

Translating technological terms throws up some peculiar challenges - brendannee
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21620221-translating-technological-terms-throws-up-some-peculiar-challenges-cookies-caches-and-cows

======
slashnull
A few hopefully relevant thoughts about translating docs

1) translating a piece of english UI will almost double the length of it.
That's annoying.

2) documentation is hard to write and to maintain, and sometimes it's hard to
read and use documentation. Creating multilingual documentation is even
harder, and it's nearly impossible to have an entire coverage of the docs in
all languages, which leads to incomplete or outdated/incorrect documentation -
which, as the saying goes, is worse than none. Multilingual software
inevitably makes the documentation situation of a software worse. Trying to
apply language A docs to a language B interface is hell.

3) documentation alone isn't part of the story; forum threads, answered
support questions and that kind of discussion-style paradocumentation is
ranges in importance from helpful to just full-on essential and that kind of
stuff is never _really_ translated. Trying to get help from a mostly english
community for a software translated is hell.

4) The sublanguage used in a given UI isn't written in a given tongue; really,
it's written in a pidgin made of the original language of the application
_plus_ the slang of the domain of the application, which is usually tied to
one, say, culture or spoken language in particular; very large software also
typically creates its own sub-language, which separates itself from actual
tongue the UI could say to have been written in. After all, any description of
a what a software does, expressed in a language evolved for the interaction of
human beings in the real, material world, _must_ be a vague and fragile
metaphor. Translating metaphors is nearly impossible. It's hell. It's poetry,
but when poetry is not the goal, it's hell.

That also means that to read the documentation and UI of an application
amounts to learning the sublanguage of that application, which as I explained
is different from the actual human language it was written in. I can
understand that "save" means "serialize the relevant subset of the application
state to a file" without knowing anything about the "dictionary" meaning of
the English word "save". It's not the same thing. "Save" could be replaced by
"blub" as far as I'm concerned, but it's convenient for people who speak
english to associate "serialize" to the concept of preserving, of keeping. But
it's not as important as the consistency of the language developed to describe
the concepts and operations of that application. A single "blub" is better
than "Save" _and_ "Sauvegarder". Duplicating the pidgin a software develops
for itself makes using that software a special kind of hell.

Conclusion: it's easy to end up in situations where I have to use french
software here in Quebec. Most of my friends have laptops and phones with
french UIs. It makes using them a pain in the ass.

I absolutely, deeply despise translated UIs; translating a UI is almost
systematically a counter-productive activity. It's hell.

------
Mithaldu
While i appreciate that they're trying to do good, for people interested in
communicating with people from other cultures translated technological terms
have always been a massive bane. I live in germany and while germans generally
have little patriotism they're fierce defenders of their language, which led
to all sorts of domain-specific terms being translated across many different
kinds of media. Be it movies, books, technical manuals, programming
instructions.

And for all of them it's a common theme that someone who believes they know a
thing, might even consider themselves an expert, they have trouble then
branching out of their linguistic bubble. When talking to experts in their
domain, from another language, they suddenly cannot communicate anymore, even
if they speak the other language fluently, as they need to learn an entirely
new vocabulary just for basic interaction.

And this is not just a theoretical situation. I've had problems when talking
about books i read in my youth, because often important words or even names
had been changed and the person i was talking with knew the same characters,
concepts or ideas i knew but neither of us knew under what names the other
knew them. I learned Perl on the internet, on my own, using exclusively the
english source documents; when talking to german Perl programmers i've
repeatedly had issues because they had learned it in german courses which used
german CS terms. Instead of actually discussing business we spent half the
time sorting out what to call a thing. I also translated MMO content
professionally for a while. While our translations were great and allowed the
germans a perfectly fluid native experience, we found that many germans tended
to switch the game to english after a while, because they couldn't talk to
other players since the item names, skill names and location names were all
different.

There are some situations where it's fine to use a translated term. Example:
Mouse. In german the word is written Maus and pronounced identically. In such
a situation where the difference is minimal, a translatio can be fine.

However in all other situation i believe translation of domain-specific words
does damage in the long term.

~~~
Dewie
> I live in germany and while germans generally have little patriotism they're
> fierce defenders of their language, which led to all sorts of domain-
> specific terms being translated across many different kinds of media. Be it
> movies, books, technical manuals, programming instructions.

I wish this was more of a thing in my culture.

~~~
namenotrequired
I'm curious, why?

~~~
Dewie
Because this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374821)

And I think it's just silly to say things like "snowboard" outside of English,
instead of just translating it. It's just "snow" and "board", that can be
easily and seamlessly be translated. But where I'm from, people are too lazy
for that/don't care.

------
chroma
It's an interesting article and I can certainly get behind the sentiment of
making software more accessible to non-english speakers. That said, if another
language already has a word with the desired meaning, why not use it instead
of inventing a new one?

This is a two-way street. Much of the english vocabulary comes from other
languages: trek, pundit, taboo, gauntlet, moped, etc. And many languages use
english loanwords for technical terms. Just try translating "internet" to
other languages. Even Japanese is "インターネット" (intaanetto)[1].

1\.
[https://translate.google.com/#en/ja/internet](https://translate.google.com/#en/ja/internet)

~~~
Dewie
> That said, if another language already has a word with the desired meaning,
> why not use it instead of inventing a new one?

To maintain consistency? I think there is value trying to keep a language
somewhat internally consistent. I'm guessing that it makes the language easier
to learn, at least in the future - less loanwords (or bastardized loanwords)
might for example mean less grammatical exceptions.

Of course, it's not like one has to come up with a completely unique word for
something, to make it _not-like_ English. But one might want to adapt it to
the language by for example translating the words that went into it (like
"mouse" as in "computer mouse").

> This is a two-way street. Much of the english vocabulary comes from other
> languages:

English is also kind of a nightmare when it comes to phonetics, which last I
read was due to all the different major languages that has been influenced by.
But I guess it wouldn't be a problem if the spelling of the language was more
consistent, and originally foreign words can be Anglicised to fit in, so I
guess that isn't a problem because of old loanwords, really.

------
teddyh
> _“windows” became “eyes”._

That is quite possibly because the word “window” literally is “wind-ow” or
“wind-eye” — i.e. an eye, or opening, for the wind to blow through, which it
did before windows had glass, and instead had shutters, like eyelids.

------
Yardlink
There's an obvious bias here. The piece ends with "localisation may keep small
languages alive". Isn't that adding to the problem? We don't try to keep small
programming languages alive (except a few diehards). Many small languages are
the problem itself. They're not something to aim for.

I should add that I'm not complaining about making phones more accessible to
more people. That's absolutely great. But why try to go further and use it as
an excuse to drag out languages that the world would be better off without?

~~~
Dewie
> There's an obvious bias here.

It's good that this was posted to a programming community, then. So that it
can balance that bias out with its own "less languages are good because it is
more immediately practical, who needs multiple languages anyway?"-bias.

------
pacaro
I'm amused that the article fails to note that as of 2012 Windows was
available in 109 languages[1]...

[1]
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/terminology/archive/2012/02/21/14...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/terminology/archive/2012/02/21/14-new-
languages-announced-for-windows-8.aspx)

------
brendannee
It would be interesting to review the full list of creative translations:

“Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying)

“timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away)

“Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is
wrongly woven.

~~~
jkaunisv1
I was curious why they translated "aspect ratio" the way they did. To me
translating something like "crash" into a cow falling over makes sense because
"crash" is used in an idiosyncratic way there.

But "aspect ratio" is straightforward and not idiosyncratic. It's the ratio of
the screen height to width. Surely the target language has some words for
describing the scale of things or ratios or some similar concept?

~~~
kapnobatairza
I think that it is the context of how the term is mostly used that resulted in
the change:

Think about an aspect ratio button on your TV remote. You use that to
"correct" the aspect ratio of the content for your screen. In this context of
correcting aspect ratio, a wrongly woven net makes sense.

~~~
jkaunisv1
I guess I have to take your word on that one. I haven't used a TV remote in
years and I've never had to correct the aspect ratio.

------
mwcampbell
Maybe the translators' jobs would be easier if we avoided jargon in our user
interfaces. Are there any jargon words or phrases that are common in UIs that
we could do just as well without?

~~~
gdwatson
Was it Joel who wrote a piece on the old Windows wizard for indexing a help
file? It asked a question in a jargon-free way, with the result that neither
the novice nor the expert understood what it was asking. In that case the
clear solution was to stop asking the question, and later versions of Windows
did so. When communicating information it's important to give enough detail to
act on it; otherwise why bring it up?

