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by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: Learn English (and Dutch, Grunnegs, Frysk..)
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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 it any good ? It was hilarious ! Not only the code went funny, the result of translating a product name can be quite funny to. The 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. At the time 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"
Guess how MS translated ? Guess how the users reponded ? It took translating the message back to English to make clear what was going on.
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 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, on the average still far more usefull.
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.
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