What users say versus what they mean
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
If the email says "this is placeholder text for layout, ignore the text"
If the email says that, then it doesn't know how to say it properly.
- What is "this" you are speaking about?
- What is "placeholder"? Why use big words?
- What is "layout"? More buzzwords?
- Ignore the text? OK... oh you meant that other text, not the one I just read?
Just use human language and say "please ignore the presentation text for now" and be done with it.
Now you’ve completely lost it.
So I’m not allowed to use more than two short sentences because people are too fucking lazy to read more thanthe subject linethe first two sentences but I also can only use words a 3 year old knows? And that is not their fault they’re fucking idiots?What is this “ignore” you’re speaking of, is that Latin again?
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@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
I also can only use words a 3 year old knows?
Oh? You espeted intewwigence fwom someonye wike him? He can' communyicate vewy weww, you have to speak his wanguage.
Edit: Reading it in OWO makes so much more sense now!
@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
@PleegWat said in What users say versus what they mean:
Are you replacing that placeholder by a singular or plural word? Masculine of feminine? Does it start with a vowel? If it is a number, is it 0, 1, 2, 3-20, more than 20, or a fraction in probably a half dozen potentially different buckets?
Oh come on fow fuck sake you guys awe nyot supposed to wwite a fucking nyuvw ^w^
Just teww me the nyame of the goddamn fiwe which you can't find/open/save and whewe awe you twying to do it.
But nyo, instead of having a usefuw message with pawametews you wouwd wathew nyot have any pawametews because you can't wwite in nyatuwaw fucking wanguage. How does that make sense? Hint: it fucking doesn't.
Heww even Windows sewvices suppowt pawametwized messages in mowe than onye wanguage since wike fowevew, how is that a pwobwem aww of a sudden? ^w^ ?
@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
If the email says "this is placeholder text for layout, ignore the text"
If the emaiw says that, then it doesn't knyow how to say it pwopewwy.
- What is "this" you awe speaking about?
- What is "pwacehowdew"? Why use big wowds?
- What is "wayout"? Mowe buzzwowds?
- Ignyowe the text? OK... oh you meant that othew text, nyot the onye I just wead?
Just use human wanguage and say "pwease ignyowe the pwesentation text fow nyow" and be donye with it.
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@Deadfast said in What users say versus what they mean:
For example, "An error had occurred while copying the file" would have to be structured as "While copying a file, an error had occurred" in Czech in order to sound natural.
I see quite a lot of that wrong order translation in Dutch-language software, especially “community”-translated things like forum software. Things like Om te beginnen, klik hier (“To begin, click here”) instead of Klik hier om te beginnen (“Click here to begin”). In English, neither sounds wrong, but in Dutch, the first one is awkward and shows the translator didn’t actually think about the translation.
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
shows the translator didn’t actually think about the translation.
Some people think even less about translation than computers, so...
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@Tsaukpaetra I’ve long ago stopped being surprised by poor translations, largely due to the quality of subtitles on Dutch TV — and that’s by people employed by actual translation services that get paid for their effort. Community- or fan-translated works are often worse, because the professional translators at least make far fewer grammatical errors or construct awkward sentences.
Come to think of it, they’re often both bad in different ways:
- Mass-media translations tend to get technical terms wrong but are readable and contain few linguistic errors.
- Software translations (non-professional ones at least) tend to have errors in grammar and employ poor phrasing, but translate technical terms correctly (or not at all, which IMHO is often as bad as getting them wrong, especially if the established term is normally translated or it’s aimed at a non-technical audience).
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@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
Now you’ve completely lost it.
So I’m not allowed to use more than two short sentences because people are too fucking lazy to read more thanthe subject linethe first two sentences but I also can only use words a 3 year old knows? And that is not their fault they’re fucking idiots?You're to use words of one syllable. Or less.
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
or not at all, which IMHO is often as bad as getting them wrong, especially if the established term is normally translated or it’s aimed at a non-technical audience
But at least it's googleable. Unlike C# compiler errors when you install non-English .Net Framework...
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@Gąska That’s a benefit mainly to those of us who would turn to a search engine to resolve the problem. Someone like my mother, on the other hand, is unlikely to realise that “Desktop” refers to the thing the computer calls “Bureaublad” and so wouldn’t know what to do with instructions that use the English-language term when she probably would if it used the translated name.
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska That’s a benefit mainly to those of us who would turn to a search engine to resolve the problem. Someone like my mother, on the other hand, is unlikely to realise that
...there is anything she can do, and will ignore the message box entirely no matter what it says.
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
I see quite a lot of that wrong order translation in Dutch-language software, especially “community”-translated things like forum software. Things like Om te beginnen, klik hier (“To begin, click here”) instead of Klik hier om te beginnen (“Click here to begin”). In English, neither sounds wrong, but in Dutch, the first one is awkward and shows the translator didn’t actually think about the translation.
To begin with,"Click here" is an abomination to begin with. If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text, and if it is, a label with "Begin" is just fine.But yes, anyone who thinks stuff like this was trivial should read the documentation for the gettext library.
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@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text
May I introduce you to "flat design"?
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@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text
May I introduce you to "flat design"?
Case in point for really-doing-it-wrong is the Chrome certificate error. Clicking on the obvious 'more information' button does not give you more information. Clicking on the flat error-text gives you more information. Whoever designed that should be strangled with their own intestines.
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@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
Clicking on the obvious 'more information' button does not give you more information.
Asking the inevitable: what does it do?
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@kazitor said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
Clicking on the obvious 'more information' button does not give you more information.
Asking the inevitable: what does it do?
It takes you to a generic help webpage that isn't any help at all. Clicking the text actually gives you information about the current error, such as there's a domain-mismatch or the cert has expired etc...
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@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
To begin with,"Click here" is an abomination to begin with. If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text, and if it is, a label with "Begin" is just fine.Agreed, but I used it because it was the first example that came to mind, and it has the advantage of being largely intelligible to the English-speaking world too.
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@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska That’s a benefit mainly to those of us who would turn to a search engine to resolve the problem. Someone like my mother, on the other hand, is unlikely to realise that
...there is anything she can do, and will ignore the message box entirely no matter what it says.
I wasn’t talking about message boxes but instructions like, “Double-click the Foobar icon on your desktop to start the program.”¹ If you translate that but keep the word “desktop” in English,² chances are you’ll confuse people who won’t associate that word with their desktop because their non-English OS uses a different term for it.
¹ WTF would you even have shortcut icons on your desktop? Apparently, people do, and even worse, software makers put them there without even asking.
² Because a lot ofcomputer geekspeople in general these days refer to things by their English names even when there’s a completely accepted translation.
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@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
Unlike C# compiler errors when you install non-English .Net Framework
That's why all error messages from the C# compiler, and all the other development tools, have numbers that you can search instead.
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska That’s a benefit mainly to those of us who would turn to a search engine to resolve the problem. Someone like my mother, on the other hand, is unlikely to realise that
...there is anything she can do, and will ignore the message box entirely no matter what it says.
I wasn’t talking about message boxes but instructions like, “Double-click the Foobar icon on your desktop to start the program.”
Instructions like that usually isn't what you google up fragments of to fix your problems. It feels like we're having two different conversations at the same time, and getting confused which points are about which topic. So to untangle this mess and make myself clear - translating all GUI texts and instructions so they use local words is good idea and obvious obviousity and not doing that is completely wrong. Except for error messages, sometimes.
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@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
Unlike C# compiler errors when you install non-English .Net Framework
That's why all error messages from the C# compiler, and all the other development tools, have numbers that you can search instead.
Not all errors have them, and not all numbers are well documented. And since we're talking about compiler errors specifically - having them translated is E‑X‑T‑R‑E‑M‑E‑L‑Y inconvenient.
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@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
Unlike C# compiler errors when you install non-English .Net Framework
That's why all error messages from the C# compiler, and all the other development tools, have numbers that you can search instead.
'Sfunny you should mention this. The first time I ever ran across this concept was IBM's Pascal compiler for PC-DOS.
Er, in 1987.
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@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such
No, that's not Modern UI. Didn't you up get the memo that in
$currentYear
it is illegal to have buttons and other interactible UI controls stand out?Edit: 'd...
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
you’ll confuse people who won’t associate that word with their desktop because their non-English OS uses a different term for it.
You can do even better than that: I don't remember the words exactly, but the French version of Windows 10 use two different translations for something that relates to app pinning, depending on where you look.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
Unlike C# compiler errors when you install non-English .Net Framework
That's why all error messages from the C# compiler, and all the other development tools, have numbers that you can search instead.
'Sfunny you should mention this. The first time I ever ran across this concept was IBM's Pascal compiler for PC-DOS.
Er, in 1987.
It comes from way earlier when the mainframes ruled the world. One teacher at the university mentioned back when they had a mainframe it only printed the numbers—because it didn't have the memory to waste on error messages—and there was a bookshelf of manuals where you'd go look up what the particular error code meant. Microsoft still sticks to the practice, though they do include the descriptions in the programs now.
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@Zerosquare
So, one translation if you're looking in Quebec and another if you're looking in RealFrance?
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@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text
May I introduce you to "flat design"?
Case in point for really-doing-it-wrong is
theChromecertificate error. Clicking on the obvious 'more information' button does not give you more information. Clicking on the flat error-text gives you more information. Whoever designed that should be strangled with their own intestines.FTFY. Also
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@Gąska The funny part about this is that DLL/Desktop Application projects get compilation messages in Visual Studio's language, while web projects get compilation messages in the .Net Framework's language.
Back in 2005, I vowed never to use a French version of Visual Studio due to how poorly translated the compilation errors were. Now that I have a few web projects in my solutions, I can see that it's still the case.
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@Medinoc said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gąska The funny part about this is that DLL/Desktop Application projects get compilation messages in Visual Studio's language, while web projects get compilation messages in the .Net Framework's language.
I've very definitely had Polish messages with C# desktop app in English VS2010. I never tried non-English .Net Framework or VS since then, so can't say if it got better.
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@Gąska Maybe I'm mistaken and instead of Visual vs .Net, it's .Net vs Windows (I noticed too late my latest Windows install on my work PC was in French).
Also, to this day, the file rights "Read attributes" and "Read extended attributes" are still translated respectively as "Attributes of reading" and "Reading of extended attributes" on French localizations of Windows.
Note: It may not be obvious, but the latter translation is correct. The French language likes to nounify verbs whereas the English language likes to verbify nouns.
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@Medinoc kinda related - I found a wonderful website some time ago that lets you look up any text anywhere in any MS product and see how it's written in other languages. A really useful thing when you get this kind of issues; I wish I knew about it back when I was having these problems. It also works for translating Excel function names.
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@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
One teacher at the university mentioned back when they had a mainframe […] there was a bookshelf of manuals where you'd go look up what the particular error code meant.
We still had one of those for the first couple of years of my degree. Fun machine, but seriously broken in some critical ways. I wasn't very sorry to see it gone.
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@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
Microsoft still sticks to the practice, though they do include the descriptions in the programs now.
The descriptions are especially nice when the error code is the wrong one.
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@Gąska Or when a constant has been repurposed, like SeChangeNotifyPrivilege becoming the "bypass traverse checking" privilege.
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@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
It feels like we're having two different conversations
You are, yes. I was talking about poor translations in general, that create awkward sentences and use terms in
the original languageEnglish when there’s no need, and you interpreted that as being about messages (errors or otherwise) you might want to google to try and find out how to resolve a problem.
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@Zerosquare said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
you’ll confuse people who won’t associate that word with their desktop because their non-English OS uses a different term for it.
You can do even better than that: I don't remember the words exactly, but the French version of Windows 10 use two different translations for something that relates to app pinning, depending on where you look.
That fits perfectly well with Windows 10 having two different places in which you have to look for various settings that pertain to the same thing.
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@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
It comes from way earlier when the mainframes ruled the world. One teacher at the university mentioned back when they had a mainframe it only printed the numbers—because it didn't have the memory to waste on error messages—and there was a bookshelf of manuals where you'd go look up what the particular error code meant.
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@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
@kazitor said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
Clicking on the obvious 'more information' button does not give you more information.
Asking the inevitable: what does it do?
It takes you to a generic help webpage that isn't any help at all. Clicking the text actually gives you information about the current error, such as there's a domain-mismatch or the cert has expired etc...
The problem is that the link they send you to is helpful for the average user, who doesn't need to know why, just what a bad cert means (and that they shouldn't visit the site).
Of course, they should have a "technical details" link or something, and that would be where you put the useful info
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@Gurth said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
It comes from way earlier when the mainframes ruled the world. One teacher at the university mentioned back when they had a mainframe it only printed the numbers—because it didn't have the memory to waste on error messages—and there was a bookshelf of manuals where you'd go look up what the particular error code meant.
In any case, if there were no VAC areas available, the program would branch to the Alarm/Abort routine and set Alarm 1201. Similarly, if no core sets were available, the program would branch to Alarm/Abort and set Alarm 1202.
...
What happened next in either case was what you described as, 'The computer has been programmed to recognize this data as being of secondary importance and will ignore it while it does more important computations.' It was a little more than that, and had been the subject of a great deal of testing before the software had been released. The software rebooted and reinitialized the computer, and then restarted selected programs at a point in their execution flow near where they had been when the restart occurred.What an amazing piece of hardware the AGC was, first time I've read about the recovery capability.
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@sloosecannon said in What users say versus what they mean:
The problem is that the link they send you to is helpful for the average user, who doesn't need to know why, just what a bad cert means (and that they shouldn't visit the site).
Of course, they should have a "technical details" link or something, and that would be where you put the useful infoI kind of agree with you, but this thinking is why Chrome also hides valid cert details from the user. I really don't agree with that, people should be checking that the 'secured' site is actually https://mybank.com and not a LetsEncrypt cert for a phishing page at https://vhost12.malware.mybankonline.com.
I thought we were kind of getting there for a while with user education, the coloured banners for https etc..., and now it all seems to be back-sliding.
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@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text
May I introduce you to "flat design"?
After the hippies and punks we got the young conservatives; after Microsoft Bob and Propellerheads we got flat design.
"Development is the “struggle” of opposites." –Matías Duarte
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@dkf said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
One teacher at the university mentioned back when they had a mainframe […] there was a bookshelf of manuals where you'd go look up what the particular error code meant.
We still had one of those for the first couple of years of my degree. Fun machine, but seriously broken in some critical ways. I wasn't very sorry to see it gone.
We didn't have that, but we still had some proper glass teletype terminals, connected to some aging sparcs. Their big benefit was that they were not good enough to play anything, but were good enough to read your mail in mutt or pine, so if you needed to do just that, you could always find a free one. They were also used for the Unix lectures, so you learned The Good Old Ways™ (job control and screen, because they didn't have console switching, the various ctrl-something shortcuts, because they didn't have all the normal keys and such).
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@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
What an amazing piece of hardware the AGC was, first time I've read about the recovery capability.
There is a really good documentary series called Moon Machines about pretty much all aspects of the US moon landing program, including a whole episode about the development of the navigation computer.
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@Cursorkeys said in What users say versus what they mean:
@topspin said in What users say versus what they mean:
@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
If something is clickable, it should be recognizable as such without reading the text
May I introduce you to "flat design"?
Case in point for really-doing-it-wrong is the Chrome certificate error. Clicking on the obvious 'more information' button does not give you more information. Clicking on the flat error-text gives you more information. Whoever designed that should be strangled with their own intestines.
In fact it does give you more information. If you are a normal user. If you are an advanced user it is useless, but guess what the ratios of the former to the latter are.
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@pie_flavor said in What users say versus what they mean:
guess what the ratios of the former to the latter are
inb4 grumpy cat
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@LaoC said in What users say versus what they mean:
after Microsoft Bob and Propellerheads we got flat design.
"Like this but with the Aero aesthetic
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@Zecc dreams of a world with Aero titlebars and XP buttons
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@hungrier
I don't see Casio calculator watches on that chart?
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@Applied-Mediocrity
you didn't have a tv remote watch?
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@Luhmann said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Applied-Mediocrity
you didn't have a tv remote watch?I still remember when smartphones started having IR transmitters in them. The TVs in sports pubs were constantly fucked with. It was awesome.
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@Luhmann
I'm only pretending to be old :/Although I did have a knockoff that I traded for two Nescafe cans of Pokemon, TMNT and assorted tazos. It was all the rage in 1996, but I rather regret it now.