Interesting: Wordpress.com tag “translation”
I just discovered that WordPress.com , a blogging host, has feeds for tag searches.
The tag Translation turns up some interesting results… like this one:
Picasa’s bad translation « Thailicious
I wonder who Google hires for Thai language extension/ interface translation. Is he/she/it a human at all? Could it be the computer that does all this work for Google all along?
Personally I’m inclined to give Google a little leeway on localization problems — they’ve done a lot more than most companies in the way of making their content available in many languages.
But it’s a good thing that Thailicious is pointing out the problem — the most important question is how responsive a process they have in place for getting problems fixed. I hope somebody at the Googleplex who works on Picassa takes note of that blog post.
2 comments.
Technorati tags: google, l10n, translation
“they’ve done a lot more than most companies in the way of making their content available in many languages.”
“Traditional” approach: find a localization company or translators, have something translated, edited, reviewed, final-proofread, QA, pay, maintain.
Google approach: throw the text on the web and say “you are all free to translate, I don’t care”
Not sure if the second approach is “a lot more.” It is also about quality, not only quantity.
Fair point, Mihai.
I’m certainly in no position to opine about the quality of Google’s offerings in various languages.
Still, isn’t there something to be said for the fact that at least it’s there?
It seems to me undeniable that if one is to compare the experience, say, an Amharic or Khmer speaker will have with Google’s stuff (assuming they don’t know a “larger” langauge at all) compared to, say, Yahoo, Google is a much safer bet, i.e., it’s certainly better than nothing.
But I did once find a hilarious story about some mischievious localizer who hacked in some rather profane content into a particular interface. Unfortunately I’ve lost the link to the story; if I recall correctly the language was Maltese.
Have you had experiences with particularly badly translated interfaces at Google? Would be interested to hear.
Thanks for stopping by!