This is somehow subjective depending on the target translation language, but bear with me for a sec.
I have recently been involved in a translation project. The goal was to translate the strings of an MVC framework to the Greek language.
70% of the language strings of the framework where translated, however 30% where intentionally left out. The decision was that we will not translate error messages aimed towards the developer of the application.
The reasoning behind this (in short) was:
are aimed towards designers/programmers.
Programmers ( and even designers :) ) should have a basic
understanding of English, at least enough so
they can search on it on Google if
they do not know what it means. (racist?)
are aimed towards the developer
and in a perfect world should not be
displayed to the end user of the
application as they concern the
inner workings of the web
application itself. i.e "You must
set the database name in your
database config file."
and perhaps most importantly,
they make the life of the developer
harder when he tries to get more
information/help regarding the
error. For example the above error
yields 8 results in Google (in
quotes), whereas its Greek
translation yields exactly 0.
I know that this depends on the popularity of the target translation language and the application itself. For example I'm guessing that there are is vast amount of documentation regarding German SAP error messages (i know, i know, SAP IS German, but you get the point), as opposed to Greek Error Messages documentation regarding random application X which has about 500 installations worldwide.
So to summarize: When you develop language translation packs for your applications do you translate error messages? Do you only do for predominant languages like English/Spanish/German/French? Or do you leave them intact? I'm not looking for the "right" or "correct" answer, I'm looking for a "best-practices" answer, or if this problem is defined in any "official" standard/policy that you have had experience with.
A good framework that includes built-in error messages should have an option to i18n them. This is important entirely for the user.
Exceptions messages on the other hand must not be translated. You already pointed out an important reason - searching. And yes, they are for developers, not end-users.
If an exception message is also used as a display message to the user, this is wrong design. Exceptions may contain i18n keys.
Translated or not, make sure to always use a unique ID and allow the user to copy it.
TIP: in some applications, hitting Ctrl+C makes a copy of the message without being editable, would be nice to implement the same hidden feature.
I can only offer my own opinion, but for me as a German developer it's always annoying to get translated error messages, especially for widely spread software such as MS software. That's for two reasons:
German error messages are usually more difficult to understand because the German language makes everything sound more complicated. Also, there are often no good translations for IT-related words. German Developers either have to use English words instead or replace them with cumbersome literal translations. Same goes for MSDN websites, BTW.
Also, as you already mentioned, it makes it much harder to find solutions to those erorrs with google on English websites. The German developer community is much smaller than the English community...
If the application is for common business or consumer users and the error messages are displayed to them so that they can understand or take some action based on that then I believe it should be translated. If the error messages are purely for logging and troubleshooting then translation should be unnecessary.
What about printing them in both languages? The user/local admin knows what is going on and can search it and communicate with the developers.
Do not translate exception messages; It might turn to a translation nightmare.
I'm working a lot with Microsoft Office automation. Exception messages that were translated to Hebrew give me a real hard time:
Most of them I can't find on Google/MSDN, so I have to translate them back to English myself just for the sake of googleing it.
Some of them refer to objects by their translated class names. The object classes I'm manipulating (as a programmer) are always named in English. This just makes the messages less understandable.
Some of them are formatted strings, where the message itself is translated but the arguments constructing the message are not; this makes the message even less understandable, and sometimes it means the message won't display properly in a default MsgBox (Right-To-Left languages can be a nightmare).
From my experience, a developer needs his Exception messages in English, so translating those will simply require more effort on both sides, and will not gain you much.
There are typically a lot of error messages, and they are typically shown only sporadically. Therefore, translating them sometimes seems too much effort.
Depends on the app. A highly technical application that will be used by people that understand English and the target language, you might be OK with English error messages.
If it's a message that will be seen by the end user, it should be translated. Think about if you were using an application that was written by a Japanese developer and you saw an error message in Japanese. That's probably not going to be all that helpful to you -- you won't have any idea what it says, whether or not you could do anything about it.
Related
Should it be
The page could not be found
or
The page could not be found.
?
With proper Oxford English the later would be the obvious choice but there are many examples for the first one out there as well.
What does your company's coding standard outline? Generally, this is the kind of thing a coding standard or business practice should address. There is no "right" choice.
That being said, obviously, the second one with the period. I base this on nothing but my personal preference.
I have several projects I've worked on that are setup for internationalization.
From the programming perspective, I have everything pretty much setup and put all of the string into an xml file or properties file. I wish to get these files translated into other languages, such as: Italian (it), Spanish (es), Germany (de), Brazillian Portugese (pt-br), Chinese Simplified (zh-cn), Chinese Traditional (zh-tw), Japanese (ja), Russian (ru), Hugarian (hu), Polish (pl), and French (fr).
I've considered using services like google translate, however I feel that this automatic translation tools are still a bit weak.
In summsary, I'm curious on if others have used professional translation services for their programs, if so which ones would people recommend and how did you coordinate the translation updates with the translation teams? Any idea on what I should expect to pay? Or is there a better way of doing this that I'm not aware of?
Machine translation services like Google, Bing etc. are not a good choice. As you mention, these services are in reality still in their infancy, and more importantly using them will most likely give your non-English customers a bad impression of your application.
If you want top quality translation, you will need to employ the services of a professional translation agency. Translators need to understand your application in order to translate the text correctly, so providing them with the application itself or screen captures of the English product will help.
You will pay per word - the rates vary from agency to agency, and also from language to language.
The other alternative is using crowd-sourced translations, from GetLocalization for example.
To summarize, proper localization is not just a matter of translating the text - you need to build a relationship with your translators, and ensure they understand your application and the context of the strings that they are translating, otherwise you will end up with a linguistically poor application, that will reflect badly on your company.
When there is a ready to use translator plugin available from companies like microsoft,google and yahoo why one has to implement globalization feature in an application using resource files like .resx. Why not simply plugin any one of those translator in the application and give the user with the freedom of choosing his own language/culture? Which one is better over other? Thanks in advance.
Automated machine translation is not the same as providing customized translations for different languages. Machine translation gets things wrong far too often, and can easily phrase something in a way that is offensive or embarrassing. It also doesn't take into account localization at all.
And more importantly, public machine translation services only work on public sites. Most globalized sites have pages only signed in users can reach. In that case, it is easier to provide translations yourself.
If you're making money off your customers, you're better off investing in real translation over a free service that ultimately marginalizes any users who don't speak the primary language the site is written in.
As I understand, these translators aren't as accurate. My last boss hired a translator and we translated the data into a separate language database table.
Autotranslate is not efficient and WILL get you in trouble when serious application is regarded. There is a very simple linguistic test you can perform on your application. First you translate from the original language to the target language. Then, you take the result and translate it back. If you get satisfactory results, you're good to go.
In fact, for some simple applications, that would be a recommended way. However, it MIGHT come back and bite you in the buttocks.
I've been looking for first-hand information on the World of Warcraft addon API. There are a couple wikis that are pretty good, but their reference links only point internally. Surely there is some information published by Blizzard on the topic.
Can all of their information really be gleaned from reverse-engineering and forums? That would be hard for me to believe.
Its not all necessarily gleaned from inspection or trial and error. Some is provided, but randomly, from "heads up" posts in the forums from "the source", as in Blizzard employees. They are usually pretty good about it, though is almost always provided in a "just the essentials to save you some pain" sort of way.
Here's an example:
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/233590-mop-changes/
Watching for the "Blue" posts goes a long way, and its been this way for a long time. If you look at someting like this (old 3.1.0 end user patch notes) http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/patch-notes/3-1-0 , and then scan to near the bottom there will be a note and link for API changes, so its easy to glean their intent on this, and that they intend to provide some "unofficial" support about API changes there whilenot burdening the actual product readme with them.
In general, I'd say that due to the very open nature of the materials, the source for the UI, very little is hidden and most is pretty self-evident, so it sort of barely qualifies as reverse engineering. Once you understand the Lua relationship to the general design of the WoW UI and supporting API, it's much easier.
As for the implied question about "why", the "hard to believe" part. They are doing, in my estimation, what they believe is the best balance between fully supporting without "officially" suporting, and not wasting cycles trying to document a huge amount of available facilites thats ever changing. I think they belive it makes a better product, having the ability to customize, so its intheir interest, however is frought with problems and even legal issues from many angles to be expressly "official" about it or to try to maintain coherent docs.
----
Toward the question "git hub" below, here is the "blue" post in context, which can be found by clicking the "blizz" link icon on the mmo-champion link provided before: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6413172918#1 I was trying to give an example of a Blue post that had detail, but I accidentally gave one for the Web API not the Game API. However the principle is the same, and provides more Blizzard to Community context for dev support.
So basically that particular post was in reference to changes in the Web API, and the Git remark has no relevance to the game UI Customization and Macro thing. There is no hidden or official doc source for game UI Customization and Macro. Mostly its because it simply doesnt exist for anyone. :)
Yes, all the information is gleaned from the source.
Blizzard doesn't post the API information at this time, AFAIK.
http://www.wowpedia.org/Portal:Interface_customization is likely to be your best resource.
There are multiple ways to discover the names of callable C functions exported into the Lua environment.
But yes. One quite simple one would be to enumerate all the globals in the source that are written to, then enumerate the globals that are exposed while WoW is running - and take the difference, perhaps limiting the result to globals of type 'function'
Blizzard used to informally document its API for a while, but it has always been 'unsupported'
There are other ways to discover the API - but they involve doing things which may violate the TOS.
There is a website now that contains the API for wow addons. This has been helping me a lot.
I've always been interested in writing and designing programming languages. Of course, it's pretty difficult to find an employer that will let you write a programming language as part of your job. So I'm looking for the "next best thing".
What fields of programming will let me get some experience solving some related problems? Or what kinds of employers are most likely to view all of my dinky little interpreters as relevant experience?
If your interest in language design is irrepressible, get a Ph.D. and make it your area of research. You can count on academia to support all manner of unprofitable activity.
None. The bulk of the professionals in that field do not design languages for a living, but retarget existing compilers to new (usually embedded) targets, or work on source2source conversion systems for legacy code, making a few language extensions in the process.
You should really ask yourself if you want this, because, besides from an extremely lucky shot, that is the realistic outlook of what you will do if you go into this industry.
Remember that the big public toolchain industry is not very profitable at the moment, and that maybe a good 100 languages are in largescale pulbic use and continually maintained, after 30 years of programming languages creation.
I know this is is very gloom, but I hope it sets you on the path to chuck the romantic, hobbyist view, and start researching how the real world in this field looks like.
Moreover, having done small hobby projects on your own is not really a pre. You need to show that you can work on large projects in a team, more than that you can create a small interpreter on your own. If you really want to pursue this, I'd recommend:
stay in school, and get a bachelor (preferably a master or PHD) in CS.
join some opensource team that works on a significant project in the field. gcc, but also the Java world, Tracemonkey (Mozilla), Mono etc. Verifiable experience in real world scenarios is very important.
I think the best way to get into this type of work would be to undertake an advanced degree with a specific focus on language design, compilers etc. It's going to be very tough for you to walk in off the street into a private company and start writing new language features otherwise.
You could also shoot a little higher and on your own, or with a small team, produce something that is much more than just a dinky little interpreter. Show your potential employer that you can produce something useful.
I have worked as an embedded programmer for the past ten years. Before that I wrote compilers (and assemblers, linkers, debuggers, etc.) for 20 years.
My co-workers joke that I turn every problem in to a parsing problem. And they're right. I've used techniques that are appropriate for language design many times during the course of my career.
Today, I play around with compiler stuff on the side: http://ellcc.org. It helps me scratch my language itch.
Actually, there is a fair bit of work going on with visual programming. It isn't exactly traditional programming language work as we know it but there is a need for it. For example, a lot of advanced data analysis tools rely on visual programming tools (Pentaho). You don't have to look too hard to find good practical uses of visual programming.
To get into visual programming languages, you will need to do an advanced degree with an advisor in the area. You will need to do some human computer interaction / interface work in addition to the programming language stuff.
An employer that has a rich "domain" (i.e. a complex industry) can benefit from a "domain specific language".
Will they realise this? Unlikely. They'll be too likely trapped in their deep domain (and entrenched legacy systems) to see that a targeted language could help unclog the mire.
But if you bury yourself in a complex industry for long enough to gain rich domain knowledge you may then be able to turn them with your own skunkwork DSL. Slim chance.
Stay in academia. If you want to develop a new language your chances of being paid to do so are vanishingly small. Newer languages tend to be expressions of a novel problem domain, and you only really encounter the chance to develop them where (a) novel problems are part of the scenery, and (b) no-one is troubled by the necessity to actually earn a living.
Please take your time over it, as well. Speaking as a jobbing developer, the last thing I need is another blasted language to learn :-)
In static analysis there is a lot to do, and the problems that come up are related to those that interest you.
Most currently popular languages came out of a geniune NEED to scratch a particular ITCH. Python came about because some non-C programmers NEEDed to customize inputs their C programs and libraries. Lua came out of the NEED to embed a scripting language in to C programs. Erlang was created to address the NEED of 99.9999999% uptime, hot code loading, and highly concurrent execution. Perl came out of the NEED to easily write programs that parsed text files.
So the very simple question any employer will be asking themselves, and you should ask yourself is. What NEED can I supply a solution to that doesn't exist. Hobby work very seldom shows that you are providing solutions to a NEED, most of the time it is showing that you like to re-invent the wheel for the sake of re-inventing the wheel.