Comments on: Localisation – When Language, Culture and Technology Join Forces

By: Jody Byrne

Jody Byrne — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:39:24 +0000

I know what you mean Henry – I’ve often had to resort to the “shout and whack it” approach to computers. In the ideal world it would all be seamless and in this day and age there’s just no excuse for language problems like these in software. What makes it worse is when it’s the bigger companies who really should know better. That said, Polish and other Eastern European languages like Czech do seem to suffer more than most at the hands of inept programmers. And us translators have it even tougher still…
This article was supposed to make localisation sound “sexy” to people who know nothing about the field so I had to go for the PR approach and emphasise the best case scenario

(Great rant by the way – a much under-appreciated art form!)

By: Henry Grodsk

Henry Grodsk — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:49:01 +0000

Ha! I knew it! “…your colons become “?’s” etc” (above) was not what I wrote at all.

By: Henry Grodsk

Henry Grodsk — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:47:29 +0000

I wish it were all seamless. I wish it were. Every few minutes, when working with Polish MS Word, I have to stop, select all, go to “tools”, “language”, “select language” and shout “English”! at it. The drop down box is so small and fiddly I usually pick the first English option – US – even though I prefer UK. Ticking the little boxes to stop it from automatically “detecting” (read: taking a wild guess) what language I’m writing in is useless — whether that’s because it’s a networked computer at work and all defaults are restored every time you log in or the programmers who wrote MS Word are dolts, I don’t know but the end result is that the proof reading is never done. There’s a very useful keyboard shortcut which, if you time it wrong, switches over to a Polish keyboard: your “z’s” become “y’s” and your colons become “?’s” etc.

All that rant pertains only to your first paragraph, of course.