phrases like "save to disk" be translated to "leftover on plate" which will be very confusing.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I tend to try designing the app with as much culturally-neutral iconography as possible (difficult). ISO icons are useful (although many designers hate them). I also try to leave as much as possible to the platform (Apple platforms). Again, designers tend to hate that. The problem is that every custom element requires both a visible string, and at least one "invisible" one (voiceover). It can get a bit dense. It's nice, if I can rely on the built-in Apple versions. I've also been caught out by choosing culturally-biased icons and visual elements. I've used ibabbleon.com, in the past, and I'm told they do a good job. Not too expensive, fast, and technically correct. Nothing beats having the end-users do the translations, though. I have been able to do this, with some of the open-source stuff that I've done. It can be an ... iterative ... process, though, as they can do things like send you translations with illegal characters, or in formats like UTF-8(BOM).

908B64B197 5y ago

One nitpick about localization: If you speak several languages, try setting your device to use one _language_ and keep your locale to US. Now you can spot which developer understands the difference between a language and a locale and which one doesn't (hint: on large enough apps you'll land on pages using the wrong one, ie determines the language using locale). Or the opposite (watch the UI quote you prices in Euro despite your locale being USD).

dataflow 5y ago
If someone sets the language to (say) French but keeps their locale as English, do you write a thousand as 1,000 or 1.000? What about the reverse case?
- david_allison 5y ago
  locale defines decimal formatting
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Congratulation: You just opened the Pandora box of locale vs language! My understanding would be that locale should dictate numerical formatting. But one could argue the opposite and also be right.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    Yeah my understanding is people would classify this as locale too, but it's always seemed weird to me. I guess my question is whether this is about formatting to begin with. Periods mean something different depending on the language, right? It seems less about displaying it differently and more about conveying correct information. But then again, mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy are often exposed as a formatting option...
  - pjscott 5y ago
    I checked the documentation for the ICU Unicode library and Apple's Foundation library, and they both say that numerical formatting is a property of the locale rather than the language. I'd be surprised if other major platforms did otherwise.

drran 5y ago

Wow, 100% of users on English-speaking site said that they prefer to use English language. I suspect that 100% of them are using Internet also.

kuroguro 5y ago

Sometimes I wish we could switch the whole world to a single language. Get rid of timezones and use metric everywhere while we're at it.

spidersouris 5y ago
Great way of erasing all cultural differences and putting an end to diversity. Might as well merge all countries together into one and establish a single religion and a single political system while you're at it.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
About as tempting as switching all cuisine to Soylent to save us the mild indecision when having to choose a restaurant for date night.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Having just recently been picking a restaurant for an anniversary, I can tell the problem is real and I'm appalled at the sad state of technology for restaurant discovery.
  - conductr 5y ago
    Soylent for two?
yoz-y 5y ago
Getting rid of time zones is a nice idea for the first five seconds you think about it.
- david_allison 5y ago
  Mainland China did mostly. Everything is +8[0] (besides Xinjiang Time[1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time

Vinnl 5y ago

Interesting and related: why Mozilla created Fluent, a project to translate software with: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/fluent-1-0-a-localization-system-for-natural-sounding-translations/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/fluent-1-0-a-localization-...

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Not to mention messages are almost impossible to google. In fact, I used to play all my games in english for the same reason: items, places, starts... When you want to know more, the only good wikis and tutorials are in english. I used to write a blog in french, it became super popular. Yet, it's a shadow of what you can achieve woth an english audience.

sundarurfriend 5y ago

A related pet peeve of mine: if you want us to volunteer time and energy correcting or adding translations for you ("Help with the translation!"), then please make it as low friction as possible. Just linking to some third party website and expecting me to make an account, email-verify, figure out how it works, all to add a couple phrases of translation, is a good way to demotivate people trying to do free work for you.

jobigoud 5y ago
What would you consider a low friction workflow? For a long time in my open source application I had an ODF spreadsheet with all the translations, people could download it and send back to me. But that caused edit conflicts and was a pain to maintain. I've since moved to Weblate, which is basically what you describe, a third party website where users have to register and figure how it works, and I've got a lot more translations in and it is way easier to manage for me.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  It's about proportional overhead. When I found uBlock (before it was Origin I think) was available in my language, I was willing to create an account because I knew I wanted to use it long term, and planned to work on as many phrases as I could, so it seemed worth the overhead. 99% of the time though, it's a word or two that I wish to correct in a site I might never visit again (just like I might correct a typo in a Wikipedia article that I'll never see again), and the overhead is many times more work than the actual translation. If I was able to (for eg.) hover on the vertical Feedback button that many sites now have, see a Translation Feedback option, and paste in the offending phrase with some context, and the correct translation, I'd be much more likely to do it. That can perhaps then automatically go into the third party website as from some common guest user, maybe even given lower priority since they likely require more processing - you can even warn me with "Register here to ensure your translation is seen" to manage expectations. But this way, the long tail of users that are put off by the friction can still together contribute - many eyes, shallow mistakes, etc. > my open source application My gripe is with the many large (for- and non-profit) organizations that do this though, to be clear. If it's something from a solo developer or a small team, it's understandable that the overhead of processing these might be more than they can bear (though that can be reduced by some categorization on the feedback form).

kruuuder 5y ago

What I don't get is why some companies with obviously large marketing budgets have so poorly translated websites. Most recent example I stumbled upon: 1password's German website. It sounds so horribly bad. Everything sounds like a word by word translation of English texts. "Halten Sie Ihre Familie online sicher" - wiebitte? Nobody speaks like that. 1Password immediately feels like a scam when I read those sentences.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

One aspect not entirely covered in the article is when you have a deeply technical piece of software and the dominant vocabularly of the technical field is in English. We get many requests from users of Ardour (a crossplatform digital audio workstation) to disable automatic translation based on their system language setting, because the terms used in the original/English version are the ones they are used to. It also leads to some hilarious discussions among translators (at least for those of us watching from the outside). The funniest one I recall was the Portugese and Brasilian Portugese translators discussing how to translate the word "Roll" in the context of a DAW's "transport control" (i.e. the "play" button)

obscurette 5y ago

Localization is treated as translation job in whole tech world, but in reality it should be a UI/UX design job. Most of localizations are awful even by translation standards though. And not because it lacks some kind of context etc, but nobody just cares – these are done by big agencies using mostly automatic process and with prices racing to the bottom. PS. I have 10+ years experience with open source localization and tried to make it my job at some point. I escaped industry very quickly.

hrpnk 5y ago
+1 to that. If you design UIs, you need to understand concepts like Right-To-Left, one-few-many for numbers and counts, etc. Same for phrases that use different typefaces with an aim of concatenation (e.g. "red" + "apples") where other languages may have more than 2 words or need a reverse order (e.g. "apples in red"). Modern UI design tooling allows for integrations with Localization Management Systems, which will perform automated translation or pseudolocalization in order to allow the designer to preview how their text looks like in another language or length.

hrpnk 5y ago

One problem I stumbled upon frequently is codebases that did not support localized formats, but just assumed a certain format to use, for example through concatenation. There are capabilities built into the programming languages, which allow to format numbers, currencies, etc. with a specific locale. There are also great resources [1] out there that provide all kinds of formats and localized names for countries, currencies, etc. [1] Unicode CLDR: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr

lucb1e 5y ago

In case the author is here: for me, the font size was at a level where I found it was most comfortable to read after zooming out all the way to 50%. And I have neither great eyesight (I should go for new glasses... soon...) nor a retina screen with zoom or anything. Probably looks great on phones, but on desktop for me the font was set uncomfortably large.

muhammadusman 5y ago

I used to work on the localization team at my company. It's a pretty complicated world in itself. I was nodding my head while reading this and I think the biggest surprise I ran into is how not a lot of companies do a great job at localizing for many different regions. I think this is also something where large companies have a huge lead on compared to newcomers.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

That's an obnoxiously large font, especially for a .design website

FalconSensei 5y ago

Apart from the translation itself being bad (plenty of comments here already), this is another thing that also bugs me with apps/software in Brazilian Portuguese: > Words may have radically different lengths in other languages Sometimes the UI gets completely screwed, and I know it'll just look better in English, if the design was originally done with English text

crazygringo 5y ago

> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior There are multiple comments here about how it usually is inferior. But even when it's not, there can still be reasons to stick to English. I've done a lot of work with Brazilian graphic designers, and they all use Photoshop/Illustrator in English -- the Portuguese version is essentially "unusable". Not because the translations are necessarily bad, but because Photoshop has its own bespoke vocabulary. E.g. what's the difference between "image" size and "canvas" size, between auto "tone" and auto "color", between "crop" and "trim", or between "vibrance" and "saturation"? In layperson English these are essentially synonyms, but mean different things in Photoshop. And if you want to follow any Photoshop tutorial, or communicate with any designer, you need to know these "English" terms, just like every programmer needs to know "if" and "then". Translating adds yet another layer of confusion that hinders more than it helps. Of course, this is specific to professional tools that require training -- it doesn't really apply to consumer software intended for a general audience.

is_true 5y ago
English is a good choice usually because tutorials are easier to follow, there are way more tutorials in english than in other languages.
maximus-decimus 5y ago
It does apply to troubleshooting in other languages though. Tryin to fix my dad's French software issues over the phone when my own computer uses the English version of the software is its own version of hell.

gverrilla 5y ago

I see a lot of bad translations to brazilian portuguese even on big companies/services. It was always obvious to me that they could get better conversion rates if they fixed it. It's tricky, but not that hard compared to the benefit.

aaron695 5y ago

And translators are artists, don't trust them to know what they are doing from an IT perspective. Like using short, close enough phrases. They also might get nationalistic and think they represent their country/culture over your app. And fuck worrying about things like 'Flags are not languages' it's bike shedding. And bullshit about culture and colors and what means yes/no. If they have a phone they know world/Western concepts. These are the least of your worries over formatting and keeping updates and testing on what's now two apps.

chrismorgan 5y ago

Hmm, haven’t come across the language icon before: <http://www.languageicon.org/ http://www.languageicon.org/>. Unfortunately, it looks rather shabbily done and very abandoned. Serving a JPEG for the large image instead of a PNG (to get an alpha channel while still being easily copyable) or SVG (for best results except for most copy-and-paste purposes), speaking of 2013 in the present tense, no HTTPS, claiming “copyright and hassle free” but it’s actually using an extremely problematic barely-specified license (claiming “a CC license” with no link, and a whole bunch of terms so that it’s a poorly-modified CC-BY-SA-NC), claiming you can download “rar or zip” and it includes SVG and more but it’s actually ZIP only with an eclectic mixture of bizarre formats (not including SVG), colours (some obviously wrong) and sizes, the icon itself is not aligned to any sort of sane grid and has been hand-placed and angled… all up it’s an unhappy mess. That’s not the way to go about trying to make a universal language icon that you want adopted. Pity, because the idea is decent (though the original article is quite correct that labels are far better than icons anyway).

david_allison 5y ago
https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate is a reasonable alternative to be used with a dropdown selector PNG/SVG available. Under Apache 2.0 [0] [0] https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/...
lmm 5y ago
If you actually care about people being able to find the switch language button, use flags. Usability trumps correctness here.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Please don't. Flags are not languages. (http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/) There are many languages which cannot be clearly distinguished with a flag icon -- for example, there are dozens of languages which could be represented by an Indian flag (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Urdu...), and some languages which don't have any clear flag, or whose flag could be politically complicated to display (like Catalan, Romani, or Tibetan). Use the localized name of a language to indicate the language (e.g. English, Español, Svenska, 中文). It's unambiguous and takes very little effort to implement.

jefftk 5y ago

> The web’s Anglocentric-bias exists largely because of where it was originally created At CERN, in Switzerland?

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

I live in slovenia... for many cases, it is impossible to even translate stuff directly into our language, because we don't only have singular and plural, we also have "dual" (for two of something). We also have a lot of irregular stuff, where we count beers: - eno pivo (one beer) - dve pivi (two beers) - tri piva (three beers) - štiri piva (four beers) - pet piv (five (or more) beers) How the hell do you put this into strings.xml?!

MatmaRex 5y ago
Well, I don't know how to put it into strings.xml specifically, but there are localisation systems that handle it without much fuss. It requires a bit more effort from developers and translators, but it's not that hard in concept. For example, Fluent (https://projectfluent.org/ https://projectfluent.org/, used by Firefox), or MediaWiki's localisation system (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Message_parameters https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Message_paramete...).
david_allison 5y ago
CLDR should work https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/37/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html#sl https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/37/supplem...

mastazi 5y ago

Youtube still shows dates for "Premieres on..." in MM/DD/YY, regardless of the locale. Internationalisation and localisation are such hard problems that even the big FAANG companies fail at it.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I would very much be on board for YYYYMMDD universal standard enforced by whatever means necessary to get it done. But why people don’t use JAN / FEB / MAR … DD YYYY, IDK, seems low friction and no one gets confused even if they would rather see 7 JAN 2022
- mastazi 5y ago
  Yes using JAN FEB etc. would be a very effective quick and dirty fix. I guess the only reason why not many complain in this case, is that "premieres on..." is a feature that almost no one uses on Youtube.

makecheck 5y ago

It’s unfortunate that by default a lot of systems just gather strings into a pile for translation, as if all strings are created equal. But if you have two uses of the same text with different meanings, you have to be careful (e.g. put them in separate translation tables or something). Even for single words, e.g. somewhere there’s a button named “Open” but elsewhere there is a status text indicating that the current state of something is “Open”; lots of things like that. Just because it’s the same in one language, it may not be in another. It would also be nice to have more context besides, say, just a comment. For example, things in toolbars ought to be short (ideally one word), things in menu items might be medium (a few words tops), things in notifications might be medium-to-long, and stuff in a window might have no restrictions at all. When you start from just a string, you do not necessarily know how much space you have and even if your UI can auto-resize, that doesn’t mean you’d want it to in every case.

hrishi 5y ago

I'll add my few experiences. The primitives of UI that we use in English are often untranslatable, or need really verbose translations simply because they've been inducted into English as part of the tech UI lexicon. I speak four languages fluently, and 'OK', 'Abort', 'Retry' and 'Load' are some of the hardest things to translate.

dhosek 5y ago

My first job out of college involved template-based translations for chemical bottle labels (with information printed in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, with different regulations attaching to each language (jurisdictions included the US, Japan, Canada, EU, Germany and UK, each with their own specific requirements). Machine translation was still expensive and unreliable (this was 1991–3) so we had translators build up a phrasal dictionary that we could then apply rules to in order to build up the text that would appear on each label. Thanks to the regulatory regime, there was a lot of care taken in designing the system and with hand-translation of each phrase by actual human translators, no glaring errors. Looking at after the fact attempts at internationalization, there are lots of pitfalls and it's something that needs to be done intentionally. (I'm still thinking about how to best implement the equivalent of LaTeX's \cref for finl. What works for English, doesn't work for other languages (e.g., in Czech, “in sections 3 and 4“ would be renderered “v sekcich 3 a 4” while “see sections 3 and 4” would be “viz sekce 3 a 4” although “see sections 3–10” should be “viz sekci 3–10”.

nicbou 5y ago

A few more based on my own experience: * People don't always speak the language of the country they are in * There are significant regional differences for a given language. As a French Canadian, I couldn't translate a website to French because it would sound wrong to someone in France. For example, we have vastly different sets of English loanwords. * The order of things can be different. For instance, German addresses put the door number after the street name. This can break your layout or even your UX in subtle ways. * You must choose formal or informal pronouns (tu/vous, du/Sie) and use them consistently. * Labels can make no sense if you don't know what the UI is like. Context is important for translators.