Localizing English error messages makes it slightly harder to search for solutions online.

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• rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Fairly obvious if you grew up in a non-anglophone country. It’s part of the reason why certain kinds of people set their machines to English even if everything is localized well.

  Makes me wonder what kind of device you’re using in the shower, though.

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  • dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Let’s not kid ourselves. Most localization in software is trash because technocrats refuse to pay actual translators. Part of the reason I have involved myself in FOSS localization efforts is because it is extremely obvious it is either being done by amateurs who don’t speak the language, or using machine translation (AI or otherwise) that never gets the context right. Most people doing quality localization are scattered thin and the only ones paying good money for quality localization (FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.

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    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I suppose I’m relatively spoiled as a German.

      FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.

      I do remember setting my webbrowser to English to avoid YouTube’s absurd automatic title translations, and that was before the LLM hype …

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    • Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Or the software is so shitty that you cannot get translations correct because they assumed every language in the world works like English.

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  • YICHM@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    A water multiplexer (faucet) and a water demultiplexer (showerhead).

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  • MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    A good rule of thumb is to set each machine/website to its original language (English in most cases). Because when you set your devices to english then sites and apps will also try to change to english and that usually sucks for government websites for example.

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  • Strider@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Also gaming, mmorpg, I concur

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    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Oh yeah. It sucks trying to search for tips, solutions etc. when you only know the localized terms, and it’s rare that help resources in different languages are even somewhat useful.

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• joyjoy@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This is why error codes exist. Localize the message all you want, but keep the error code or id.

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  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Well codes are very simplified and not able to depict the extent of all messages

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    • Ephera@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah, most errors occur somewhere in a library that you use (because libraries typically do the actual heavy lifting) and in the vast majority of cases, it will give you a (English) string describing what went wrong.

      If you can just slap that string into the final error message (or at least into logging), that is so much easier and more helpful than pretending you could possibly assign an error code to each such error case.

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• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This was the main reason, why I moved 99% of my apps to English. Even worse is when they take liberties with the translation.

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• Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  A fair amount of zhongguoren on here

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  • YICHM@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    1. it’s interesting that, for me, “中國人” is easier to read than "zhongguoren"
    2. from the use of traditional glyphs, you can assume that i don’t live in the PRC
    3. you are technically correct. see also: Republic of China.

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    • Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I mean, officially the Republic of China is still China and the people there can be described as Chinese. It’s just not controlled by the communists. So I’m not wrong (assuming you’re taiwanese). I couldn’t tell if the screenshot was Traditional or Simplified. Ironically, the only character I know to look for in order to tell the difference is 国/國

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