The German language broke my website | Hacker News Reader

The German language broke my website

speedbumpapp.com

17 pointsnullderef52 comments

Former QA from Germany here - some international companies supposedly develop their UI in German first because after that most other translations will fit ;)

Though, that doesn't help with bad translations. I often had a hard time explaining to my American business colleagues that just because I'm a native German speaker doesn't mean I will be good at translate their strings at 5pm so they could get out their launch... +1 for a professional translations!

I would use then Hungarian instead, even more longer words =)

As a German, I can tell you the problem is that none of these translations are common here, as the whole concept of a speed bump is something entirely ungerman. In fact the first time I've ever seen them was in Mexico, and we were joking that there isn't even a word for it in Germany.

Sure, you could translate it as Bremsschwelle, but I bet your metaphor would confuse most people.

What? Where do you live in Germany? They are all over the place!

What do you call them then?

The main problem is that no one uses the word (which is already not well known) outside of the road context.

I am originally from north western Germany and they were everywhere, especially in 30km/h zones and play streets. We just called them Huckel and I never thought about an official term. I can not remember seeing any of them in Berlin though. Here they make you break by going left and right instead of up and down.

Interesting, I don't think I have seen them in Bavaria more then in exceptional cases. And even then it's just not something that is present in my head. In other countries though, like Mexico or Thailand, when I think of the roads there, speed bumps are something that I immediately think of.

It might be because they are used differently there. Like they are literally everywhere on each kind of road, so steep that you destroy your car if you ignore them. In a play zone you already have to drive very slow, so they don't bother you, but there you have to actively look for them and slow down. IMO this is because instead of having many bureaucratic traffic rules there, the bumps serve as physical traffic rules. This use case seems to be what OP is referring to in his metaphor.

When was the last time you were talking about speed bumps in Germany?

When creating the site's landing page, I had to investigate where to find speed bumps in Munich. I couldn't remember any, but it turns out there's quite a few in the end. Probably not as popular as in other European countries, though. And there's rarely a signal.

that's a common issue. I worked on a Japanese product where most of the words were 2 characters and they had made horizontal menus that fit 5 buttons across (mobile). You can imagine that didn't work with anything other than Chinese. Yea, they had to redsign.

    +---------------------------+
    |[発生][保存][設定][情報][終了]|
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    +---------------------------+

new|save|set|info|end didn’t cut it?

Sure if you want to be too terse. I'd say most people would want

Start|Save|Settings|Info|Exit

At a minimum but given the style, both that and yours would be super cramped given the font size they wanted.

Further, the post is about German

Start|Speichern|Einstellungen|Info|Beenden

(no idea if those are correct)

Also, those buttons I made up. I what I remember something like 通信 being one button.

As a native German speaker I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of the listed words except Bremsschwelle. Most of them are weird regional slang terms that won’t mean anything to most people, no need to overthink it that much.

I only know Hubbel, which doesn't cause the problem the article is about.

Hubbel isn't even slang as the blogpost mentions, it's dialect in southwest germany. [0]

[0]https://www.dwds.de/wb/Hubbel

Thank you! I will update the post

Yeah most of the other regional terms I've never heard.

Around here we just call them Bodenwelle or Verkehrshürde but I haven't ever heard Bremsschwelle to be honest. The word sounds very strange to me and more like a bureaucratic term rather than a word people regularly use.

Speaking of which, I checked dejure for a Rechtssprechung. It seems that Fahrbahnschwelle is the official term. [1]

[1] https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht...

Where I live, we do say Bodenschwelle. I‘m surprised it’s not a ubiquitous term. Granted, you never talk about these with people when traveling.

(OP here) I'm thinking of either using "speed bump" in English, or adding the typical European sign for speedbumps for clarity. For now, I'm using Wikipedia's word in the end...

And that kids is why we translator is a profession (and not an algorithm). AI is attempting itself on it, but is at least three steps away from it (finding a really suitable word, rewriting the whole paragraph to fit this word contextually, considering the whole article to make sense).

Same as with code right now.

Speed bumps? Oh! You mean speed humps or sleeping policemen or speed tables or traffic thresholds or speed cushions or rumble strips or…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump

Rumble strips are a different thing, designed to guard against inattention. They can be related to speed control, but need not be.

Traffic calming measure

Sure, but mostly everyone in English understands speed bump. There's a standard word that's understood by most. In German, you can even see in this post how many people have heard only very different words (they don't even know the rest).

"...even AI doesn't work well enough." He sounds surprised. He thinks this is an outlier. He hasn't been paying attention.

Purely linguistic tasks like this are the one area where LLMs tend to be great, not sure what you mean.

...that llms are not great...

I asked Claude if it would be appropriate to use it for localization of text during app development and it strongly recommended avoiding using itself.

LLMs are incapable of introspection. Answering questions about themselves is one of the things they are extremely bad at.

There was a few month window where ChatGPT was capable of giving you the reasons and rationale of how it came to a completely wrong answer, and then proceeded to explain why it was wrong. It was quite interesting and in most cases understandable, giving you the opportunity to give the additional context needed to succeed in the future.

Then for whatever reason it was nerfed. Same as the original chain of thought output where for a few days it was accidentally exposing the hardcoded guardrails OpenAI had included. You would actually see it saying “Making sure my answer doesn’t support any stereotypes or include information that could fuel discrimination” and then re-writing factual statements in the output if it happened to touch upon something remotely controversial.

The problem with LLMs is that they do what you tell them to do.

If you ask the LLM to translate something without context, it will translate without context, and the result will quite likely be incorrect. If you provide some context, the result will likely be better. And if you tell the LLM what you are actually trying to say, the result will often be even better.

In this case, the issue was that "speed bump" did not actually mean a speed bump. It was used in a figurative sense, as a cultural idiom. If you tell that to the LLM, it should be able to suggest better ways to express the same idea in other languages.

I wish LLMs asked more clarifying questions for precisely this reason. And that they disagreed with me more often.

I'm not sure that when asking for a translation, even with context, they would have replied that my request doesn't make sense (or advised against using LLMs for translation).

Because attention is all you need?

The German language demands a more precise and sober style, whereas English tolerates more sloppy expressions. One common technique to work around that is to just use English terms when there is no catchy German one. In German marketing, this is done all the time. So in your case, you are fine sticking to speed bump.

Btw: my favorite word for speed bump is the Dutch "drempel". It is quite onomatopoetic. My favorite term for speed bumps in German comes from Comedian Helge Schneider. He calls them "Teerwülste" (tar bulges). I don't think you find it being used, but it fits the German style very well as it is precise and sober.

It is the bane of my existence that in German you cannot just put things in places. The word you would use for "put" depends on the physical relation of the objects involved.

Is it lying down ultimately? Hanging on? Standing upright?

And things don't sit on other things unless they literally have a chair.

Maybe it's not my children but the constant dealing with the German language that perpetually makes me feel exhausted.

I mean you can just hintun something, which is very informal but literally means put something somewhere in every case.

I'm German myself. To me this looks like a category of problem where you can no longer translate the word in the literal sense, because chances are low that the consumer understands the word ("Bremsschwelle" or whatever you end up picking).

Wouldn't it make sense to rather think of a completely different analogy? One that is really well-known by the target audience? From what I understand, you are building an app that inhibits people from doomscrolling. That is a well-established "German" word, too. Using that, people immediately understand what you mean, rather than trying to follow a broken analogy.

I know from my own experience that us folks in the US tend towards a lot of idioms in our communication and these can be a struggle to effectively translate. Most translation software translates literally instead of figuratively.

I found myself when I first went to work with an international company having to break that habit when my European colleagues would look at me funny half the time because I used idioms a lot. Even though they spoke English perfectly, they couldn’t understand me.

Took some time to break me of that habit.

https://youtu.be/mY9gVIcRkkI?si=rdSofwaAH4bQCIBK

Maybe make your layouts more flexible. There’s no reason in the speed bump example, why the word could not be broken into another line.

> even AI doesn’t work well

Why would you think it would?! Do people actually expect AI to be accurate now? Jesus christ...

Translation was literally what transformers were invented for.

LLMs are a lot better than e.g. Google Translate on difficult translations. Because they actually do "understand" the source and target language in a broad sense. But they are not perfect, and in the present case (there is simply no widely used word for "speed bump" in German) a good translation would even be hard for a human.

I wish sites would stop automated translation without even cursory proofreading.

Although sometimes it can be hilarious: one website translated "Big Ass Fans" into my native language as "Fans (as in people) of a big ass (as in body part)".

If they had people to cursorily proofread, they would likely do a half-ass translation rather than machine translation.

I see this a lot in AliExpress

Do you know the secret?

Use the title of the Wikipedia page in the chosen language

In this case it's Bremsschwelle

That probably works in an article about actual speed bumps but not so much as a product name.

In German you don't really use any of the terms for "speed bump" outside the road context, so as an app name they feel "off".

I don't think you often translate a product name. That's certainly not what they're doing here. Look at the Spanish version of this post, the app is still called SpeedBump

It's not to translate the app's name, but rather for a metaphor on the landing page. That one is indeed translated in Spanish.

It seems to have been actually intended as a live metaphor even in the original English, so I don't see the problem.

Bodenschwelle is used, at least it’s common in Austria.

Surely this is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of German’s agglutinative nature and come up with your own?

Handyschwelle?

Or more formally: Mobiltelefonbremsschwelle?

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