Even relatively obscure languages like Dutch where they usually just watch English-language movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY
They brought in Eugenio Derbez, a Mexican comedian, to voice Donkey (voiced in English by Eddie Murphy). Donkey in particular speaks in colloquialisms and pop culture references with wordplay, so Derbez wrote a bunch of new lines and jokes that referenced Latin American colloquialisms and pop culture.
Children learn different fairy tales in different countries, so they also managed to change the identity of some of the characters without changing their appearances (and without altering video at all, just audio).
I just have to ask: How do you know this?
EDIT: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0220240/otherworks: "Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dreamworks allowed [Eugenio Derbez] not only to dub Donkey's voice, but to translate and adapt the script of "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" to make it more appealing to Latin America"
I also remember that the Gingerbread Man was one of the characters who was altered, but I don't remember the name of the Latin American replacement.
What was relocalized was the Muffin Man nursery rhyme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muffin_Man), which was substituted by Pinpon's ronda song:
Pinpon is a puppet very handsome and made out of cardboard. He washes his little face with soap and water. He untangles his hair with an ivory comb. And in spite of the hair pulling he cries not nor even winces.
I don't watch this type of movies often so I tend to bundle them together into "Pixareque" category in my mind ;).
In software, this would translate to localization coders being able to (and having the talent to) rewrite the entire frontend logic. And if your software product is going to make multi-millions in new markets by virtue of feeling like it's translated natively, it might be worth retaining native-speaker coder(s) to maintain a branch that parallels (and consistently merges in) your master branch, and rewrites display logic as it comes in. I'd imagine the Googles of the world do exactly this.
Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa also plays the lead in the Broadway musical Wicked. Several translations of Frozen use an actress for Elsa who played the lead in a localized version of Wicked.
We literally had to re-render the entire movie for each translation. Disney Animation takes these translations very seriously :-)
High-end kids movies are usually localized carefully, including songs, etc (there's a YT video with snippets of all the versions)
And of course they don't split the movie into phrases and make them translate one by one
This is what makes me use SW and equipment only in English.
Translations are pretty much useless (and of course, Googling the English error messages usually gives the best results)
However, for a lot of modern tools that isn't the case. Often a translated tool is an order of magnitude less usable because of broken translations and inability to Google things.
It's also infurating that lots of tools look at your Windows location when deciding your language. No, I don't want your broken native translation on my English Windows installation, just because I do like to still have € in front of my currency.
Netflix search box is the same way. This is in addition to the discriminatory practice of often not providing subtitles in the language of the audio track.
Chrome also would install in the geo IP language, regardless of system settings. How arrogant is that? They deliberately disregard your OS language settings and pick another for you. And, it'd force the default Google search to go to the localized version until it detected a few location. Which, in Denver has had me appear in France then Hungary, as their database somehow accumulates errors. And again, no way to fully opt out- even selecting English and .com would still show country specific logos and such on eg YouTube.
Xbox is also a mess. You can buy games that are country restricted, with zero warning. When downloading, the Xbox provides no indication of a problem until it finishes. Then it does a geo check and reports "download corrupted". Xbox support wanted to RMA the unit, as they were convinced this was a hardware issue and had no KB info on country restrictions. Using a VPN fixed it.
Basically it seems that many developers are brain dead or simply do not care about travelers, expats, or anyone with different language prefs.
Sort of. Almost all the issues I have with translators and context come from the same word being used for different things. This is particularly true for words like "date" and "time", which can have different translations depending on context (is it the time of day, or the time the test has been running?)
So as well as using the same word for the same meaning throughout, using different words for similar-yet-subtly-distinct meanings is also required.
And I really don't see how having a similar rule for translations of text in software would eliminate most "context missing" problems. It seems what it would actually do is stop translators even guessing those missing contexts.
Well, because for one translations would at least be consistent. In software words have often specific meaning related to the application itself. You're not free to translate the word "like" on Facebook however you like because it has its own, specific meaning that is different from the dictionary one. The same applies to things like tools in Photoshop, etc. In general, wrong use of synonyms for things that have application-specific meaning is one of the most common problems with translations I see (and the same happens in official movie translations).
When you don't have (or can't be bothered to get) context, this is the least you can do to play safe.
I dealt with word order issues by avoiding formatted strings with more than one replacement field. Only one string needs to deal with singular vs plural quantities.
Lack of context was a definite problem with the machine translations. It would inconsistently choose translated words that should have been the same because the short string snippets could not be evaluated for their meaning within the narrow domain of the program using them.
printf (_("You should use the '%s' keyword"), "new");
Anyway, what you wrote is exactly why I stick to using all software and webservices - OS, text editors, Facebook, et al. - in en_US instead of my native pl_PL. Because translations are always crappy - even for big players. Lack of context is the key here - translated text often feels out of place, because there usually is some overarching idea behind them that isn't communicated to translators. Then there is lack of consistency. Words in original text often have some site-specific meaning, which tends to also be somehow lost in the translation process. For example, on Facebook the word "like" talks about a well-defined thing, not about the dictionary meaning, so it's totally not ok to randomly replace it with synonyms during translation [0].
I realized at some point that I often look at a crapy translation, guess what was the English original, and then in my mind translate to what it should be in the first place. Because for some strange reason I, the user, have the context, and the paid translation team has not. I guess I'm going to put that into my "Translation issues" file in the "Mysteries of capitalism" drawer, right next to "how on Earth multi-milion media companies can't do a movie translation that isn't a total crap" file. I mean, seriously, you're better off looking for pirated subtitles even if you bought the original because pirates at least seem to have watched the movie they're translating.
</rant>
[0] - I wish more translators would use the approach Jehovah's Witnesses used when doing their own Bible translation. Since it was designed to be studied and analyzed, they preferred accuracy over aesthetics - therefore one of the translation rules was "as much as possible, let's have any given word in original text be always represented by the same word in English". Adhering to that single rule would eliminate like half of the "context missing" problems with software translations.