Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet.
Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language.
There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.
It's also really good at doing things like synonyms. We used this to improve our icon search by letting it come up with comma separated lists of alternatives for each icon name. Worked really well too.
And it can do fictional languages. We did a pirate speak localization a few weeks ago for international pirate day. Just for giggles but it works.
For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..
Now Firefox added stupid popups offering translating websites written in my native language because the OS is set to English. And they didn't see a need to create a checkbox for that outside of about:config (Mozilla, if you want to get rid of me you can just say so instead of spamming me with popups)
A fun trick is that if you install Windows 11 with the "English/Europe" locale, it doesn't install a lot of the bloatware because it's not defined for that location.
Even the keyboard on my MBP is physically US ANSI, because if you've ever coded more than a hundred lines using brackets on an ISO keyboard you know why.
I managed to get everything right in KDE on my PC though, by some weird way of using "Danish (UK)" or whatever it's called in some specific settings -- I don't even remember how or why but everything worked just right. Sorting, decimal point, app languages, everything. Could never replicate it though.
When I travel to the US/UK I _do_ actually want to start seeing distances in miles (I'm "bilingual" with m/km, it's useful to think in distances that locals understand and that match signage). So "just use my home locale's units all the time" wouldn't work (especially for speeds!). So yeah I guess localization is indeed hard!
Honestly I've now just started trying to learn Farenheit! 90 is hot, 70 is nice, 50 is cold, 30 is ice.
It drives me nuts, most sites are geolocating me instead and serving me Spanish content. My browser is always sending accept language, and it's most often ignored than not, even frommthe big old web players (Google and Wikipedia to name a few)
Related, but a few years ago the Norwegian broadcaster NRK asked people how the visualize a year. https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... (English version)
Quite interesting how different people are. Mostly it's a clock of sorts. To me however it's more of a sine wave, where each year is one phase (summer on bottom), but it's kinda fractally so if I zoom in it got bumps for the months, smaller bumps on there again for the weeks etc.
I wonder if visualizing a year as a circle is a particularly Norwegian thing, or if I’m the odd one out anywhere…
Back to the subject of which day the week begins: I’d say the fact that the week begins on Sunday doesn’t have much of a meaning in US culture, if any. If I say “next week” at work, it clearly means “the next M-F period”. If I wanted to refer to Saturday and Sunday I’d say “this weekend”. So if what I normally mean by a week begins on Monday and ends on Friday, you have to slot the weekend on one of those ends, and it feels slightly wrong whichever way you do it.
So, the only practical, concrete way in which “the week starts on Sunday” means anything to Americans is that we are used to seeing calendars printed with Sunday on the left, and Saturday on the right. I continue to maintain that this is arbitrary! But it does make me really confused when I have to use a calendar widget in an interface that wasn’t localized, and starts with a day other than Sunday, so I get your frustration.
It's a bit like decimal point vs. decimal comma. Neither is inherently better, but man would it have been nice if we'd all picked the same one.
No disagreement there!
The real question is why the weekend was defined as straddling the last and first days of the week. Weird.
> However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc.
but also sensible sorting. I'm currently mixing en_DK, en_IE, en_US, C and cs_CZ (my native language) locales for various LC_*, but it's still not perfect and some apps (such as Thunderbird) ignore this anyway and others (Slack) have only one language setting, so I can select either US with 12-hour time or UK with UK spelling. Does anyone have a solution? Should a write a new locale?