Comentários sobre: Software for developers: translated or in English?

Por: Benjamin Otte

Benjamin Otte — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:40:22 +0000

To give you another data point, I am German and a developer, but run my whole desktop in English (actually, without localization). This makes stuff a lot easier to google (error messages, forum posts or mails about a topic). And I work and think in English all the time anyway, because doing Open Source is English-only. Hey, I even run US keyboard layout.

Por: Daniel Borgmann

Daniel Borgmann — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:55:33 +0000

Yes I do prefer English, and I get very irritated in Windows when I set my locale to German and some applications insist on using the German translation (including Gimp), I find that this often makes them barely usable to me. I’ve “fixed” this for now by using a UK locale and just tweaking some settings.

Regarding the comment that the problem aren’t translations but bad translations, that may be true to some extend, but often I am much more accustomed to the English jargon than to the equivalent German jargon, simply because I tend to primarily study and communicate with English sources. Just because I am living in Germany does not mean that I necessarily prefer the German language, and I think all localization should take this possibility into account.

Por: Robin

Robin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:59:44 +0000

I use software in my native language (German), because it feels more comfortable and it allows me to better communicate with normal users who *always* use the translated versions.

And I agree that the American English date format mm/dd/yy sucks (not to speak of US letter and such). For example, Trac uses it as the default format, a strange choice for an internationally targeted application. I hope the ISO formats will gain traction more and more in the future (and that the USA finally adopts the metric system for that matter).

Por: Marco Barisione

Marco Barisione — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 11:13:23 +0000

Here in Italy most people prefer translated programs for everything. Some friends refuse to use the sofware that or University give us for free (XP, Visual Studio, e other MS programs) because it’s in English!

Por: Thijs

Thijs — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:45:28 +0000

> Since I’m not a developer, I’ like like to ask your opinion: do developers prefer software in English or in their native languages?

Answer: Yes please, I am Dutch and I would like to use a localized English version as a developer. Though my mother (obviously) prefers the translated versions.

Por: Olosta

Olosta — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:07:19 +0000

I have even seen a bug introduced by translation, sfdisk (a command line partitionning utility) can dump a partition table as a text on the standard output and re-read it to partition another disk. The french translator (I think it was on RHEL 4) had translated the comment character “#” as “Nombre”, every script that used this feature where unusable without a LANG=C.

Translation is harmful for tools where the ouput can be used in scripts.

Por: Robin

Robin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:00:46 +0000

PS: And I agree, the American English date and time notations suck, for example I hate that Trac defaults to mm/dd/yy. And let’s not even speak of US letter. I hope that internationally targeted software will use the ISO formats more and more in the future.

Por: Robin

Robin — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:54:31 +0000

I use software in my native language (German), because I feel more comfortable with it and it allows me to better communicate with normal users who *always* use the translated version of the software. I also try to contribute translations when I encounter a program which is not fully translated.

Por: Leonardo Fontenelle

Leonardo Fontenelle — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:04:26 +0000

mermshaus: You’re right. But, just to make it clear: many, many people suck in English much, much more than you and me. But then, I agree, they would have a very hard time becoming software developers.
Patrys: I agree some error messages mustn’t be translated. But, even if translators must pay attention to it, this is primarily a developer-side issue, i. e., this strings shouldn’t be marked for translation.

Por: Patrys

Patrys — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 22:19:23 +0000

I’m a developer but prefer all my software in Polish. I do read and write a lot of English documentation and code but proper localization and translation makes the interface more friendly. I do however hate people who translate critical error messages that end up spitted into stderr. This forces me to relaunch the dying app with LC_ALL=C and pray for the error to occur again.