Some time ago I wrote about localization of software. This post describes some problems in using a program in language other than American English except the two trivial ones – not having a single language used by everyone or a program without localization. It is based on my experience in using free software localized to Polish, but it should apply to some other European inflected languages. Some ‘localization’ mistakes can be easily observed even in English.
In these situations translations are often incorrect:
- sentence/title construction
- ‘Remove icon’ is clearly correct, maybe in English ‘Remove Icon’ would be also accepted. But in Polish ‘Usuń Ikona’ is incorrect. There are two problems here: lack of inflection and incorrect capitalization. In this case the problem is caused by using the normal name of the object with a general removal text. It would be solved by each object having a separate ‘Remove X’ text, e.g. ‘Remove icon’ translated into ‘Usuń ikonę’ (although it won’t make translators avoid using incorrect capitalization in their texts). The GNU Coding Standards show a different example of this.
- using a single text for counted objects
- ‘N comments’ is a good example of this. Even in English I have found programs using the form ‘1 comments’ or ‘N comment(s)’. In Polish it is more difficult with three plurals, as stated by the GNU Coding Standards. Fortunately, for positive numbers the problem is completely solved by e.g. GNU Gettext, although having a different form for zero objects would be still better (e.g. ‘no comments’).
- ignoring the grammatical gender
- This may occur in construction of text about such objects as icons or floppy disks, but it is commonly found on the Web in texts about users. In English ‘he’ or ‘she’ are rarely used in messages about the user, but in many Indo-European languages nearly everything depends on gender. Fortunately, some software begins to support specifying grammatical gender of its user, like MediaWiki. (It is interesting that many roguelikes require the user to specify their gender, although they support only English.)
- non-ASCII punctuation
- Again, this problem can be easily shown in English. A common web browser separates its name from the page title by a hyphen while a dash should be used. Our language has also different apostrophes and quote marks than typewriters of our ancestors. For Polish it is more difficult, since even in print inner quote marks are usually put in incorrect order.
There is one simple solution – write a program which uses completely correct English and let translators correct it until it will be correct in other languages.
