I remember reading an interview with a British author, it might have been Neil Gaiman. He was just about to get his first book published in the US, and the American publisher contacted him and asked if it was OK if they changed a couple of British words to American, like "flat" to "apartment". Not wanting to risk the publishing deal, they said sure. A couple of month later they got the first edition of the US version back and found lines like.
- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment."
- "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..."
- "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught."
- "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me."
> One general point. A thing I have had said to me over and over again whenever I’ve done public appearances and readings and so on in the States is this: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it! We like it the way it is!
> There are some changes in the script that simply don’t make sense. Arthur Dent is English, the setting is England, and has been in every single manifestation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ever. The ‘Horse and Groom’ pub that Arthur and Ford go to is an English pub, the ‘pounds’ they pay with are English (but make it twenty pounds rather than five – inflation). So why suddenly ‘Newark’ instead of ‘Rickmansworth’? And ‘Bloomingdales’ instead of ‘Marks & Spencer’? The fact that Rickmansworth is not within the continental United States doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist! American audiences do not need to feel disturbed by the notion that places do exist outside the US or that people might suddenly refer to them in works of fiction.
To add to the many find and replace issues that have shown up, at one point TSR's style guide for D&D material said that "wizard" had to be used to the exclusion of "mage". So when proofs of a book arrived where the authors had used "mage" they did a find and replace job.
Resulting in such lines as "The tower can take up to 200 points of dawizard before it is destroyed. Dawizard sustained is cumulative." and references to a spell called "Silent Iwizard".
There once was a company in Russia who tried to make their own wikipedia — but of course, they didn't have any resources to build their own content, so in their world, Europe in the middle ages was terrorized by mighty Nordic warriors called encyclongs (w and v are the same letter in Russian language).
Also dawizard and wizardnta (when a tabletop RPG company tried changing "mage" to "wizard"), "amDanielan" (when an Eric was renamed to a Daniel) and a company that was "formerly in the red, but now in the African american."
I feel like folks in editing or similar roles put their "problem detection" hat on too tightly.
I get lots of advice like that regarding code and UI and the suggestions about perspective problems are often absurd. Nobody has been confused by the thing yet and they're concerned that someone "might" be confused and not able to figure it out themselves so they change some words or UI and ... I kid you not more often than not the solution is the thing that trips up users.
In the above example, maybe if the reader doesn't know what a "flat" is, maybe they'll just look it up or understand by context and they'll be ok?
That's exceptionally lazy. When coding, unless the false positive rate is exceptionally low, I just find (without replace) and go through them by hand. How many "flat"s can there be in 1 book? C'mon. You might have to read 20 sentences, oh no.
I developed KeenWrite[1] to make using variables in documents trivial[2]. My editor has no search and replace function. For my sci-fi novel, there's a variable {{location.protagonist.tertiary.Type}} that has the value "Bavarian Village". I could change this to "apartment" and every instance throughout the document prose and reference diagrams would update automatically and contextually. My typical example for explaining the use case is changing the name "May" to "June", but flat/apartment is hilarious.
That definitely must've been early. I would've thought Gaiman of all people knows how easily English humour can get lost in translation. Often even when not changing the text
the irony being that many readers probably attributed this to neil's sense of humor. i would have. "he said apartmently? what? aaah ... now i get it - haha - good one!"
A couple of years ago, Turkey/Türkiye had a campaign to get people to use Türkiye in English. At that time I flew Turkish airlines, which had a promotional video about this, and with all mentions of Turkey in safety cards, magazines and the seat back screen changed to Türkiye. Then when browsing for a tv show to watch on my seat back screen, I came across an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond with a description something like “on thanksgiving day, Raymond burns the Türkiye“
Idk what's happening to the Windows/file explorer teams, this is embarrassing.
Another issue I've had in newest file explorer, (probably a bug, unless they're trying to get rid of ".txt" files), is this one also reported on Twitter by "MittringMartin":
- "The name "zip" (meaning "move at high speed") was suggested by [Phil] Katz's friend, Robert Mahoney.[4]. They wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.[4]"
The term ZIP is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan; it was chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently and quickly (zipping along) when senders use the code in the postal address.
Like other commentors, I always thought it was an allusion to zipping up some sort of storage or container, like a suitcase - zipping would still be useful even if it didn't compress, as it's a way to send a folder as a single file.
I could've sworn it was named for the authors - took a while to find with nothing more to go on, but I was thinking of Lempel-Ziv (and I suppose Ziv became ZIP, sorry Ziv). I must be using a lossy compression for memory.
When I worked at Microsoft as a localization lead, we had actual human beings that would look over this stuff before calling machine translation good (of course, we had actual human translators back then, too). But that was a long time ago, back when Microsoft had human software testers, too.
And what options are available when I right click on a .zip/.postcode file? Say, perhaps I wished to uncompress it?
I think the worst example of this overzealous localization was when some person translated the VB(A) reserved keywords to the appropriate language (I want to say it was german or swedish). Happened in the 1990s.
Your programming language reserved keywords changing depending on your selected language was a big facepalm.
Searching for this problem on the web doesn't produce any valid relevant results, so the web has forgotten or maybe the horror has been plastered over.
There was a famous translation mistake back in the days of IE 5 for Mac or so where in one of the settings screens they translated the country code for Norway "no" as "nej" (literally No) in Swedish
We had an almost identical bug, also at Microsoft, when I was working on Hotmail (it may have been Outlook.com by then, I can't remember): POP, the email protocol, was localized into UK English as DAD.
I find POP->DAD a little odd, because I've never (as an American) heard anyone say 'pop' referring to their father. 'pops'? yes. Now, POP->SODA, would not surprise me in the least.
Vaguely related, I’ve noticed before manuals in which tech writers provide expansions of acronyms - but they don’t realise that in the context of that manual the acronym means something different.
I remember one z/OS manual saying AIX stood for “Advanced Interactive eXecutive”-which is true if we are talking about the Unix, but this manual was talking about a VSAM AIX (Alternative IndeX) - a secondary index for the VSAM flat file database system. Another example was USS being wrongly expanded as “UNIX System Services” when in the context it was actually a reference to VTAM’s “Unformatted System Services” (the part of VTAM which handles the initial LOGIN command, I think “Unformatted” because it is plain EBCDIC not 3270)
In Windows, there is an account flag called “UF_MNS_LOGON_ACCOUNT”. A lot of people claim “MNS” stands for “Majority Node Set” - even one MS doc - see MNSLogonAccount in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedi... - however, while it is true that’s what the acronym stands for in the context of Windows clustering, I’m pretty sure in the context of Windows user accounts it actually means “Microsoft Netware Services”-this flag was used by Microsoft’s 1990s era software which enabled Windows NT to pretend to be a Netware server, and the unrelated Windows clustering “MNS” has never used that account flag. “Microsoft Netware Services” was renamed to “Microsoft Services for Netware” (MSN-but not that MSN!-hence MSFN or SNW), no doubt for trademark law reasons, but the name of this flag got stuck with the original acronym. I don’t think it actually does anything unless you have that old stuff installed, which probably doesn’t work on newer versions of Windows. I suppose that being an effectively disused flag, there is nothing stopping people from stealing it for their own purposes, and probably someone out there has.
Another British English oddity is with Mac OS. Classic Mac OS had a British version until circa Mac OS 8, which called the Trash the Wastebasket. But the icon wasn't changed, so was still visually a dustbin. British English returned at some point with recent Mac OS X versions, but now the icon really is a wastebasket, they called it the Bin.
(If anyone has this British English Windows 11, is it still the Recycle Bin, or the more British Recycling Bin?)
I've honestly just given up using British / Commonwealth English localisations in software. You run into constant little bugs and annoyances, and it's not like I can't decypher the US English version.
Please always remember to let your users change regional settings separately and individually for currency, measures, first day of the week, etc.
Probably an issue during localization, where someone saw "zip" and assumed it meant "zip code" and so "translated" it to "postcode". This is a perfect example of why its important to also supply the context instead of just the raw strings you need translated!
It also brings to mind a translation issue from my home country, wales, where road signs must be bilingual (english and welsh). A request was sent to a welsh translation service asking for the translation for a specific phrase. The signwriters received the response, completed the sign and it was then erected. The problem: it was an out-of-office auto-reply! https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffi...
This kind of mistake isn't that amazing, it's actually very common in translation because translators often don't get enough context - they just see a string with no comments.
Reminds me of the time I used my French bank card in a ticket machine in the UK.
The machine detected it was a French card and switched the interface to French (fine).
It then asked me to "entrez votre broche" as a prompt for my PIN.
In the context of electronics "pin" (as in on a component) translates to French as "broche" but it makes no sense for a pincode!
The scope and scale of translation work has always seemed daunting to me.
I can’t imagine a way to make it any more efficient, without sacrificing significant accuracy by missing context, than to do manual translation of everything.
I can’t imagine if, every time I added a button to a UI, an entire team of localization translators mobilizing to make sure the right context came through in every language the UI supported. Not to mention the tools that support that workflow of passing context to translators, compiling the translations, and binding them all into a data structure I can use to populate my UI.
And that’s just for language. Iconography and colors have their own localizations.
How does that even happen? I mean for localizing software - any software - you need some kind of Lookup key for each resource and then you can do a lookup for that key and a language, to get the resource (An image, a text string, whatever). So the function is (key, language) -> resource. E.g. ("filetype:zip", "en-US") -> "Zip file". Since any term can be used in multiple places and words can have multiple meanings, you can't localize software as a mapping from one language to another. Especially not english.
I have worked with volunteer translations for Valve using the now defunct Steam Translation Server (and Crowdin very rarely nowadays) and discussing problems like these with other people from the community, the mods agreed that this is a lack of context issue.
Then, I started playing World of Warcraft and realized how bad the localization is. I mean, the translation isn't bad per se, I really appreciate that they tried to adapt the game to my country's culture and that is totally awesome.
But seeing Blizzard pay a ton of money for some people that don't even play the game to verify if their translation is correct or makes sense is just astonishing to me. When Blizz released the new UI for WoW, there was an option called "snap" which meant "snap to grid". The amazing translator team, having no context and not even the decency of checking the context in game, translated this option as "estalo", which, in portuguese, means "snap (sound)", as in a finger snap.
Another example is that when they added minimap sizing to the UI editor, there's an option that allows the name of the zone to be below the minimap. The brilliant translator team translated it in portuguese to "abaixo cabeçalho" (literally under header) or something very silly which you could literally see that they put no effort in the translation.
Playstation used the equivalent of "Store/archive/stock 20%" on the PSN Store for years in Norway instead of "Save 20%", because they translated Save without realizing that we have different words for saving money and saving things.
[+] [-] dagw|2 years ago|reply
"He looked out over the apartment landscape"
and
"'Come with me', he said apartmently"
[+] [-] perihelions|2 years ago|reply
- "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..."
- "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught."
- "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me."
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])
[+] [-] modernerd|2 years ago|reply
> One general point. A thing I have had said to me over and over again whenever I’ve done public appearances and readings and so on in the States is this: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it! We like it the way it is!
> There are some changes in the script that simply don’t make sense. Arthur Dent is English, the setting is England, and has been in every single manifestation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ever. The ‘Horse and Groom’ pub that Arthur and Ford go to is an English pub, the ‘pounds’ they pay with are English (but make it twenty pounds rather than five – inflation). So why suddenly ‘Newark’ instead of ‘Rickmansworth’? And ‘Bloomingdales’ instead of ‘Marks & Spencer’? The fact that Rickmansworth is not within the continental United States doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist! American audiences do not need to feel disturbed by the notion that places do exist outside the US or that people might suddenly refer to them in works of fiction.
https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/please-dont-let-anyone-amer...
[+] [-] madcaptenor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignite|2 years ago|reply
"It was about 1000 feet, or 304.88 meters". "He was 6 feet tall, or 182.88" meters."
Every single measurement, converted with two or three decimal places. It got old fast.
[+] [-] Ichthypresbyter|2 years ago|reply
Resulting in such lines as "The tower can take up to 200 points of dawizard before it is destroyed. Dawizard sustained is cumulative." and references to a spell called "Silent Iwizard".
[+] [-] golergka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MollyRealized|2 years ago|reply
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/s82mi4/til_that_in_199...
[+] [-] miki123211|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|2 years ago|reply
I get lots of advice like that regarding code and UI and the suggestions about perspective problems are often absurd. Nobody has been confused by the thing yet and they're concerned that someone "might" be confused and not able to figure it out themselves so they change some words or UI and ... I kid you not more often than not the solution is the thing that trips up users.
In the above example, maybe if the reader doesn't know what a "flat" is, maybe they'll just look it up or understand by context and they'll be ok?
[+] [-] erhaetherth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wly_cdgr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thangalin|2 years ago|reply
[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite
[2]: https://youtu.be/CFCqe3A5dFg?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...
[+] [-] ChrisRR|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2-718-281-828|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vram22|2 years ago|reply
Change all occurrences of flat to apartment, intelligently!
Got you!
;-)
[+] [-] smcl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnwalkr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpw94|2 years ago|reply
Another issue I've had in newest file explorer, (probably a bug, unless they're trying to get rid of ".txt" files), is this one also reported on Twitter by "MittringMartin":
https://twitter.com/MittringMartin/status/166378202005572812...
can't do "right click" > "New" > "Text document".
Happens on my system too, a stock windows install on a surface laptop, for which I've never messed around with any obscure settings.
It's also gone from the "shift right click" menu (aka the good old menu)...
[+] [-] perihelions|2 years ago|reply
- "The name "zip" (meaning "move at high speed") was suggested by [Phil] Katz's friend, Robert Mahoney.[4]. They wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.[4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)#History
[+] [-] rjeli|2 years ago|reply
The term ZIP is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan; it was chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently and quickly (zipping along) when senders use the code in the postal address.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
[+] [-] mastax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambicapter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TechBro8615|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|2 years ago|reply
And what options are available when I right click on a .zip/.postcode file? Say, perhaps I wished to uncompress it?
[+] [-] canucker2016|2 years ago|reply
Your programming language reserved keywords changing depending on your selected language was a big facepalm.
Searching for this problem on the web doesn't produce any valid relevant results, so the web has forgotten or maybe the horror has been plastered over.
[+] [-] kalleboo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandallBrown|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordShredda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbrackbill|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hermitdev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skissane|2 years ago|reply
I remember one z/OS manual saying AIX stood for “Advanced Interactive eXecutive”-which is true if we are talking about the Unix, but this manual was talking about a VSAM AIX (Alternative IndeX) - a secondary index for the VSAM flat file database system. Another example was USS being wrongly expanded as “UNIX System Services” when in the context it was actually a reference to VTAM’s “Unformatted System Services” (the part of VTAM which handles the initial LOGIN command, I think “Unformatted” because it is plain EBCDIC not 3270)
In Windows, there is an account flag called “UF_MNS_LOGON_ACCOUNT”. A lot of people claim “MNS” stands for “Majority Node Set” - even one MS doc - see MNSLogonAccount in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedi... - however, while it is true that’s what the acronym stands for in the context of Windows clustering, I’m pretty sure in the context of Windows user accounts it actually means “Microsoft Netware Services”-this flag was used by Microsoft’s 1990s era software which enabled Windows NT to pretend to be a Netware server, and the unrelated Windows clustering “MNS” has never used that account flag. “Microsoft Netware Services” was renamed to “Microsoft Services for Netware” (MSN-but not that MSN!-hence MSFN or SNW), no doubt for trademark law reasons, but the name of this flag got stuck with the original acronym. I don’t think it actually does anything unless you have that old stuff installed, which probably doesn’t work on newer versions of Windows. I suppose that being an effectively disused flag, there is nothing stopping people from stealing it for their own purposes, and probably someone out there has.
[+] [-] TechBro8615|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredoralive|2 years ago|reply
(If anyone has this British English Windows 11, is it still the Recycle Bin, or the more British Recycling Bin?)
[+] [-] troad|2 years ago|reply
Please always remember to let your users change regional settings separately and individually for currency, measures, first day of the week, etc.
[+] [-] rts_cts|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic
[+] [-] supermatt|2 years ago|reply
It also brings to mind a translation issue from my home country, wales, where road signs must be bilingual (english and welsh). A request was sent to a welsh translation service asking for the translation for a specific phrase. The signwriters received the response, completed the sign and it was then erected. The problem: it was an out-of-office auto-reply! https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffi...
[+] [-] astrange|2 years ago|reply
But you're supposed to find it in QA after that.
[+] [-] mfuzzey|2 years ago|reply
In the context of electronics "pin" (as in on a component) translates to French as "broche" but it makes no sense for a pincode!
[+] [-] r3trohack3r|2 years ago|reply
I can’t imagine a way to make it any more efficient, without sacrificing significant accuracy by missing context, than to do manual translation of everything.
I can’t imagine if, every time I added a button to a UI, an entire team of localization translators mobilizing to make sure the right context came through in every language the UI supported. Not to mention the tools that support that workflow of passing context to translators, compiling the translations, and binding them all into a data structure I can use to populate my UI.
And that’s just for language. Iconography and colors have their own localizations.
[+] [-] popcalc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xinayder|2 years ago|reply
Then, I started playing World of Warcraft and realized how bad the localization is. I mean, the translation isn't bad per se, I really appreciate that they tried to adapt the game to my country's culture and that is totally awesome.
But seeing Blizzard pay a ton of money for some people that don't even play the game to verify if their translation is correct or makes sense is just astonishing to me. When Blizz released the new UI for WoW, there was an option called "snap" which meant "snap to grid". The amazing translator team, having no context and not even the decency of checking the context in game, translated this option as "estalo", which, in portuguese, means "snap (sound)", as in a finger snap.
Another example is that when they added minimap sizing to the UI editor, there's an option that allows the name of the zone to be below the minimap. The brilliant translator team translated it in portuguese to "abaixo cabeçalho" (literally under header) or something very silly which you could literally see that they put no effort in the translation.
[+] [-] kristofferR|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroWidthJoiner|2 years ago|reply
Microsoft, at the time: "This is an issue in the latest Canary Channel build and the loc folks are working on a fix" (https://twitter.com/JenMsft/status/1643599284120723456)