Pimp My Code, Part 17: Lost in Translations | Hacker News Reader

Pimp My Code, Part 17: Lost in Translations

wilshipley.com

29 pointsnaish7 comments

And then there are the small oddball countries who actually enjoy material in their original language. In Finland almost all tv-shows and movies are subbed instead of dubbed, and many people I know prefer (in addition to myself) english software instead of translated. One of the most horrible examples is Microsoft Excel which has actually translated the names of formula functions. Or GCC having translated error messages. Also having "," as a decimal separator instead of "." is sometimes a PITA. Helpdesking people over phone is much harder when you actually need to translate/guess menu items/button label texts etc on the fly from english to finnish. And then there is the problem that there is always some software in english, and its much nicer when the whole system is actually in the same language. And then there is the problem of just plain crappy translations, especially those made by some hobbyists.

English is lingua franca of the internet. Even if having own language is kinda nice, its just not that practical in globalized world.

nb. Localization is a lot more than just translations. Even if no translation is made, proper localization should be still made. Number and date formats are a common example. Another example I have heard is actually having different icons in different areas/cultures.

Mac OS X has two different international settings: Language and Formats. The first one controls the interface language, the second one date/time, currency, and other formats. I hate using interfaces in my native language, so I set Language to English, but still have Russian formats.

Making Cocoa applications use proper numbers and dates is a no-brainer, so, I guess, this is why Wil didn't mention it.

Hear, hear. You didn't mention how frustrating it is when software tries to "intelligently" guess which language you want based on where you are. If you are in Finland and not logged in to Reddit, it shows the UI in Finnish, even though all the articles are in English. When I go to Google.com, sometimes it decides I want to go to Google.fi instead, and then I'm left wondering why my searches are bringing up odd results.

i did something similar to this once. i came to the same conclusion as shipley: trying to have other people edit your nibs is madness.

i chose to solve it in a different way, though. i kept all my localized strings in my own simple text file, and did away with nibs altogether, preferring to build all views and windows and menus in code at runtime. probably wouldn't work so hot for really complicated user interfaces, but it worked for me.

If you are running your code in an iPhone environment and ever want to modularize code. (Say having a tab in someone else's app without revealing your source) Not having XIBs makes using a static library much easier and cleaner.

i am even more anti-xib/nib when it comes to the iphone. they are almost always useless in that case. i've written three fairly substantial iphone apps so far, and i haven't used a nib yet.

So by doing some translation effort, you can get perhaps +20% more users, but this should be compared with spending the same amount of effort on some other part of the program. Maybe some nice new feature would also have resulted in +20% users with less effort?

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