• PixxlMan@lemmy.world
    1904·
    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.

  • nobloat@lemmy.mlEnglish
    114·
    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
      48·
      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.

      • nobloat@lemmy.mlEnglish
        34·
        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·
          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.mlEnglish
            11·
            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.

            • Natanael@slrpnk.net
              7·
              1 year ago

              Also this is why unicode has codepoints signifying where to switch between right to left and left to right writing, so that letters can be correctly written “forwards” in the underlying file format (first letter written first) for both writing systems and also rendered correctly for both writing systems on display

  • Spore@lemmy.ml
    64·
    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
      55·
      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·
        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.

      • Kalamata Hari@infosec.exchange
        14·
        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

      • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
        7·
        1 year ago

        Just wait until you’re working with different time/date formats, like, god forbid, sharing such documents to someone who has their Windows time/date format set differently than you have.

      • Matth78@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        So true… Not only sometimes it makes it hard to find the translated function name (especially since they are adding a lot of new functions) but there are quite often longer… For instance in French you go to a simple ifs to si.conditions…

    • Natanael@slrpnk.net
      5·
      1 year ago

      The Microsoft Office installer has translated “Office downloads” (as in office is downloading now) to the plural form in Swedish, so it reads grammatically incorrectly as if there’s multiple downloads going on. Very professional, lmao

  • Ludwig van BeethovenEnglish
    57·
    1 year ago

    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

  • hackris@lemmy.ml
    551·
    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
      24·
      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.

      • hackris@lemmy.ml
        92·
        1 year ago

        Yep, this sort of behaviour translates to Windows paths also. Why would they name a directory “C:\Users\Example\Desktop”, when they can replace “Desktop” with a locale-specific name, which is not just a link to “Desktop”, but a completely different directory which breaks any scripts expecting “Desktop”.

        We know MS well, their choice is clear :)

        • PixxlMan@lemmy.world
          61·
          1 year ago

          It’s just… Why?

          Was there a thought process applied here at all? Worse still is that many of these localised paths are actually lies. They still use the original developer version in order to not break compatibility with programs, but refuse to admit it in the explorer. It’s maddening.

          • hackris@lemmy.ml
            4·
            1 year ago

            Yep, and when you try to troubleshoot shit, it all falls apart and you can’t really tell what’s going on under the hood…

      • fibojoly
        5·
        1 year ago

        FUCK whoever thought translating Excel formulas was a good idea. It is the most infuriating shit. Everything I learnt in English is now useless, without googling every fucking function every single time. Fucking idiots.

    • darkpanda@lemmy.ca
      15·
      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.

    • ToxicWaste@lemm.ee
      15·
      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.

      • hackris@lemmy.ml
        7·
        1 year ago

        In this case they were still using English, with minor differences. Imagine one of the Indian externals writing an internal script that utilizes the Indian localisation. You’d have to whip out a translator or dive into the docs for a tool which you may have already used countless times and know how it works when instead, they could have simply learned the English arguments for the tool.

        Nothing against people not being native speakers of English, I’m not one either. I just think that this creates more problems than it solves.

        • ToxicWaste@lemm.ee
          4·
          1 year ago

          I agree with you, that even the devil would run away from localised scripts.

          Just pointing out that even if everyone is using English, there will be differences. These differences can make it hard enough - no need for more stuff on top.

    • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
      93·
      1 year ago

      Wouldn’t it be easy to convert the code to any language if this was the case though? Any human-language programming is already an abstraction, so why can’t a programming language be abstracted to more than one human language? Literally just swap the command words out for words in the other language, seems like something modern IDEs can trivially do if a language like that existed.

      Also, non-English speaking countries exist. Some have actually developed programming languages in their own language so the idea of non-English programming isn’t exactly unheard of. There is no reason that code that won’t be edited by English speakers should always be written in English, it’s not like it’s the one perfect human language for interfacing with computers or anything. So I suspect that should this become a reality, you wouldn’t even notice anything’s changed unless you live in a non-English speaking country. Either way your company can still always just require code to be in English, the same way companies have requirements for formatting and software design philosophies.

      • TangledHyphae@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Not particularly, because compilers rely on very explicit syntax to parse. And languages are all structured very differently grammatically speaking.

  • Emma @programming.dev
    40·
    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.orgOP
      622·
      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.

  • centopus@kbin.social
    331·
    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.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
      15·
      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.

      • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
        17·
        1 year ago

        Critical security hole a few months before was due to localized variables. And again and again in the past. Aside from countless other issues with batch and powershell scripts because of localized variables.

  • denast@lemm.ee
    26·
    1 year ago

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

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
    21·
    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!

    • nxdefiant@startrek.website
      19·
      1 year ago

      we should all standardize on Esperanto. Not because it is good, but because regardless of which language you know, Esperanto is the last choice, and thus the only equal choice.