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Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related to technical documentation, error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.

Sometimes when not working on my own machines at a client the locale is set to a language other than English and some Java frameworks such as Hibernate then will dutifully print out error messages in that language.

This is next to useless. At a time when you still had nothing but a printed manual in your local language to go on this might have made some sense but nowadays people research error messages on the internet. Searching for some arcane ORM framework error message in a language other than English is a futile endeavour.

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Oracle does this too. The best part is that this is all set during installation, there's no way to change it afterwards.

It's really great trying to figure out an error that's written in Norwegian, when you're not the least bit familiar in that language.

Most of the errors do have codes though, and just Googling that will get you started at least.

You can install a new language easily by using the -addLangs parameter of the installer (on an existing install) or by copying the msg/msb files from another install (matching versions). After that you have to change the NLS settings of the DB and it will switch to the new language.

Sounds as easy as hitting yourself with a medium sized hammer :)

That's not entirely true. You can "change" the charset from 1 type to another... The problem with that is fields may extend past the max length of that field when converting from 1 to the other.

Source: me. I had to help someone with specifically this when they set the wrong charset on their DB. Had these problems.

The most fun I had was investigating some bug reports with .NET Exceptions in Japanese. Thankfully, there was enough of context in the rest of the logs to get to the bottom of things, but having to rely on machine translations for debugging would have been... fun.

Some programs work around this by prepending a global error ID to the localized, such as "E300: Ascorbic Acid Error", but this is harder to manage on the development side.

spaCy doesn't localize errors, but it does do a beautiful job of managing that kind of error codes.

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/master/spacy/errors....

> error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.

Ah, I remember MS Combat Flight Simulator 2. Translated to Spanish (or maybe automatically using local system files?) without bothering the check the text fit the allotted fields, which meant you could not read most things at all. Impressive QA, Microsoft! ;)

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