Fairly obvious if you grew up in a non-anglophone country. It’s part of the reason why certain kinds of people set their machines to English even if everything is localized well. And it’s not just error messages, most of the good learning material is in English, too, especially for niche or very recent software.
Makes me wonder what kind of device you’re using in the shower, though.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Most localization in software is trash because technocrats refuse to pay actual translators. Part of the reason I have involved myself in FOSS localization efforts is because it is extremely obvious it is either being done by amateurs who don’t speak the language, or using machine translation (AI or otherwise) that never gets the context right. Most people doing quality localization are scattered thin and the only ones paying good money for quality localization (FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.
Oh yeah. It sucks trying to search for tips, solutions etc. when you only know the localized terms, and it’s rare that help resources in different languages are even somewhat useful and up-to-date.
Also, localized voice acting tends to be lame. For one reason or another they’re rarely as good as the original ones. Conversely, I found that German voice acting for games that were originally written in German can be quite good - it seems that localization just doesn’t have the same energy as the original.
A good rule of thumb is to set each machine/website to its original language (English in most cases). Because when you set your devices to english then sites and apps will also try to change to english and that usually sucks for government websites for example.
Fairly obvious if you grew up in a non-anglophone country. It’s part of the reason why certain kinds of people set their machines to English even if everything is localized well. And it’s not just error messages, most of the good learning material is in English, too, especially for niche or very recent software.
Makes me wonder what kind of device you’re using in the shower, though.
A water multiplexer (faucet) and a water demultiplexer (showerhead).
Let’s not kid ourselves. Most localization in software is trash because technocrats refuse to pay actual translators. Part of the reason I have involved myself in FOSS localization efforts is because it is extremely obvious it is either being done by amateurs who don’t speak the language, or using machine translation (AI or otherwise) that never gets the context right. Most people doing quality localization are scattered thin and the only ones paying good money for quality localization (FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.
I suppose I’m relatively spoiled as a German.
I do remember setting my webbrowser to English to avoid YouTube’s absurd automatic title translations, and that was before the LLM hype …
Or the software is so shitty that you cannot get translations correct because they assumed every language in the world works like English.
Also gaming, mmorpg, I concur. Always English.
Oh yeah. It sucks trying to search for tips, solutions etc. when you only know the localized terms, and it’s rare that help resources in different languages are even somewhat useful and up-to-date.
Also, localized voice acting tends to be lame. For one reason or another they’re rarely as good as the original ones. Conversely, I found that German voice acting for games that were originally written in German can be quite good - it seems that localization just doesn’t have the same energy as the original.
A good rule of thumb is to set each machine/website to its original language (English in most cases). Because when you set your devices to english then sites and apps will also try to change to english and that usually sucks for government websites for example.