Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
I hope this is a joke because the Arabic translation is so wrong. It's also confusing because Arabic is written from right to left so it'll just create a mess. The translators are using "letter case" and translated it literally to Arabic. The word used doesn't mean "letter" as in a letter in the alphabet but "letter" as in what you send in the post office. These are totally different words in Arabic.
Spanish is also wrong, this one means "ignore-letter-size". I'm not sure if there is an official correct way to say in a short manner, I would say "ignorar-capitalizacion" but I think it's just a barbarism.
grep --groß--und-kleinschreibung-der-buchstaben-ignorieren
grep --Groß--und-Kleinschreibung-der-Buchstaben-ignorieren
But you just told the computer to ignore case...
That's not active while the command is being interpreted, though
This looks like the final layer of hell. Your coworker writes their scripts in another language and now you have to decipher what the hell they mean. Who has a problem woth English for development tools, etc.? It's really not a monumental task to learn it, and I'm not even a native speaker.
You don't even have to learn English, you just memorize a few flags/keywords, no complex grammar or anything.
May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?
One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn't work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.
Even if everyone is using English, there will be cultural differences. I used to work at a company which had a lot of indian externals working on their code base. Whenever I had to work on a mainly Indian developed project i had to get used to how they wrote things. Usually things where named a bit different. Not by much, but enough tho throw me off a couple of times before i got used to it.
IMPORTANT: I am not shitting on how they used English, merely pointing out that they used it differently from how i would have expected.
o.O And I thought translated errors without error codes were the worst cancer in IT world, now you created an IT covid.
I have to use a German API with weird halftranslations and ultra long names, due to bad model generation. Something like getPersonAntragsPersonAdressDetailEintragList().
Unfortunately, it makes sense, since many of the terms have a very precise legal meaning and can't be unambiguously translated.
IT bubonic plague
Hungary presents: grep --kis--és-nagybetűk-figyelmen-kívül-hagyása
Yeah that is a resounding no. PS: I am not exaggerating. That is the first translation that came into mind
If you reword it a little, it will be shorter: grep --kassza-szenzitív-abc-nem
(/j)
Ah yes can't wait to switch keyboard layout mid-command every time, so nice!
The future of the past issues MS had with this shit? Oh, right, programmerhumor.
I'm OOTL. Story time?
Critical security hole a few months before was due to localized variables. And again and again in the past. Aside from countless other issues with batch and powershell scripts because of localized variables.
Excel does this, so that German guy you forwarded a sheet to has to manually replace all the Polish function names before it works
Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:
Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That's the sanest suggestion (who's with me?):
Of course, you're kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don't generally render unicode...so let's go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.
Why is the third one not:
--大文字-と-小文字-を-無視する
?
Because they didn't think it out fully lol
There shouldn't even be dashes imo since they replace spaces and Japanese doesn't use spaces.
This might be an old April first joke because I couldn't find anything about it lol
Really ducking hope so. I hate translated software to my native language.
My blood boiled there. Like excel that has functions in all languages. Completely insane.
Yeah, this is one of those things which sounds great on paper but also introduces problems. I've seen people get really annoyed when exception messages are translated because it makes them harder to search for online. That would need to be solved too.
I've had huge issues collaborating on a spreadsheet with a Spanish client. It tries to open the sheet in your locale and then can't find the functions. Insane that Microsoft didn't even add some metadata to allow me to work on it in Spanish.
Or… maybe it’s language that is wrong
we should all standardize on Esperanto. Not because it is good, but because regardless of which language you know, Esperanto is the last choice, and thus the only equal choice.
This reminds me of a similar experience.
The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let's not talk about it) have its CLI --help message machine translated in some languages.
That's already evil enough, but the real problem is that they've blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command's flag names.
So if you're Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what's the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I've said it's machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that "--分布" is actually "--distribution"? It's "发行版" in Chinese and "ディストリビューション" in Japanese.
At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes "translated" is worse than raw text in its original language.
Related links if you like to see people suffer:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4111
PS: for the original post, my stance is "please don't make your software interface different for different languages". It's the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people's commands different.
It's the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a "translation" subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts them to the user's language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.
The Microsoft Office installer has translated "Office downloads" (as in office is downloading now) to the plural form in Swedish, so it reads grammatically incorrectly as if there's multiple downloads going on. Very professional, lmao
Try using Excel in another language than English. You have to hope someone, that speaks your language had exactly the same problem as you, because all the formulas get translated and Excel doesn't recognize the English version when your language isn't set to English.
Oh god the fucking Excel formulas.
I live in Quebec, and all the excels are in French.