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I hope this is a joke because the Arabic translation is so wrong. It’s also confusing because Arabic is written from right to left so it’ll just create a mess. The translators are using “letter case” and translated it literally to Arabic. The word used doesn’t mean “letter” as in a letter in the alphabet but “letter” as in what you send in the post office. These are totally different words in Arabic.
Also why did they use Arabic script for the Arabic but not hiragana/kanji for the Japanese?
Spanish is also wrong, this one means “ignore-letter-size”. I’m not sure if there is an official correct way to say in a short manner, I would say “ignorar-capitalizacion” but I think it’s just a barbarism.
Just curious, what would be a correct translation?
It’s somewhat difficult to translate, because Arabic doesn’t have the concept of case in letters. Usually you can use “حروف صغيرة” or ”حروف كبيرة” which literally translates as “small letters” and “big letters” when referencing other languages. For the general “letter case” you can use “حالة الأحرف”. So it’ll be something like : تجاهل حالة الأحرف.
So here you substitute الرسالة for the correct word الأحرف to mean “letters”
Dumb question but your comment got this into my head: in your response, since it’s mostly English and LTR, are the Arabic words in your response read right to left?
Yes it’s always read right to left, which can be confusing when you combine English and Arabic. When you reach the Arabic word or sentence you jump to its beginning which is the first Arabic letter to the right, read it from there to the left, and then continue to the next English word when you’re done.
Also this is why unicode has codepoints signifying where to switch between right to left and left to right writing, so that letters can be correctly written “forwards” in the underlying file format (first letter written first) for both writing systems and also rendered correctly for both writing systems on display
grep --groß--und-kleinschreibung-der-buchstaben-ignorierengrep --Groß--und-Kleinschreibung-der-Buchstaben-ignorierenBut you just told the computer to ignore case…
That’s not active while the command is being interpreted, though
Why is the third one not:
--大文字-と-小文字-を-無視する?
Because they didn’t think it out fully lol
There shouldn’t even be dashes imo since they replace spaces and Japanese doesn’t use spaces.
This looks like the final layer of hell. Your coworker writes their scripts in another language and now you have to decipher what the hell they mean. Who has a problem woth English for development tools, etc.? It’s really not a monumental task to learn it, and I’m not even a native speaker.
May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?
One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn’t work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.
Yep, this sort of behaviour translates to Windows paths also. Why would they name a directory “C:\Users\Example\Desktop”, when they can replace “Desktop” with a locale-specific name, which is not just a link to “Desktop”, but a completely different directory which breaks any scripts expecting “Desktop”.
We know MS well, their choice is clear :)
You don’t even have to learn English, you just memorize a few flags/keywords, no complex grammar or anything.
Even if everyone is using English, there will be cultural differences. I used to work at a company which had a lot of indian externals working on their code base. Whenever I had to work on a mainly Indian developed project i had to get used to how they wrote things. Usually things where named a bit different. Not by much, but enough tho throw me off a couple of times before i got used to it.
IMPORTANT: I am not shitting on how they used English, merely pointing out that they used it differently from how i would have expected.
Wouldn’t it be easy to convert the code to any language if this was the case though? Any human-language programming is already an abstraction, so why can’t a programming language be abstracted to more than one human language? Literally just swap the command words out for words in the other language, seems like something modern IDEs can trivially do if a language like that existed.
Also, non-English speaking countries exist. Some have actually developed programming languages in their own language so the idea of non-English programming isn’t exactly unheard of. There is no reason that code that won’t be edited by English speakers should always be written in English, it’s not like it’s the one perfect human language for interfacing with computers or anything. So I suspect that should this become a reality, you wouldn’t even notice anything’s changed unless you live in a non-English speaking country. Either way your company can still always just require code to be in English, the same way companies have requirements for formatting and software design philosophies.
All code should be written in Esperanto, the international auxillary language!
I prefer Klingon. I’s a more threatening language which keeps the computer in line.
Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as
oand notwo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:- 大文字と小文字を無視する
- だいもんじとこもじをむしする
Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):
- ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル
Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.
This might be an old April first joke because I couldn’t find anything about it lol
Really ducking hope so. I hate translated software to my native language.
My blood boiled there. Like excel that has functions in all languages. Completely insane.
Yeah, this is one of those things which sounds great on paper but also introduces problems. I’ve seen people get really annoyed when exception messages are translated because it makes them harder to search for online. That would need to be solved too.
I’ve had huge issues collaborating on a spreadsheet with a Spanish client. It tries to open the sheet in your locale and then can’t find the functions. Insane that Microsoft didn’t even add some metadata to allow me to work on it in Spanish.
The future of the past issues MS had with this shit? Oh, right, programmerhumor.
I’m OOTL. Story time?
Critical security hole a few months before was due to localized variables. And again and again in the past. Aside from countless other issues with batch and powershell scripts because of localized variables.
Hungary presents:
grep --kis--és-nagybetűk-figyelmen-kívül-hagyásaYeah that is a resounding no. PS: I am not exaggerating. That is the first translation that came into mind
If you reword it a little, it will be shorter:
grep --kassza-szenzitív-abc-nem(/j)
Ah yes can’t wait to switch keyboard layout mid-command every time, so nice!
Or… maybe it’s language that is wrong
we should all standardize on Esperanto. Not because it is good, but because regardless of which language you know, Esperanto is the last choice, and thus the only equal choice.
Nah, ithkuil is equaler (since it’s more or less impossible to learn)
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/4111PS: 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 them 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.
Oh god the fucking Excel formulas.
I live in Quebec, and all the excels are in French.
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
Excel does this, so that German guy you forwarded a sheet to has to manually replace all the Polish function names before it works
o.O And I thought translated errors without error codes were the worst cancer in IT world, now you created an IT covid.
I have to use a German API with weird halftranslations and ultra long names, due to bad model generation. Something like getPersonAntragsPersonAdressDetailEintragList().
Unfortunately, it makes sense, since many of the terms have a very precise legal meaning and can’t be unambiguously translated.
IT bubonic plague
I don’t get it. Is the joke that i18n for CLIs is unimportant? Or is this an earnest post that just so happened to get posted under humor? I wish I had the source for the image.
The joke is that it’s hard to tell if this is a joke because the lines between good intentions, corporate jargon, and feasibility have been blurred beyond recognition both here and in the real world.
It’s also funny that after all these years, i18n is still a mess. Moreover, even if translations are standard in GUIs and documentation, for some reason, everyone is okay with defaulting to English for the oldest form of computer interaction.
Also, the joke is whatever you want it to be. Follow your dreams.
that’s because as a non-english native, it’s WAY easier to have the whole computer in english. obscuring options and error messages (by translating them) makes it much harder to fix problems.
