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Since translation is given less and less thought, the underlying system is also becoming more basic and less context-aware.

I don't remember exact occurrences but I've noticed quite a few similar problems on macOS that are just the result of words being translated out of context.

On a popular forum software I used to do support for, "flag" (for moderation) was translated in French as "drapeau" for example. Which is technically correct I suppose, drapeau does mean flag, but the wavy kind of flag that countries like to use as symbols. Nothing else. And it's not a verb.

In this case, there is simply the string "zip" somewhere that is used both in some address forms and for the file type, and the translator just happened to translate the first occurrence probably without even knowing that is was also used in another context as well. Or without any means to ask the dev team to separate them into two terms. Which might not even be possible if they used too simplistic a translation system.



I want to share this gem of a screenshot I took on the Belgian Amazon (Amazon.com.be) settings page a few weeks back:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/323831494718128130/...

This is French, English, German and JavaScript all in one sentence.

Two trillion dollar company.


Other localizations of Amazon are just as hilarious. And to understand the product listings, you have to know (pretty complete) English, because the translations only make any sense if you know the English description and can reverse the translation in your head back to English.

So, you have to understand 2 languages to understand these listings.


The programmers and the translators are different people who have probably never met eachother.

Translators usually just get to see the string they are translatinbg, and if they're lucky a 1 sentence explanation written by a programmer.

With no context, a "Zip file" might indeed mean a "postcode file" - perhaps it is a file for storing all the zip codes, and now it will be used for storing all the postcodes?


I’ve drapeaued this comment to favorites :)


J’ai drapeaué


To be fair, translation systems genuinely are a pain, and it's easy to make a mistake either as a developer or as a translator who has thousands of strings to translate.

It doesn't help that a lot of developers probably never translated an application; when I added translations the first thing I did was translate it myself, but that's not really feasible for larger systems and/or with people who don't speak a second language well enough to actually do translations.


> that is used both in some address forms and for the file type

Oh yes, the classic "I just picked the string from my IDE's dropdown list, it was there so it's fine right?"




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