I know multiple developers who would just say "well it's their fault, they have to change name then".
In fairness, they mostly wanted stuff to be in English, and when necessary, to transliterate German characters into their English counterparts (in German there is a standardised way of doing this), so I can understand why they didn't see it was necessary. I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font.
This would only fail in older printers and who is still printing stuff these days? Nobody right?
Using real utf-8 is just too complex... All these emojis are nuts
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+20A0
Even Bitcoin is there. And "German Penny Sign"?
In fact this is one of the root problems, there are plenty of Unicode symbols you can make out of others, either juxtaposing or overstriking or using a combining character, but this isn't consistently done.
TIL:
Hah, fair enough. I think it was an abstract question to me, so I was looking for the technically correct answer. Practical question for him, so he gave the practical answer.
I cannot know, but they could be ideological. For example, they had found it wonderful to use plain ASCII, no need for special keyboard layouts or something like that, and they decided that German would be much better without its non-ASCII characters. They could believe something like this, and they wouldn't say it aloud in the discussion with you because it is irrelevant for the discussion: you weren't trying to change German.
If you can speak English, you might be better of using the software in English, as having to deal with the English language can often be less of hassle, than having to deal with inconsistent, weird, or outright wrong translations.
Even high quality translations might run into issues, where the same thing is translated once as "A" and then as "B" in another context. Or run into issues where there is an English technical term being used, that has no prefect equivalent in German (i.e. a translation does exist, but is not a well-known, clearly defined technical term). More often than not though, translations are anything but high quality. Even in expensive products from big international companies.
And then developers just do N > 1 ? "things" : "thing" without thinking twice, not use pgettext and all the other things.
You're right that sometimes translation for technical terms is difficult, but the case I experienced far more often was Germans creating their own English words, or guessing at phrases they thought ought to exist because their English was not as good at they believed.
I agree that high quality translations are hard, and particularly difficult to retrofit into an existing application. But unless you have a very specialised audience, they're usually worth it!
I've heard that German is often one of the first localizations of (desktop) software because there were often super-long words in the translations of various concepts, so if you wanted to test typeface rendering and menu breakage it was good language to run through your QA for that.
Windows actually ships with a locale like that.
As developers, we need to build software for our users, and not for ourselves. That means proper localisation, and it means giving users the option of choosing their own language and settings.
The coworker who made that happen said I'm a weirdo for setting my machine in my own language. According to him I should have set it to english.
This of course happened in a non english speaking country.