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Comment by Softcadbury | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse when they use terms sign in and sign up, like Github! English is not my native language and it always confuses me.

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English is my native language and I still call it "login" and "register", the words which were originally used and which I do not see any reason to change.

Yeah, what ever happened to Create account/Register and Log in?

Why have two very different options with almost the same label?

Heh, there was a time when Microsoft’s Polish translators (who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise) decided “Sign in” should be translated as „Zarejestruj”. Which is what everyone else called the “new account” button. They managed to fix it since then to a much more reasonable and much less confusing „Zaloguj się”.

Oh, I remember that incident. Since then I've become suspicious of any translations from English to Polish.

Especially given that I have some insider knowledge on how large publishers translate tech books and the way they do it is, in one word, awful.

>who I’m mildly convinced are robots in disguise

I think Windows translators are real humans, because quality is much better than whatever Bing Translator spits out (seriously, who thought it was good idea to automatically redirect to Bing-translated MSDN pages), but translated completely without any context. For example, task manager now have RAM "Form factor" translated as "Współczynnik postaci"...

Translators for the Dutch version of Windows 10 are definitely robots. For example, in the save webpage dialog of Edge, they translated “Webpage, complete” to “Webpagina, voltooid”. Voltooid means completed, as in a completed task. The correct translation would have been “Webpagina (volledig)”.

Similar errors are often found throughout programs new with Windows 10 and sentence structures are directly copied from English. I have never found a single error in Windows XP/7.

English is my native language and this annoys me because it slows me down

GitHub is awful for this. If you're not signed in, the whole page is taken up with a giant signup UI, then in the top right there is another signup button. Next to the signup button, there is a sign-in button, but it has no border and is so deemphasized that if you don't know it's there it blends into the other useless links in the top bar.

I end up regularly on the sign up page on github by mistake because of this.

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