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Comment by lkozma | Hacker News Reader

Relatedly, there was an unintentionally funny translation of Gmail in Hungarian, where it was supposed to say "You have no conversations in Trash", or something like that. The translation was technically correct, but it sounded very much like "No more talking in the trashcan!", which was hard to read without imagining someone shouting at a trashcan with a person inside it.

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Outlook's Portuguese translation uses the word "Lixo" (Trash/Garbage) for the "Spam" button. Sometimes people report emails as spam when they're trying to delete them.

The Hungarian translator must have been a fan of Oscar the Grouch.

It is quite common with Hungarian translators I have been told. Hungarian translations typically do not make sense given the context, especially when that context is anything IT related. It is like they are being given sentences to translate without telling them the context, and you get some funny translations.

Yes, that's exactly how low-end translation works. You get an Excel sheet with two columns, one labeled "English" and the other "Hungarian" (or whatever), and you get paid some laughable rate per word.

When my work did it, we added another coloumn with "context/explanation" and had devs fluent in that language review the translation.

still a few phrases came out awkward

> It is like they are being given sentences to translate without telling them the context

This is a pretty common localization problem. Tooling doesn't always make it easy to share context with translators who are often contractors for outside agencies. Unfamiliar developers try to do string math instead of laying out full sentances to translate. People are surprised to find the same original sentence needs different translations on different screens.

Of course, Google has lots of experience with localization, so should really have this down by now.

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