Brendan as wandering
if it would make sense to do a multilingual Codebetter site using
Babelfish. As a test he created a link to a Babelfish translated Dutch version of the CB home page.
Was the result any good ? It was hilarious ! Not only the code went
funny, the result of translating a product name can be quite funny to.
The overal quality of the text itself varied. Parts of it were
excellent, parts of it were just wrong; the total "reading experience"
makes you toes curl.
This is not specific to automated translates like this. My
native language is Dutch but all software installed on my machines is
(when I get the choice) in English. The first reason is that I want all
my software in the same language. There's allways an English version, a
Dutch version is sometimes available but a lot of the
translations are so bad.. Also from big companies. A classical example,
MsMail, shows clearly what translating without any context can lead to.
In Msmail an email message with an attachment needed a handler for the
attachment. If the handler was not installed you could not open the
message. In the English version the error mesage was "This message
cannot be opened". This stands for two things leading to two different
translations in Dutch:
- You cannot open this message: "Dit bericht kan niet geopend worden"
- This message cannot be in an open state: "Dit bericht kan niet geopend zijn"
Gues how MS translated ? Guess how the users reponded ? It took
translating the message back to English to make clear what MasMail was
trying to tell. My point is that as a developer (even as a user) you
just have to know your English. Even when localized resources are
avallable the quality is often not good enough, be it autotranslated by
babelfish or officially translated by a big software company. And when
it comes to feedback things get even harder. I do know some foreign
languages, Sahil knows quite a lot more but you can't expect the average mid-western developer to respond in German.
Is all that English still English ? There's the EN-US the EN-UK and
loads of other EN cultureinfo's. Time to add another one EN-WWW: the
English being made up by all us foreigners, full of grammar mistakes,
spelling errors and incomprehensible language constructs. But it does
communicate.
When it comes to conversation language I do like as many languages
as possible. Even in a small country as the Netherlands we do have
local languages and dialects and I want to make sure I can at least
understand and I enjoy it. As long as it doesn't get funny on the web.
Moi and oant sjens