Comment by xeeeeeeeeeeenu
6 years ago
Their half-translated UI (my browser is set to polish) is extremely off-putting.
So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide much better UX to international users.
BTW, Microsoft with their automatically translated MSDN docs is by far the worst offender in this area.
That's the case because you speak English. Think about the last time you had to navigate a website in a language you didn't speak (in my case e.g. Chinese or Russian). I remember being very happy with a few (incomplete) clues in English about were to look and what to expect.
By all means, advocate for making it easy to change the language back to the original. But this stance will decrease accessibility.
In case of technical websites, you have to know English anyway, because even if there is a broken translation of the documentation, function names, enums and all the cool stuff remains in the original language anyway.
> you have to know English anyway
You don't, plenty of developers are getting around having to know English as there are other resources for learning.
I think it's a dangerous assumption that everyone knows English. It's especially true in the Spanish-speaking world, where I know developers who can't have a conversation in English but are good enough to be employable.
I would rather just use google translate to do it automatically on the entire page, and yes I do that quite regularly from German.
Especially when you never see the subject matter translated anyway, which would be the case with Git. There aren’t any conventional translations of words like “repo” or “pull request” in most languages, and when you try you risk making it incomprehensible, or comical.
For example, take their Swedish translation of “pull request”: “Pull-förfrågning”. They had to leave “pull” untranslated, probably because it would be impossible to understand if you actually were to translate it word by word; unfortunately “pulla” is a sexual slang word in Swedish [1], so the whole translation sounds like a request for sexual assistance.
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pulla#Swedish
Eh, "pulla" is not the correct Swedish translation for "pull". It would be "dra" or "rycka". There is a GitHub repository where bunch of Swedish developers have tried to translate the entire git vocabulary into Swedish, you can see it here: https://github.com/bjorne/git-pa-svenska
Table shows that "pull" is usually referred to as "pulla" but the suggestion is to change it to "rycka". If you do know Swedish, there is a discussion about the naming of "pull" here: https://github.com/bjorne/git-pa-svenska/issues/30
I think it very much depends on the the country.
In Sweden, you can assume that pretty much everyone understands English, so if your website has an incomplete Swedish translation, might just be better to go with English one anyways.
But in Spain (outside the big cities), not that many people do understand English. In that case, it'll be better to serve a incomplete Spanish version instead of in English, as otherwise they'll be completely lost.
So as always, I'd say it really depends, and it's hard to generalize over all "international users".
I think the important question is about the target audience of this site: how many of each language's programmers know no English?
I'm a native English speaker, so I don't know.
French here. I know lots of developers who don't speak English well. They know specific words that are used in language constructs (while, function, class) or usual software vocabulary (provider, database) but they lack the rest: the grammar, non technical vocabulary, everything.
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> So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide much better UX to international users.
Good to know
Personally, I kind of like the balance of gogs/gitea on that subject.
You can switch language quite easily using the menu in the bottom center/right.
Also, in a self hosted context you can disable/enable languages in the configuration file easily.
Also, if you find the translation really bad (I think in most cases, the default translation is from MS automatic translation), you cam easily contribute to it:
-> https://crowdin.com/project/gitea
I personally contributed to the French translation a few years ago, which was really bad in Gogs at the time, specially with some over translation of technical terms such as "git commit" which was translated to "git commission" (a bit weird and laughable since "faire une commission" can be a weird formal way to say "pooping" in some contexts).
I took me a few hours to go through a few of the message strings and propose an hopefully better translation. It's quite easy to contribute to the project in this manner, far easier than contributing code.
Lastly keep in mind that gogs was created by a Chinese developer, and I'm half expecting that Chinese developers are not as fluent in English as developers from India or Europe. In this context, pushing for an internationalized service is a good call vs an English only UI.
Localization is a difficult problem no one has solved yet. If you find a solution please write about it.
Not translating isn't really a solution.
Wanting everything to be 100% translated is also unrealistic.
When the audience is programmers or generally tech people, not translating from English might indeed be the best option. The lingua franca of technology is English.
E.g. looking at the quality of Microsoft's German translations (which seem to be done by a poorly trained bot), the translation is actually counterproductive, because it's full of special terms translated into German that either would not be translated from English in a "native" German text, or where a different translation is commonly used.
My favourite is the Visual Studio translation for Link-Time Code-Generation. Which is translated as "Link-Zeitcode Generierung" which in English means "Link Timecode Generation".
It is a tough one and yes, here in Germany I would expect far most developers to understand enough English to use English tools and documentation. (Exceptions exist, notably with old technology like Mainframes)
In other countries like Russia or Japan I noticed, as an outside observer, more reliance on translations.
When translating a complication is the degree to which one does it. There are terms which can be translated and some where it becomes weird. In some parallel comment "pull request" was mentioned. Translating that certainly becomes weird, but translating "file" as "Datei" is well established and - when translating - expected.
Even not great translation helps younger wanna be programmers. They have better chance to learn. It takes quite a lot of time to learn English well enough to understand documentation.
How can you say that localization is a difficult problem that no one has solved yet. i18n is the case for as long as I’ve been writing software, and probably longer. So minimum 20 years.
I do agree that it’s not a walk in the park because it takes loads of resources to provide actual translations and one has to make i18n a feature in the code. But... come on. phpMyAdmin was doing this in 2004.
Even in the 1980ies Microsoft employed linguists for translating terms like "scroll bar" into different languages.
However finding the right translation level in technical context is hard. For which concepts should one translate the name and which terms should one borrow the English term? The French translate "computer" as "ordinateur", the German "Rechner"/"Rechenmaschine" however is outdated.
Now what about a git repository clone and commit? How much translation will destroy understanding?
You're unfortunately still stuck in thinking you can just take a string and make it another string and boom you have i18n.
Unfortunately that's misunderstanding that fundamentally language relies on way more context than just strings to get the same message across.
You can't just simply translate and have a good UX for other languages.
So far I haven't had any issues, and I am an English-speaker.