The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let’s not talk about it) have its CLI --help message machine translated in some languages.
That’s already evil enough, but the real problem is that they’ve blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command’s flag names.
So if you’re Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what’s the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I’ve said it’s machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that “–分布” is actually “–distribution”? It’s “发行版” in Chinese and “ディストリビューション” in Japanese.
At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes “translated” is worse than raw text in its original language.
PS: for the original post, my stance is “please don’t make your software interface different for different languages”. It’s the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people’s commands different.
It’s the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a “translation” subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts it to the user’s language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.
Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn’t recognize the English version when your language isn’t set to English.
@hstde@Spore Even better, the alphabetical index of function names was generated in English first and then translated, meaning the documentation looks like a scrambled mess in any other language because it is alphabetized according to what the English equivalent would be. #excel
Just wait until you’re working with different time/date formats, like, god forbid, sharing such documents to someone who has their Windows time/date format set differently than you have.
So true… Not only sometimes it makes it hard to find the translated function name (especially since they are adding a lot of new functions) but there are quite often longer… For instance in French you go to a simple ifs to si.conditions…
The Microsoft Office installer has translated “Office downloads” (as in office is downloading now) to the plural form in Swedish, so it reads grammatically incorrectly as if there’s multiple downloads going on. Very professional, lmao
This reminds me of a similar experience.
The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let’s not talk about it) have its CLI
--helpmessage machine translated in some languages.That’s already evil enough, but the real problem is that they’ve blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command’s flag names.
So if you’re Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what’s the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I’ve said it’s machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that “–分布” is actually “–distribution”? It’s “发行版” in Chinese and “ディストリビューション” in Japanese.
At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes “translated” is worse than raw text in its original language.
Related links if you like to see people suffer:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4111
PS: for the original post, my stance is “please don’t make your software interface different for different languages”. It’s the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people’s commands different.
It’s the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a “translation” subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts it to the user’s language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.
Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn’t recognize the English version when your language isn’t set to English.
God. Damnit.
This is so bullshit that EVERY major datasheet application works the same way. Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc…
All of them have their functions translated and it makes me have to search for tables of equivalency between them. Fuck that.
Even LibreOffice? Is there any variant which uses a sane format?
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Oh god the fucking Excel formulas.
I live in Quebec, and all the excels are in French.
@hstde @Spore Even better, the alphabetical index of function names was generated in English first and then translated, meaning the documentation looks like a scrambled mess in any other language because it is alphabetized according to what the English equivalent would be. #excel
I’ve learned excel in middle and high school in my native language, I absolutely fucking hate the translations… excel-translator.de coming in clutch.
Just wait until you’re working with different time/date formats, like, god forbid, sharing such documents to someone who has their Windows time/date format set differently than you have.
Or try having numbers or strings that look like they could be dates.
That would be unfortunate!
So true… Not only sometimes it makes it hard to find the translated function name (especially since they are adding a lot of new functions) but there are quite often longer… For instance in French you go to a simple ifs to si.conditions…
The Microsoft Office installer has translated “Office downloads” (as in office is downloading now) to the plural form in Swedish, so it reads grammatically incorrectly as if there’s multiple downloads going on. Very professional, lmao