Re:A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
by TeMPOraL on Thursday January 15, 2015 @10:56AM
(#8893154)
I can totally imagine that. Recently I've been helping a guy with tweaking his integrated car navigation/radio/media player and I spent some time browsing through its firmware and file system. I saw the translation strings and man, they were horrible. Also half of the stuff wasn't even translated (though it didn't show anywhere on the UI).
BTW. half of the files and directories were named in Chinese which made my work very "fun", but that's another story...
Re:A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
by julenx on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:59AM
(#8897703)
> Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space.
As a rule of thumb, if you're using English strings to design your UI, you should account for 30% more space so other languages can fit in. Of course, sometimes this might not be enough.
Re:A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen to You
by bcbrown on Thursday January 15, 2015 @12:57PM
(#8894111)
I worked for a place that used German as the "placeholder text", to avoid the problem of text longer than the allotted space. German is supposedly about 1.5 times as long as English, so if you can fit the German version, you won't have any problems with other translations being longer than the space.
I kid you not, the way we translate is to use Google translate as a first pass and then the screens get reviewed by people who know the language. I guess somethings slip through and we evidently pissed off a lot of Chinese folks because of a similar flub. The folks doing the first pass don't know any other languages.
It's quite comical but also a real pain. One of the things I had to work into our code was the left-to-right vs. the right-to-left; you would think it would be just a C-style string but we have to know for text justification semantics.
I don't actually do translations but work on the HMI where the text is displayed. Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space.