So the names of the options literally translate to:

Row Above
Row insert beneath
Colums Left
Insert Column Right

Not only are they named inconsistently and only partially translated. The capitalization is also seemingly random.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I develop software products and we put so much attention into how we design and arrange them, including the naming of things.

    Then we send everything off for batch translation by some service that probably doesn’t give a flying fuck because they’re just using AI anyway. And we have no way to check their work because we don’t speak all the languages.

    I wish we could have in-house people for this.

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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    5 days ago

    There’s a very good reason for this.

    Microsoft’s localization team is just three monolinguals and Copilot. And the monolinguals are all managers.

  • .Donuts@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Localized Office is a big heaping pile of trash. In my language in Teams you need to toggle “Show number” on, to hide showing your number. Make it make sense.

    • ValiantDust@feddit.org
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      In German, Teams used to show people as “kostenlos” which does mean “free” but in the sense of “free of charge”, not “available”. They fixed it eventually but it caused much confusion with people asking if there are times when the calls are not free of charge.

      My personal Teams translation highlight was a hint explaining to me how I could reorder a list. It said “Nachbestellung hier”. Which again does mean “reorder here” but reorder as in the thing you do when you buy the same thing again, a repeat order.

      • .Donuts@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Yup, same! Our agents don’t make themselves “available”, they make themselves “free of charge” (gratis)

        I’ll have to check the reorder one, but that’s funny too. Billion dollar company!

      • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 days ago

        Some Windows 11 versions had translated ZIP (i think the archive format) as postal code in not US English. Not even English is safe.

      • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        This is what I assume happened. They probably used a program that allows each string to be localized individually and the translator(s) didn’t think to make it match the other strings which would have required looking up.

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    Ok but the biggest crime was rebinding CTRL+S to underline in the Italian version. To save you had to CTRL+B (which doesn’t even make sense)

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    Yeah, Microsoft fucking sucks. German has ~95 million speakers and is one of the most spoken languages of the world. And Microsoft, one of the most profitable companies in the world can’t be bothered to even do some minor translation work. I don’t even expect them to translate every help document on their page, but menu items in the main ribbon? And Edge is showing totally garbled weather infos on every new page. To millions of people. Because they don’t want to hire one or two guys to proofread their texts.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      5 days ago

      We are talking about Microsoft. What are you going to do, not use Microsoft? I know that Europe is trying to move away from Microsoft but that’s very hard since they have a strong foot in the door.

      • brot@feddit.org
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        Yes, that is the plan. My private IT has been Microsoft-free for a while. There is an old PC with Windows standing around, but everything else runs on linux. Works great :)

        (work is, of course, something else as I don’t have anything to decide about the software there)

  • riodoro1@lemmy.world
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    Corpos are still gonna spend their money at microsoft. Even if ms literally took a shit on your desk they still would pay for that shit and ask for more.

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    I have been a translator for few random projects about 10 years ago when my English was probably at around B1 level max. And yet I still have seen translations much worse than what I was able to do. Blows my fucking mind to be honest.

  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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    I remember when IBM translated hard disks as “rigid disks” in French for some reason, in defiance of the established usage.

  • ValiantDust@feddit.org
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    And apparently the shortcut key r doesn’t stand for rechts (right) but for insert. Which is not only English but also the one thing all of those for options have in common.

    • justsomeguy@lemmy.world
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      At this point I think there’s some kind of code hidden here. Maybe the localization AI is trying to tell us something.

      link left

      link right

      link top

      link top

      link bottom

      link centere