The auto-translation by LLM on https://learn.microsoft.com/ is horrible. Because it has no idea what is explainer text and what part of the syntax of a command, programming language, class members, ... It translates reserved words that when taken at face value lead to errors. E.g. for https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/windows-hardware/drivers/d... you get /gerät-aktivieren for what should be /enable-device which must not be translated. For this reason I made a bookmark to switch to English:
javascript: (function() {
var url = window.location.href;
if (url.match(/de-de/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/de-de/gi, 'en-us');
} else if (url.match(/en-us/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/en-us/gi, 'de-de');
}
})();
To be fair, everyone is committing this crime: Amazon, Google, IBM... as a native spanish speaker, I have never wanted to read documentation in spanish: it is usually of lower quality, not up to date and uses translations of technical terms that make it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the literature (I'm looking at you, dragon book translation. Nobody says "canaletas" instead of "pipelines").
At least before the translations were done by profesionals, but now they are done with tech capable of hallucinating new stuff itself... I'm trusting translations even less than before.
It goes beyond that, a lot of content really shouldn't be translated to begin with.
I'm Spanish, yet I set my system to English because I know that at some point I'm going to look something up or I'm going to come upon some error, and it doesn't matter if the system is perfectly translated, the information I'm going to be able to find is different. There's a flexibility, a leeway for words that go from one language to another that distort terms and make finding information harder.
“Shell script” - “libreto de cápsula de sesión” :) (and mind you, this translation _was_ done by a supposed professional back in the 90s where it was basically the only option.
The only 3 languages worth writing documentation in are English Chinese and Japanese as far as I'm concerned. I only include Japanese because I've read some Japanese game console docs and they were done pretty well
OK, story time. One day at work, I was so fed up with websites automatically translating stuff, I went into my browser's language settings only to find out that I can't remove language preferences altogether, I need to have at least one language set (and I wanted to always have the originals, explicitely not English every time). A team mate came up with a solution: set the language to Latin. I found this a brillant idea: it's a language nobody in their right mind would be using on the web or automatically translate to and if they do, I'll applaud their dedication. So I did exactly that and went on a Latin adventure.
Turns out, the web becomes a more interesting place when you do. First of all, Google apparently makes a logical route from "Latin" to "Rome" to "Italy" to "Italian" and routinely displays login screens and such in Italian. hCaptcha breaks into a thousand pieces and displays (or displayed then) prompts in a broken mess of two to three different languages within one sentence. Several websites wouldn't load at all because they automatically request a translation from their backend server as the first order of business and after a Latin translation returns a 404, they just croak with an empty page.
I've encountered multiple websites actually translated to Latin with a language file, i.e. not live via Google Translate or similar. Probably still an automatic translation, but still I had the chance to applaud them.
But my absolute favourite are Google Maps embeddings. Turns out, every time you visit an embedded Google Maps instance, your account settings don't matter, your location doesn't matter, all that matters is your browser's language -- and Google Maps actually have Latin data for countries and cities! Granted, not for everything, but many many things are translated with Latin names, some of which directly correspond to the Latin names used in centuries past. You can browse the world for hours, sometimes trying to remember which city is behind a Latin name.
Documentation for Visual Studio used to translate SQL Keywords... But most confusing is that Excel sometimes really uses localised words in formulas (if/then/...). Makes some sense for Excel-Users, but is very confusing when you don't expect this.
Are those actually localized, or is it just the displayed value?
In other words, would a French document not load properly if Excel is running in German?
I basically never use Office, and even though I admit my opinion of MS quality is as low as it could possibly be, I still kinda hope that they didn't stoop this low.
It's been a while so I can't really answer your question. But in a localized Excel version i can NOT use the english formula names. So after you googled a solution for your problem, you also need to find out the translations...
If I remember correctly, the localized versions were incompatible among different languages until about Office 2000 when the localizations became aliases. Until then it was good luck with your German .xls file on a French computer.
lol I really despise it when corporations try to be "too" smart/helpful and automatically translate their shit to the local language guessed from your IP, which is a major pain when traveling.
Google absolutely sucks ass at this: You can't set your default language without having a Google account which I refuse to sign in except on YouTube, and there's no easy way to change the language on some of their pages.
Even worse nowadays on YouTube itself: The auto-translated titles and machine dubbing, for which you can only pick one default language, which all other content will be forcibly translopped into. God forbid I speak more than one language and am comfortable consuming content in its original language.
It's insane that their don't have proper support for multilingual people. How hard is it to add a "if language is in [x,y,z], don't offer translation" check?
It's made even crazier by Google being such an international company. Don't they have a huge number of Indian developers? Why has not one of them been bothered enough by this to fix it?
YouTube is the epitome of "echo chambering": When you open YouTube from a hotel or Airbnb in other countries, god, you will see a flood of the most clickbaity videos from that country only, or whatever's been targeted for that IP/area watch the most, sometimes with lewd/suggestive thumbnails and just horrible
You know what's really dumb though? How they're an ads company and try to spy so much shit about you, but if you watch just 1-2 Russian videos then you'll get Russian ads for a while..
Anyone who determines language solely from IP is per se incompetent and needs to be completely blacklisted from the industry. The Accept-Language header exists for a reason.
Yeah! Why can't it just check the OPERATING SYSTEM LANGUAGE????
It's literally there!! My OS is in English, my browser is in English, don't fkn show me everything in Klingon just because I happen to be a prisoner on their ship!
Sometimes it's impossible even with an account. I can't search in English on my phone in Japan. If I go into options and change the language, the moment I click OK, it switches everything right back to Japanese. I know multiple colleagues who've had the same issue for years.
It's more annoying because browsers literally tell you what language they want.
Developers seem to have a canned response to this; largely that they don't trust users to have set their operating system language to the correct one... somehow
