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.
It’s somewhat difficult to translate, because Arabic doesn’t have the concept of case in letters. Usually you can use “حروف صغيرة” or ”حروف كبيرة” which literally translates as “small letters” and “big letters” when referencing other languages. For the general “letter case” you can use “حالة الأحرف”. So it’ll be something like : تجاهل حالة الأحرف.
So here you substitute الرسالة for the correct word الأحرف to mean “letters”
Dumb question but your comment got this into my head: in your response, since it’s mostly English and LTR, are the Arabic words in your response read right to left?
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.
I don’t get it. Is the joke that i18n for CLIs is unimportant? Or is this an earnest post that just so happened to get posted under humor? I wish I had the source for the image.
The joke is that it’s hard to tell if this is a joke because the lines between good intentions, corporate jargon, and feasibility have been blurred beyond recognition both here and in the real world.
It’s also funny that after all these years, i18n is still a mess. Moreover, even if translations are standard in GUIs and documentation, for some reason, everyone is okay with defaulting to English for the oldest form of computer interaction.
Also, the joke is whatever you want it to be. Follow your dreams.
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.
Wouldn’t it be easy to convert the code to any language if this was the case though? Any human-language programming is already an abstraction, so why can’t a programming language be abstracted to more than one human language? Literally just swap the command words out for words in the other language, seems like something modern IDEs can trivially do if a language like that existed.
Also, non-English speaking countries exist. Some have actually developed programming languages in their own language so the idea of non-English programming isn’t exactly unheard of. There is no reason that code that won’t be edited by English speakers should always be written in English, it’s not like it’s the one perfect human language for interfacing with computers or anything. So I suspect that should this become a reality, you wouldn’t even notice anything’s changed unless you live in a non-English speaking country. Either way your company can still always just require code to be in English, the same way companies have requirements for formatting and software design philosophies.
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.
In this case they were still using English, with minor differences. Imagine one of the Indian externals writing an internal script that utilizes the Indian localisation. You’d have to whip out a translator or dive into the docs for a tool which you may have already used countless times and know how it works when instead, they could have simply learned the English arguments for the tool.
Nothing against people not being native speakers of English, I’m not one either. I just think that this creates more problems than it solves.
Ah yes can’t wait to switch keyboard layout mid-command every time, so nice!
