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

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SeanB:
Had both the English and the original French maintenance manuals, and the French ones were sort of readable, with the assistance of a dictionary, because the English one, while keeping in lockstep with the French, down to page and paragraph number in many cases, was often something less than usable in many respects.

Think I was the first person in years who actually read the French version, thanks to the few French English dictionaries also supplied with them, though they were very much lacking in any sort of technical translations, but you could muddle through thanks to the literal translations in the 2 versions. Did not help that the entire systems I worked on were covered in only a few chapters, in the 30 volume manual, but that at least helped with being able to see the connections between the systems, and also the fact that certain parameters were passed on via separate buses, even if they were the same data, in the same format, but with some slight variation, as they were both analogue voltages. Gave a way to tell the black box changers that, despite their insistence that this unit was faulty, it was actually the sender that had drifted out of tolerance, and they thus would have to do the big job and change that, instead of trying 15 units to see if one was on the other side of the curve to compensate. Changing the easy part was quicker for them.

blacksheeplogic:

--- Quote from: Brumby on September 24, 2016, 10:41:20 pm ---Generating documentation in the first place is an uphill battle when management just want the application up and running.  Generating good documentation is even more difficult still.  You have people who are creating it come from a technical environment and the people using it don't.  The subsequent 'vocational culture' gap requires journalistic writing skills - not technical ones, but it is extremely rare to find someone who not only understands the technical details, but can write clearly enough for the target audience at a speed (read 'cost') that management will tolerate.

--- End quote ---

When I have written technical documentation, I was assigned a editor who reviewed the work, including it's grammar, formatting, and use of colotical terms. The editor was non-technical.  It then went though technical panel review and finally legal review. Fortunately, I was finished at that point and was not involved in NLS.

Good documentation is very expensive to produce and maintain, let alone the cost of NLS. If your low cost or low margin, this is an area your probably not going to invest in.

SL4P:
In public infrastructure situations, it’s always funny, because civil servants rarely give a shit, so doing ‘anything’ gets the salary paid.

Why do more if your boss is even more incompetent than you are.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: blacksheeplogic on March 12, 2020, 10:36:03 pm ---When I have written technical documentation, I was assigned a editor who reviewed the work, including it's grammar, formatting, and use of colotical terms. The editor was non-technical.  It then went though [a] technical panel review and finally [a] legal review. Fortunately, I was finished [with it] at that point and was not involved in NLS [non-universal term, spell out].

Good documentation is very expensive to produce and maintain, let alone the cost of NLS [non-universal term, spell out]. If your [a] low cost or low margin [operation], [then] this is an area your probably not going to invest in.

--- End quote ---

I wish you hadn't said editor in that it has activated my ex-editor gene - which means I was forced to notice every literal, grammatical error and mis-phrasing in those two short paragraphs. Painful. And let me be clear, yours is far from the worst English I've seen that needed beating into shape to make it publication ready. (The worst was probably a lawyer who used to write a computer law column for the magazine I was a section editor on.) I'm not picking on you, honestly, I'm underlining your point about needing an editor.

Domagoj T:
You guys should consider yourselves lucky.
Over here in Croatia they like to, for some ungodly reason, translate software. And these are folks that translate into their native language. You would not believe how hard it is to find even the simple stuff such as the Control Panel in Windows, when it's all in Croatian. It's incredibly annoying with even simpler stuff, such as bringing up the Calculator app. You press the Windows key on the keyboard and start typing "Cal" and usually the top result is the Calculator, so typing "Cal" and Enter is enough so you develop muscle memory and are able to type it all out before the screen even displays the results. Then you sit in front to a machine with Croatian translation of Windows and that suddenly doesn't work any more, but you forgot that the Windows are in Croatian and try again, only to fail once more. Then you have a brain fart trying to remember what the Calculator is called in Croatian (it's Kalkulator, but "Kal" doesn't trigger the search for "Cal").

And don't even get me started on tutorials or GUIs that translate "Drop down menus", "Editor", "Debugger". That stuff is entirely incomprehensible once translated.
Some time ago I had an opportunity to talk to a guy who was so proud to be a part of the translation team for something. When I told him that he's wasting his time and that Croatian translations are less comprehensible than English originals (even to people who struggle with English) he had trouble grasping the fact that most people when they start using computers are faced with English terminology and learn and get accustomed to that, not Croatian, regardless of their general English skills.


--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 12, 2020, 11:31:57 pm ---I was forced to notice every literal, grammatical error and mis-phrasing in those two short paragraphs.
--- End quote ---
And even you missed a couple.
I was told that anything written should spellchecked then be put in a drawer and let sit for a few days. You then check it again, to find a whole bunch more stuff.

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