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[-] PixxlMan@lemmy.world 189 points 1 year ago

Translation of developer utilities themselves is the final layer of hell. I'm not hearing anybody out about this kinda stuff - after microsoft decided to TRANSLATE THE EXCEPTION MESSAGES IN .NET WITH NO WAY TO BYPASS IT making them unclear, unusable and ungoogleable, I realized what a terrible idea it is to fragment developer knowledge by language.

Let's just stick to a lingua franca, please.

[-] loutr@sh.itjust.works 57 points 1 year ago

That's why I always select "English (US)" when installing an OS or creating an account online. No bad or missing translation, no mangled UI because of longer words, and of course easily searchable error messages.

[-] DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 24 points 1 year ago

Yeah the only drawbacks is I later have trouble giving remote support to family members because their shit is in another language so I don't know what does the option specifically say hahaha

[-] mormegil@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that's why unlocalize.com exists (or... existed? Dunno, seems down from here!) Or you can have used the official Microsoft Language Portal... until they removed it and replaced it with the worse https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/reference/microsoft-language-resources (but it's still usable, I guess...)

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[-] nobloat@lemmy.ml 121 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I hope this is a joke because the Arabic translation is so wrong. It's also confusing because Arabic is written from right to left so it'll just create a mess. The translators are using "letter case" and translated it literally to Arabic. The word used doesn't mean "letter" as in a letter in the alphabet but "letter" as in what you send in the post office. These are totally different words in Arabic.

[-] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 52 points 1 year ago

Spanish is also wrong, this one means "ignore-letter-size". I'm not sure if there is an official correct way to say in a short manner, I would say "ignorar-capitalizacion" but I think it's just a barbarism.

Ber ber ber ber ber ber ber ber

[-] Rom@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

Also why did they use Arabic script for the Arabic but not hiragana/kanji for the Japanese?

[-] sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 1 year ago

Just curious, what would be a correct translation?

[-] nobloat@lemmy.ml 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's somewhat difficult to translate, because Arabic doesn't have the concept of case in letters. Usually you can use "حروف صغيرة” or ”حروف كبيرة" which literally translates as "small letters" and "big letters" when referencing other languages. For the general "letter case" you can use "حالة الأحرف". So it'll be something like : تجاهل حالة الأحرف.

So here you substitute الرسالة for the correct word الأحرف to mean "letters"

[-] Skwerls@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 year ago

Dumb question but your comment got this into my head: in your response, since it's mostly English and LTR, are the Arabic words in your response read right to left?

[-] nobloat@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

Yes it's always read right to left, which can be confusing when you combine English and Arabic. When you reach the Arabic word or sentence you jump to its beginning which is the first Arabic letter to the right, read it from there to the left, and then continue to the next English word when you're done.

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 107 points 1 year ago

grep --groß--und-kleinschreibung-der-buchstaben-ignorieren

[-] yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 43 points 1 year ago

grep --Groß--und-Kleinschreibung-der-Buchstaben-ignorieren

[-] Spore@lemmy.ml 67 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This reminds me of a similar experience.

The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let's not talk about it) have its CLI --help message machine translated in some languages.
That's already evil enough, but the real problem is that they've blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command's flag names.

So if you're Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what's the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I've said it's machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that "--分布" is actually "--distribution"? It's "发行版" in Chinese and "ディストリビューション" in Japanese.

At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes "translated" is worse than raw text in its original language.

Related links if you like to see people suffer:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4111

PS: for the original post, my stance is "please don't make your software interface different for different languages". It's the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people's commands different.
It's the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a "translation" subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts them to the user's language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.

[-] hstde@feddit.de 56 points 1 year ago

Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn't recognize the English version when your language isn't set to English.

[-] new_guy@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

God. Damnit.

This is so bullshit that EVERY major datasheet application works the same way. Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc...

All of them have their functions translated and it makes me have to search for tables of equivalency between them. Fuck that.

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[-] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 year ago

Oh god the fucking Excel formulas.

I live in Quebec, and all the excels are in French.

[-] barubary@infosec.exchange 15 points 1 year ago

@hstde @Spore Even better, the alphabetical index of function names was generated in English first and then translated, meaning the documentation looks like a scrambled mess in any other language because it is alphabetized according to what the English equivalent would be. #excel

[-] Nahdahar@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

I've learned excel in middle and high school in my native language, I absolutely fucking hate the translations... excel-translator.de coming in clutch.

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[-] clearleaf@lemmy.world 62 points 1 year ago
[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

tar --extrahieren --volle-ausgabe --gezippt --folgende-datei

[-] geizeskrank@feddit.de 34 points 1 year ago

tar --auspacken --volle-ausgabe --reissverschlussverschlossen --folgende-datei

[-] 7heo@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
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[-] nxdefiant@startrek.website 24 points 1 year ago

you have concisely convinced me how terrible an idea this is.

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Hungary presents: grep --kis--és-nagybetűk-figyelmen-kívül-hagyása

Yeah that is a resounding no. PS: I am not exaggerating. That is the first translation that came into mind

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[-] hackris@lemmy.ml 55 points 1 year ago

This looks like the final layer of hell. Your coworker writes their scripts in another language and now you have to decipher what the hell they mean. Who has a problem woth English for development tools, etc.? It's really not a monumental task to learn it, and I'm not even a native speaker.

[-] Knusper@feddit.de 25 points 1 year ago

May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?

One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn't work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.

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[-] ToxicWaste@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago

Even if everyone is using English, there will be cultural differences. I used to work at a company which had a lot of indian externals working on their code base. Whenever I had to work on a mainly Indian developed project i had to get used to how they wrote things. Usually things where named a bit different. Not by much, but enough tho throw me off a couple of times before i got used to it.

IMPORTANT: I am not shitting on how they used English, merely pointing out that they used it differently from how i would have expected.

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[-] darkpanda@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 year ago

To be fair, sometimes I look at my own code and think it was done in another language, and I only know English.

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[-] emma@programming.dev 44 points 1 year ago

I don't get it. Is the joke that i18n for CLIs is unimportant? Or is this an earnest post that just so happened to get posted under humor? I wish I had the source for the image.

[-] sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.org 64 points 1 year ago

The joke is that it's hard to tell if this is a joke because the lines between good intentions, corporate jargon, and feasibility have been blurred beyond recognition both here and in the real world.

It's also funny that after all these years, i18n is still a mess. Moreover, even if translations are standard in GUIs and documentation, for some reason, everyone is okay with defaulting to English for the oldest form of computer interaction.

Also, the joke is whatever you want it to be. Follow your dreams.

[-] huf@hexbear.net 35 points 1 year ago

that's because as a non-english native, it's WAY easier to have the whole computer in english. obscuring options and error messages (by translating them) makes it much harder to fix problems.

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[-] centopus@kbin.social 33 points 1 year ago

o.O And I thought translated errors without error codes were the worst cancer in IT world, now you created an IT covid.

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago

I have to use a German API with weird halftranslations and ultra long names, due to bad model generation. Something like getPersonAntragsPersonAdressDetailEintragList().

Unfortunately, it makes sense, since many of the terms have a very precise legal meaning and can't be unambiguously translated.

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[-] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The future of the past issues MS had with this shit? Oh, right, programmerhumor.

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[-] denast@lemm.ee 27 points 1 year ago

Ah yes can't wait to switch keyboard layout mid-command every time, so nice!

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

Too half-arsed.

For one, grep isn't translated. But more importantly, you have to use the english --use-locale-option to set it. Pah!

Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:

  • 大文字と小文字を無視する
  • だいもんじとこもじをむしする

Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That's the sanest suggestion (who's with me?):

  • ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル

Of course, you're kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don't generally render unicode...so let's go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.

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[-] Malgas@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

Why is the third one not:

--大文字-と-小文字-を-無視する

?

[-] lukini@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

Because they didn't think it out fully lol

There shouldn't even be dashes imo since they replace spaces and Japanese doesn't use spaces.

[-] Templa@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

This might be an old April first joke because I couldn't find anything about it lol

[-] Taringano@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago

Really ducking hope so. I hate translated software to my native language.

My blood boiled there. Like excel that has functions in all languages. Completely insane.

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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
444 points (95.1% liked)

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