Ask Slashdot: Do Most Programmers Understand the English Language? 330
Shadoefax writes "I have been developing Firefox add-ons for several years and all so far submitted to AMO have been translated (localized) into several different languages. My latest add-on is geared more to the web developer as opposed to the average web browsing user. (It is a utility for examining JavaScript Objects and their methods and properties.) By my reckoning, I believe JavaScript, HTML, CSS and the DOM are all pretty much designed to be easily understood by English language readers. My question is this: Can I assume that most programmers understand the English language well enough that I may forego localizing the UI? While this will save time, effort and bloat, it may also restrict the usage of (what I hope) is a useful tool for developers."
Reader Cenan provides an interesting response from the perspective of a developer for whom English is not a first language:"I am a developer, and happen to speak english as a second language. As much as I find it's helpful to my users to have the program's text information presented to the user in their native tongue, I really hate it if the tools I use speak to me in my native language.
Some vital parts of exceptions tend to get mangled when being translated, and you can't search for relevant information regarding whatever obscure failure you're experiencing unless you translate it back. And Google Translate doesn't do very well with technical terms.
It is especially unhelpful when the exception has been re-thrown from somewhere deep down, and is being presented with some parts translated, some parts not (I'm looking at YOU Microsoft; "Was this exception text helpful to you?" ( ) No ( ) No (x) Hell No!)"
Reader tlambert recommends such a tool only if it doesn't have end-user exposure:
Google translate will do the job well enough for non-English speakers, and almost every programmer is an English speaker in any case - or used to Google translations of CS technical papers, in any case.
If there's actually UI being exposed to an end user rather than a program, then of course there should be some way to localize the end user exposed content, although you should expect that most users won't end up using it, and will opt for English instead, unless it's for data input for text data for storage and retrieval.
For better or for worse, the primary language for IT is English. I generally think it's for the better, since there are concepts that the English language is better suited to representing, either natively, or with coined words/terms/phrases and/or "borrow words". For the last, French is probably the worst language, since they have "language police" whose sole reason for existing is to prevent "borrow words" entering the French language and "contaminating" it. The next most comparable language for "purity" is Japanese, which was represented by Matsumata Ohta when he attempted to prevent the C-J-K unification of the Unicode standard, and eventually got his way by pushing another Unicode code page so that you could, for example, grep -v the Chinese text out of a Chinese textbook on Japanese poetry. Double the storage size for a wchar_t, just so that they could keep the languages distinct in both encoding and rendering, rather than just in rendering.
Reader dejanc responds with an analogy:
"Being a programmer and not understanding English is like being a historian writing papers on the Roman Empire and not knowing Latin. There is a lot of programmers out there who don't understand English or are not comfortable with it, but as a rule, they are not that good.
You have to learn our profession somehow. Yeah, you can learn C or Java from a book written in your native language, but most APIs out there are documented only in English. If you don't speak English, then your resources are severely limited.
That being said, if you can do localization, do it. Localization is usually very easy and doesn't require much bloat. You can have volunteers do the actual translation, you just need to get the strings ready, so it shouldn't be more than a couple of hours of your time.
Some talented programmers are just not talented for learning languages, or prefer to have UI in their own language. They are the ones who Google Translate documentation online, so you'll be doing them a favor."
The standards are published in English (Score:5, Informative)
If you collaborating with non-native English speakers, although, you should be careful to not assume that the ability to read or even write English guarantees that they will be comfortable discussing ideas orally in English.
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that the majority of web programmer reads RFCs and the HTML5 spec.
It's not unreasonable to think some people in less anglocentric parts just know tag names as character sequences rather than words (and science backs up the fact that arbitrary character strings works as commands when you're used to them).
Even if they do know the meanings of every word used in HTML/CSS markup, they still might have no idea how to conjugate "to be", much less read english prose.
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Informative)
As a French speaker, I can guarantee that most programmers here understand little more than the basic programming terms.
Most of the specs have been translated into French, so that's not a problem.
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And that works out fine as long as you don't need the ones that aren't and aren't worried about what gets lost in translation.
And as long as you don't care about being limited to mostly just French speaking programmers.
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But as far as the 'support' people...no, the majority are NOT English speakers, even if they do claim their name is "Kevin".
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Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Insightful)
But it doesn't change the fundamental reality: if you can't read the documentation, you've already put a limit on how effective you are.
It's not your fault. I get it. Internationalization needs to be more prevalent. English-centric technical and implementation biases probably need to be fixed.
Nonetheless. These are the facts, here and now. The majority of the Internet, and the majority of the cosmos of software, is implemented in English. Adapt, or be less effective until the world catches up to you.
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I always appreciate a GUI and messages translated in my mother tongue when available and I consider this should be encouraged as much as possible. It's not that difficult to show respect to others.
Are you seriously saying everyone should translate everything to every language, that it's *easy* to do so, and that you're *disrespectful* if you don't?
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Funny)
As a French speaker, I can guarantee that most programmers here understand little more than the basic programming terms.
As an English speaker, I have observed the same thing here.
English Melonfarmer, do you speak it?! (Score:5, Funny)
As a French speaker, I can guarantee that most programmers here understand little more than the basic programming terms. Most of the specs have been translated into French, so that's not a problem.
Vincent: And you know what they call a ClassCastException in France?
Jules: They don't call it a ClassCastException?
Vincent: No man, they got the socialist system. They wouldn't know what the f*** a "class" is.
Jules: Then what do they call it?
Vincent: They call it a RoyaleWithCheeseException.
Jules: A RoyaleWithCheeseException. What do they call a NullPointerException?
Vincent: Well, a NullPointerException's a NullPointerException, but they call it un NullPointerException.
Jules: Un NullPointerException. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call the spaceship operator?
Vincent: I dunno, I didn't do any Perl programming over there.
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Vincent: Well, a NullPointerException's a NullPointerException, but they call it un NullPointerException.
Actually, exception is feminine, so we say "une NullPointerException" ;-)
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Interesting)
A true IT professional should be able to read technical documents in English, which is the de facto standard language for CS
One complaining about not being able to read English, needs to be told he'll be doing a great favor to himself by improving his english level.
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Informative)
This is interesting... I've studied in Germany and not only were most of CS students pretty fluent in English there, one of the first thing we were told at the University was "English is not a foreign language for a programmer or CS student".
Good English knowledge is also a requirement at many companies as they often work with foreign colleagues, partners or customers in one form or another. And that is more or less the rule as German economy is very export-oriented (and English is de-facto lingua franca nowadays).
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It's probably worth, if nothing else, considering it as a matter of good practice.
The submitter is under no obligation to provide multiple localizations(which can be an arduous and nontrivial task, combining the thrill of tech writing with the skills of a translator); but building an application such that somebody providing a localization for it involves major surgery is pretty...retro.
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard anecdotes [c2.com] that speakers of some languages (e.g. French) actually prefer programming languages written in English, because (a) the more regular grammar results in more predictable/compact function/keyword names, and (b) more transparent syntax... or at least a foreign language that abstracts away all of the questions about how to decline the verb in a function name.
For many languages, something as obtuse as Perligata [monash.edu.au] would be required to generate a coherent mapping to their native tongue; with English, native speakers simply accept the broken grammar and move on, and non-native speakers just treat the grammar as a black box, like an English speaker regards the Italian terms embedded in music notation.
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I wouldn't describe English grammar as more "regular" than French. Maybe more flexible, put it in flattering terms.
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Interesting)
From the perspective of someone coming up with programming language keywords, they most certainly are. Not in syntax necessarily, but definitely in declension: the verb forms in particular are much simpler.
For example, in particular, the imperative and infinitive are identical. In English, "is file open" and "open file" use the same word for "open". In French you'd use "ouvert" for the first case and "ouvre" for the second, from the infinitive "ouvrir". And these endings aren't consistent across verbs—only very rarely do you see irregular English verbs in code; "to be" almost always appears as "is". Having to use separate keywords for function names (actions) and properties (predicative clauses and adjectives) puts a substantial cognitive load on the programmer.
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Only a noob needs a French programming language.
Certainly you mean a 'nouveaub'.
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Only a noob needs a French programming language.
Certainly you mean a 'nouveaub'.
Come now, this is the 'texting' age: 'nuvob'
there's no french word for Bezier Curve (Score:3)
... oh wait...
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And when you say "science", you mean the long-running Bell Labs experiment called Unix, right?
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R F C means "Request for Comment". Sound slike a proposal you publish, and you hope other people of the same profession give usefull comments.
And the RFC process results in an RFC that is the standard for how things are supposed to work on the Internet. You can argue that it is just a "request for comment", but it is much more than the name implies, and anyone who programs things that interact with the Internet should know that.
For example, there is an RFC that specifies exactly what characters are valid in the local part of an email address. These "programmers" are substituting their empirical experience in what they've seen in email addresse
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:4, Interesting)
Concerning translation of development tools, I prefer to have the tools in english, but I know people who really prefer to have them in their native language.
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I still find discussing ideas in english a lot more painful than in my native language.
That (the curse of L2 competency) is to be expected in virtually all cases of starting learning a language past the age of, say, five or so.
Re:The standards are published in English (Score:5, Funny)
I still find discussing ideas in english a lot more painful than in my native language.
My native language is English and I find discussing ideas with my coworkers and boss painful too.
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English is the main language of commerce.
Those who speak their local language and no English tend (The word tend means the masses lean in that way, their are exceptions a lot of them) to be rather uneducated. Now these people are not necessarily going to be using programming tools too often.
That isn't to say if you make your program for that language as well they wouldn't like it better as it is using the language they are more familiar with but I doubt you will see a big shift in usage.
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Despite your claims, we're not all uneducated buffoons, and some of us actually know how to spell Commonwealth.
As a Portuguese software developer, I can assure you that while our average proficiency levels in English are admittedly low, the levels among the younger generations are significantly better.
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No (Score:2)
Or perhaps more accurately, no, or at least not fluently.
You might be able to presume that a majority of programmers have encountered english before, and may have a very basic understanding of it. But that's a far cry from having a practical and functional understanding of it.
Do programmers undertand English? (Score:5, Funny)
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Seriously: does the OP even read Slashdot?
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I agree with you completely. I speak well English good!
call me selfish (Score:2)
Re:call me selfish (Score:5, Informative)
I always tell people that it doesn't make sense to write papers (or software) in polish language because only a minuscule part of world population uses it.
Obviously things should be written in Reverse Polish
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You're trolling, but I'll bite.
You're selfish.
By your logic, Chinese or even Spanish would be a better choice than English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers [wikipedia.org]
From a purely practical standpoint it doesn't make very much sense to expect people to author something nontrivial in a language they aren't fluent in. It makes far more sense for the paper to be written in a language in which the author can effectively communicate their ideas. It can then be translated by someone who is good at translating into another language for a broader audience if need be. Just because a smart person doesn't speak English fluently does not mean they don't have ideas worth communicating. That's ridiculous.
He's not trolling, that is just the way things are. While there are more Chinese or Spanish native speakers, there are more English speakers in total. Why? Because when people get to school their first choice of a second language is English.
Just delete "native" from your wiki search and read that article.
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I speak very good English (Score:4)
Credits partly to John Cleese.
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I speak very good English. I learned it from a man page.
If you're a foreigner, chance are that you no speak English very well [youtube.com] anyway!
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There are cases where it is actually genuine. I have a hell of a hard time understanding French (my mother tongue) with accent I'm not used to. Now that I live in a foreign country, I even get nervous when people try to speak to me in French because I'm afraid I won't understand them although I should.
That must be some overspecialisation of my French ear because for example, I have no problem handling accent, even strong one in English.
Just gave a talk in China in English (Score:2)
You may consider making localizable strings for the UI contained in an INI or other file though and be able to check if
Yep, this is the right place to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is it really that hard? (Score:2)
How hard is it to store all the UI strings in an editable file? Wouldn't that also make your life easier if you decided to tweak the English version?
As for your code being hard to read, name the strings after their English content: $UI_Text_File_Menu_Save
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Part of it is static strings, but some other things might require more complex processing. The internationalization features of android are quite large and definitely more complicated than switching strings.
Though as a first cut, that's probably good enough.
It is harder than you think. (Score:2)
printf("Copied %n file%s\n", n_files, n_files > 1 ? "s" : "");
There are languages with more than two grammatical numbers. There are languages that use different word order with different numbers. You need to redesign your simple and easy printf statement to accommodate them, and the outcome is bound to be anything but simple and easy.
Yes/No dialogs (Score:3)
Finnish does not have a direct translations for "yes" and "no;"
You're not supposed to use yes/no dialogs anyway. For example: "Shall the file be closed? Close - Cancel" or "May the file run? Run - Cancel". Or does the button phrasing practice [gnome.org] apply only to English?
Headline Fail (Score:2)
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Thanks for the meme, QT!
English, Motherfucker, do you speak it? - YouTube [youtube.com]
Programming, Motherfucker - Do you speak it? [programmin...fucker.com]
Design, motherfucker, do you speak it? | Design for life [nitrodesign.com]
JavaScript, Motherfucker, Do You Speak It! [nelm.io]
YTMND - ELVISH MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT [ytmnd.com] Autoplay heads up for this one.
A: (Score:5, Informative)
Not always a good idea for developer tools (Score:5, Informative)
I am a developer, and happen to speak english as a second language. As much as I find it's helpful to my users to have the program's text information presented to the user in their native tongue, I really hate it if the tools I use speak to me in my native language.
Some vital parts of exceptions tend to get mangled when being translated, and you can't search for relevant information regarding whatever obscure failure you're experiencing unless you translate it back. And Google Translate doesn't do very well with technical terms.
It is especially unhelpful when the exception has been re-thrown from somewhere deep down, and is being presented with some parts translated, some parts not (I'm looking at YOU Microsoft; "Was this exception text helpful to you?" ( ) No ( ) No (x) Hell No!)
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La memoria no pudo ser "written"
What?
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Amen to that.
What I really really truely LOATHE is when a program, even when you download the English version, insists on serving you localized stuff. Especially since a lot of open source developers seem to get a hard-on by making up new translations for something.
Gimp for instance, insists on speaking Danish, with everything translated, which makes it pretty much impossible to use, since the Danish words makes absolutely no sense to anyone except the guy who did the translation. (For those who are in the
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I have once suffered a terrible, traumatic experience: I plopped my ass at a machine in a lab, and tried reading perl man pages. Turns out, these man pages have been translated to Polish. The last time I checked, Polish was my native language, and I'm not that shabby at perl either. Yet I couldn't understand a single sentence. Finally, I ssh-ed into some place that had man pages in English, and breathed in relief.
It happened 14 or so years ago, yet I still haven't recovered. Every time I see messages t
No (Score:2)
Let demand drive the translation (Score:2)
German comments (Score:3)
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LibreOffice has mostly expunged the German now (or so they claim in their 4.0 changelogs).
If it doesn't have end-user exposure, no (Score:2, Interesting)
If it doesn't have end-user exposure, no. Google translate will do the job well enough for non-English speakers, and almost every programmer is an English speaker in any case - or used to Google translations of CS technical papers, in any case.
If there's actually UI being exposed to an end user rather than a program, then of course there should be some way to localize the end user exposed content, although you should expect that most users won't end up using it, and will opt for English instead, unless it'
Hell I've worked with Americans (Score:3)
Good ones do (Score:3)
Being a programmer and not understanding English is like being a historian writing papers on the Roman Empire and not knowing Latin. There is a lot of programmers out there who don't understand English or are not comfortable with it, but as a rule, they are not that good.
You have to learn our profession somehow. Yeah, you can learn C or Java from a book written in your native language, but most APIs out there are documented only in English. If you don't speak English, then your resources are severely limited.
That being said, if you can do localization, do it. Localization is usually very easy and doesn't require much bloat. You can have volunteers do the actual translation, you just need to get the strings ready, so it shouldn't be more than a couple of hours of your time.
Some talented programmers are just not talented for learning languages, or prefer to have UI in their own language. They are the ones who Google Translate documentation online, so you'll be doing them a favor.
Not quite... (Score:2)
Most of the stuff written during the Roman Empire and by Romans, eg. the stuff we have that you can still read, is written in Greek and not Latin. All the papers about Rome and by Romans are written in Greek. You actually can be a pretty good historian of the Roman Empire and not know Latin. While the common people spoke Latin, they didn't write. And we don't have their writing. Only the elite wrote and they all wrote Greek.
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I also subscribe to this view. A decent understanding of English should be considered as much a requirement for a programmer as the ability to write a string reversing function. At times I get into arguments with Russian programmers on the subject, some of them believe English should not be required or considered the de-facto standard.
Best as I can tell, it's safe to assume programmers will know English if their own language is relatively small. My native language is small, has a few introductory-level prog
That's a good question, let's ask them... (Score:3)
.... Hey Programmers, what does the following string say in English?
"01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111 00100000 01010111 01001111 01010010 01001100 01000100"
Re:That's a good question, let's ask them... (Score:5, Funny)
"Zero one zero zero one zero zero zero, zero one zero zero zero one zero one, zero one zero zero one one zero zero, zero one zero zero one one zero zero, zero one zero zero one one one one, zero zero one zero zero zero zero zero, zero one zero one zero one one one , zero one zero zero one one one one, zero one zero one zero zero one zero, zero one zero zero one one zero zero, zero one zero zero zero one zero zero.", duh.
Worst hello world evaaaar.
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It was meant to be funny. =p
I know the English term. (Score:5, Informative)
But I can't figure out what the translator has used to name it in my native language.
So from one perspective - not using English in the tool you use may cause more confusion than help. Especially for programmers.
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My Experience... (Score:3)
Anderstend Inglish lengage? (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:2)
It's not just programming. (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, if you want to get anything done, you do it in English.
Some day another language may replace English as the lingua franca like French replaced German and Latin. When you have multiple cultures trying to do things, you need to have a common language to do it in.
None of this should surprise anyone.
--
BMO
Mixing languages (Score:2)
I find mixing my native language (dutch) and english during development only helps to confuse things since pretty much all terminology is english.
When given the option, I always use english language versions of technical software (some software insists on showing me (badly) translated dutch, though). I even comment my code in english if the entire front-end is dutch only.
For office software and such, I prefer my native tongue.
English preferred, depending on your locale though (Score:2)
I am a developer too, and English is my second language (I am from Egypt, and Arabic is my first language). When I learned programming, it was in English using English text books and magazines, ...etc, whether BASIC or COBOL (long time ago).
Once, after many years in development, I was supporting a place that got a software package developed in Morocco. French is the lingua technica there. So, the source code was totally unitelligible to all of us except one of the Moroccan developers who worked for the comp
if you're not using localization (Score:2)
Nordic perspective (Score:2)
Wait, what? (Score:2)
You should have qualified the question better. Did you intend to ask "Do most US programmers understand English?".
If that was your question, I would say "to some degree" but with the large number of immigrants and visa holders working in the US there would be a percentage that does not.
When you leave the US, it should make little difference. RFCs, APIs, Specs, Docs, etc.. are all translated to the native language. Larger companies spend healthy sums of money to make their products available in other lang
Fun with i18n (Score:2)
A few thoughts:
I was told by former colleagues from Sweden and Belgium that given the choice between a crappy translation and the original English, they'd take the original English. A good translation, on the other hand, would be noticed. And respected.
Tech docs in English, please. Unless you're Arianespace or Airbus.
As others have pointed out, strings grow in most other languages.
To smoke out i18n issues one former employer used Pig Latin. YMMV.
...laura
Well, the words are English... just wrong (Score:3)
I'm sorry, but programming jargon like "regular expressions (pattern substitution), service packs (bug fixes), binding (pulling information from elsewhere), tuples (an ordered list), virtual void functions (as close to masturbation as it gets in programming) and even web browsing" seemed more designed to obfuscate and inflate the self importance of programmers than convey useful information to anyone who wanted to understand what computing was about.
In contrast, loops, if-then statements, variables and constants all were pretty clear and made immediate sense
Non-English XML (Score:2)
I've seen XML with tags in Japanese. Tags in large-character set languages are troublesome. When text has to match exactly, full Unicode is a pain. There are homoglyphs; you can't tell by looking if there's a match.
There are huge headaches associated with Unicode URLs and domains. There are complex rules for avoiding domains that look visually the same but are different to DNS, and trouble getting the registrars to enforce them. Although they're fully supported by browsers today, they're not widely used
Speaking for German language, yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Every German speaker who studies IT learns enough English to read technical stuff. Many - maybe even most - prefer to use English documentation and tools.
I will go out on a limb and say that this is probably true for every Western European country except France.
The French make a real effort to prevent their language from becoming "contaminated" with foreign terms. Where every other language has just adopted computer terms as they were invented, the French have specifically gone to the trouble of inventing different words that sound more French. To take just one example: consider the word "byte". The Spanish say "byte", the Germans say "byte", the Italians say "byte", the Dutch say "byte", but the French say "octet". This is annoying, but really, it's their problem, they've done it to themselves.
The Good Ones Do (Score:3)
Speaking English as a second language and having worked with several developers who speak English as their second language (if at all), I am tempted to say "all the good ones speak English."
Almost everything related to software development is described in English. It may be described in other languages as well, but I don't know any other language in which as much information is available. The APIs are generally based on English. Diagnostics are pretty much always available in English. Most questions and answers on the Internet are probably in English. English is not that hard to learn, and you will get a lot of benefit from just being able to read it. Really, if you do software development, you should learn English.
Most software developers I know are good enough at English that they can at least make themselves understood. Those who don't can at least read computer English. Without that, they would be seriously handicapped. Is that an audience you want to cater to? There may be good reasons to do so, but I personally would rather spend my time on other things.
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Man, am I about to save you some time: http://support.shopify.com/customer/portal/articles/75326-how-do-i-add-google-translate-to-my-website- [shopify.com] . Embed it, and create your page to work with it & let google handle the translation for you.
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Embed it, and create your page to work with it & let google handle the translation for you.
Google Translate is better than nothing, and much better than it was a few years ago, but is still no where near the level of a human translator. Go to a website written in Russian or Chinese, and translate it into English. You will likely be able to get the gist of it, but the grammar will be atrocious, and there will be some glaring (and often hilarious) errors.
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Yep, as far as international goes, you want to create websites in languages that draw you the most business, so http://www.playonline.com/ [playonline.com] comes to mind, pick a set language to view the site, those are all different websites, but http://www.aahrpp.org/ [aahrpp.org] uses google translate. It's a matter of resources and budget, as well as need. If you don't have any Chinese customers, you'd be throwing money in a hole by making a Chinese site. Embedding google translate hasn't hurt anybody though, outside of the 1 sec
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Google Translate is great for general knowledge, informational websites like wikipedia, Sally's blog about her puppy, or whatever. I use it all the time, and helps me make sense of the large Russian portion of Livejournal.
But Google Translate is completely useless when it comes to navigating foreign travel sites. It just completely fails at understanding a website with time tables and ticket prices, different classes of seats etc. I've tried many times and failed many times to buy bus or airplane ti
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Google Translate can hopefully let someone glean the basic sense of some text, but its output is nowhere close to being easy to read. And as for grammatical correctness... oy vey.
It makes a non-terrible job of translating into English, but for example when translating into Polish, it tends to produce sentences akin to those in caveman jokes: "Ugh be strong use computer". It's about that bad.
Re:Pay the penalty where it is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a native German speaker, let me share a universal UI idea with you, if you even see a remote chance of having your software internationalized: leave enough room on all your controls so that translated text fits nicely in it. A very simple example: English: "Cancel". German: "Abbrechen". Where "Cancel" fits nicely, "Abbrechen" will be cut off, forcefully word-wrapped or whatever.
That said and to answer the OP's question: I'd assume enough knowledge of the English language from programmers. If you try to label your add-on with not too sophisticated English, it should be accessable enough for the vast majority of programmers.
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Not always possible. I once has a string that said "double". It was translated into about 20 languages just fine- until it went to polish where the string from the translater was a 16 character long word. There wasn't enough room on the control, or even in the control's parent to make it fit. We ended up rebasing just that language to use "2" instead of double. Always leave some extra room, but understand that we can't work miracles, and that translaters can't use completely different terms guessing w
INBD. let German absorb an English word. (Score:3)
I wish at least the programmers and coders will be less parochial and be more catholic and be open to words/ideas/concepts "not invented
Subject-verb agreement (Score:2)
So if you keep an eye toward, "what would it take for a native speaker to translate this," then you are doing enough.
So what are best practices when names of objects in your interface have to be declined as nouns or conjugated as verbs?
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Good question. I would say the best practice is to avoid those situations in the first place. When you're dynamically constructing human-readable strings, it's hard enough to keep the shit together with just one language.
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I would say the best practice is to avoid those situations in the first place.
How would you recommend "to avoid those situations in the first place" when expressing an example that Anonymous Coward gave [slashdot.org]: "Found [1701] matching words in [English]"? Or consider ordinals, where English has 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ..., 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, ..., 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, ... 31st, ..., 100th, 101st, ...
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In Quebec, however, it would be *illegal* to use English-only software in the workplace. All software must be available in French. This applies not only to any sort of government job, but to all companies within Quebec.
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I think that every Quebecois should be subject to the ridicule of a Parisian over the "purity" of their French.
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BMO
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English is used just because while French has to be legislated.
I remember one time hearing that all TSN and CBC hockey broadcasts had to have a French SAP audio channel, but the RDS broadcasts didn't have to have an English one. I asked a Canadian about this and he said, "Because we don't care about French TV."
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I've done a bit of traveling and found that in most of Europe its the opposite- almost everyone I talked to in eastern europe spoke at least basic English. Many of them were fluent. They teach it in elementary schools out there.
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It's true for all languages, not just English.
That said, different languages loan different words. E.g. take the Latin word "omnibus" - if we're talking about the vehicle, then it's "bus" in English, and "autobus" in Russian - so far, so good. But where English used the same word for data transfer connection, in Russian it's a different and completely unrelated word (that isn't even rooted in Latin). So if a Russian programmer would try to read an English programming text just by looking at the roots, he wo