General > General Technical Chat

[rant]why do english/chinese companies don't give a damn about other languages..

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JPortici:

--- Quote from: blueskull on September 22, 2016, 08:24:16 pm ---The reason you see so many poorly written eBay listings is because these people who sell on eBay in China usually do not have good education.

--- End quote ---

well i'd give the blame to ebay's automatic translation, which is much worse than google translate (doesn't matter if you give zero stars for the translation, you can't suggest a better one. at least google asks you for that). that is embarassing too. i'm searching for this specific term, not for what you think is the translation... for example in an english ad "probe" will have a different translation based on the words used in the title  :palm:

CatalinaWOW:
These things change over time.  It used to be that Latin was the language for technical documents.  There were still remnants of that in the late nineteenth century.  Then for a long time things followed whoever was doing the best bleeding edge technical work.  The French speakers, then briefly the Germans, and for a while it was the English speakers. 

Right at the moment the good technical work is spread all over the world, and English is filling the role that Latin used to, the agreed common language of people from a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds.

If one language group starts to dominate the leading edge of techology I suspect that language will take over.  There are some signs that Chinese may be that language group, but it is too early to say for sure.  There is a lot of oil money in the middle East trying to make Arabic that language, and who knows, they may succeed.   There aren't a lot of likely candidates, and English may hang on for another century.

sleemanj:
I think that in the first instance, English's position as the defacto common denominator language is fairly secure, but of course, language, especially English maybe more than any other, is not some rigorous stable standard and what we are speaking in another 200 years might be called English but will almost certainly be at least a bit different to what we speak now.

But in the second instance, the ability of machine translation has exploded over recent years.  It's simply amazing that, less than 20 years after babelfish.altavista.com started that we now have at least two major translation services, translating piles of languages, in basically real time, and doing a pretty reasonable job of it, so much so that you can set your web browser to auto translate pages on the fly when viewing foreign language sites and you will at least get a pretty good idea of what is being said.  Add to this the advances in voice recognition, AI, and machine learning.... I really don't think it's that far away that we will have an actual thing we can stick in our ears and be fed translated information, we might call this, the Babel Fish.  AT which time, the universal language is whatever language you choose.

tooki:

--- Quote from: JPortici on September 21, 2016, 11:13:10 am ---.. but offer translated versions of their website/documentation anyway?
why can't you pay a professional to translate your website instead of relying on google translate?

(I actually wanted to say that they don't give two shits but i think that maybe it's not title-appropriate)

for example, fluke 117 (apply to every page in the fluke website)
Display - Digital: 6,000 counts, updates 4 per second

in italian it was translated as "updates every 4 seconds". what the hell!!

i'm not asking for a perfect translation but at least avoid these  :palm:-grade errors
after all we give it a honest try

and don't get me started on manuals.  :scared:

--- End quote ---
I worked at a software company a few years ago, hired as a native English speaker to translate their product, and all other customer-facing text (manual, website, email templates, etc.) from German into English so they could expand beyond German-speaking countries. It's not as trivial as you think. Finding translators is easy; finding good translators is hard. But the real pickle, which AntiProtonBoy mentioned, is change management. If you change something in one place, you need to update that change throughout all the languages you support. If you're lucky, the company is using a content management system with CAT (computer aided translation)* support. Otherwise, you're sitting there comparing source document versions to find the changes the author made. Oh, and get it done by yesterday. (For sure, once a company goes to the effort of setting up good infrastructure and processes for multilingual text, adding additional languages becomes easier, but the cost for translation remains high.)

Every language you add support for, you're adding delays into product launches, updates, etc. It's often more pragmatic to support a few languages that cover lots of people.

Frankly, most companies have entirely given up on end-user documentation altogether, reducing it to quick-start guides and FAQs. I remember when computers came with 300 page manuals, applications came with 1000 page binders, etc. Documentation is expensive, and most companies seem to have decided that users do just fine without it. (And given how many users categorically refuse to consult documentation anyway, I can't entirely blame them.)




*CAT is not machine translation. CAT tools manage human-generated translations (in "translation memory" and terminology databases) and help a human translator bang out a document translation that is consistent with the company's existing translations. For example, if it knows that in prior documents, you translated "10 inch touchscreen display" into "10-Zoll Touch-Bildschirm", it will suggest that existing translation whenever it encounters that phrase, so you don't create a new translation, like "10 Zoll Touch-Display". The granularity should extend from short phrases to whole sentences, if they are often reused.

coppice:

--- Quote from: Richard Crowley on September 22, 2016, 09:23:07 pm ---One of my favorite PBS documentaries from back in the 1980s.  "The Story of English" with Robert MacNeil.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36

At that time the largest English-speaking country (and the country pubishing the most English language books, magazines, etc.) was India. Post cold-war, things have probably changed. But the history is interesting nonetheless.

--- End quote ---
The largest English speaking country is still India, and its becoming more English speaking every day. The huge number of middle class Indians employed directly or indirectly by western companies, and the migration of people with a variety of mother tongues to major centres like Bangalore, are driving this. When I was in India 20 years ago it was common to hear English conversations between groups in public places, like restaurants, but they were mostly business groups using a common language. Now it is common in Bangalore to hear families talking in English, as its the only language the husband and wife share.

You have other things pushing English forward. Friends in Bangalore who are from northern India want their children taught in Hindi and English. This requires them to send their children to international schools, as the local schools teach in English plus one of a selection of Southern Indian languages. In the international schools all the kids want to learn is English. Sure, they learn to speak Hindi at home with their parents, but the schools struggle to get them to take reading and writing Hindi seriously.

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