News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What they don’t tell you when you translate your app. Parent comment

Re:What they don’t tell you when you translate your app by Galanwe on Thursday September 09, 2021 @08:54PM (#28476573)
French here, I do the same, French translation are unbearable.

Not only will there be tons of small mistakes with nouns/verbs as you mentioned, but maybe worst, there is often "overtranslation".

Some words are well established as technical jargon in English, and should _not_ be translated.

- "cloud" -> "infonuagique"

- "email" -> "courriel"

- "freeware" -> "gatuiciel"

...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What they don’t tell you when you translate your app by franky47 on Friday September 10, 2021 @04:04AM (#28478897)
While I agree that we (fellow Frenchman here) tend to overtranslate, some of our portmanteaus are kind of clever.

My personal favourite is illectronisme, a combination of illettrisme (illiteracy) and électronique (electronic), to refer to people who are not good with computers.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What they don’t tell you when you translate your app by zapzupnz on Friday September 10, 2021 @07:22AM (#28479984)
My favourite is autof = selfie. It’s auto-photo, but if you pronounce it, it’s photo said backwards — because you use the hold the camera backwards or use the front-facing camera.
[ Parent | on HN ]