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.

  • JustARaccoon@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    This is why even though English is my second language I will set software to be in English, I know any translations into my primary language will use weird and uncommon phrases (also makes debugging harder)

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Same. Also I’m given the exact intended message, rather than some filtered version.

    • sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      This even works for keyboards. Many shortcuts that use the /-key for example didn’t work before I started to use qwerty instead of localized keyboards.

      • zer0@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        I remember switching from German QWERTZ to US QWERTY, as a dev, and suddenly putting all these brackets became so much easier and it all made sense. On German layout you need Alt Gr. A lot (which is Alt + CTRL)

        • sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 days ago

          Commenting lines works out of the box on qwerty, whaat . And for the Umlauts i have it set to using the dead key layout because it is tkl and has no right alt key. And I didn’t know that you could emulate alt gr with alt+space. Thanks!

          • zer0@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            I’m on Mac so for umlaut I can just hold the vocal and pick the umlaut version of it. Similar to mobile devices . But usually I just type oe or ae etc.

            • sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              3 days ago

              I use Macos/linux at home and win at work. And all with the same keyboard, because it has a dedicated macOS and win/normal mode. And yeah, the us intl. keyboard works across win/Linux, but I dislike having the hyphens key as a dead key so i only really use it at work where I can’t skip umlauts. In private I don’t really need them and should the day come I’ll copy them from ddg or something.

              • JaxNakamura@programming.dev
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                2 days ago

                I dislike having the hyphens key as a dead key

                Yeah, that sucks. You can have the best of both worlds in Linux by using the US keyboard with the “English (intl., with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard variant. This way, all your qwerty keys will work normally, but you can tell it a key combination is coming up by tapping AltGr. So you can for instance type <AltGr> + <"> + <u> to make ü or <AltGr> + <s> + <s> for ß. If I remember correctly, there is a way to make Windows do the same.

                And in KDE at least, you can use any key you like to perform the function of AltGr. I suppose other DE’s can do the same.

                • sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  2 days ago

                  Smart. I’ve always wondered what it does. does it work with the alt + space shortcut for alt gr if I’m missing altgr or any right alt on my keyboard ?

                  Edit: Didn’t read correctly. Thanks !

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I do the same. I get unreasonably annoyed by the horrible translations. I’d rather just have the original bad English.

  • 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.

  • .Donuts@lemmy.world
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    6 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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      6 days ago

      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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        6 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.

  • 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.

      • 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.

  • pewpew@feddit.it
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    5 days ago

    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)

  • brot@feddit.org
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    6 days ago

    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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      6 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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        6 days ago

        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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    5 days ago

    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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    6 days ago

    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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      6 days ago

      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