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.
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.
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)
Also makes searching for answers to problems easier.
Yeah that’s partly what I meant by debugging
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
Same. Also I’m given the exact intended message, rather than some filtered version.
I do the same. I get unreasonably annoyed by the horrible translations. I’d rather just have the original bad English.
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.
There’s a very good reason for this.
Microsoft’s localization team is just three monolinguals and Copilot. And the monolinguals are all managers.
Just wanted to suggest you write a bug report. And then I saw it’s Microsoft…
We should explain the issue in all detail to the Microsoft support so they can guide us to the windows update documentation.
Have you tried sfc /scannow?
It’s just a registry entry you have to reset after every update bro
If it is something they can’t solve they will just keep asking for logs and basic troubleshooting stuff until you give up.
If it was over paper you could at least use it to wipe your butt.
Have you tried updating your drivers?
- Microsoft support
You can’t expect a billion dollar company to employ a translator.
Maybe they employed four instead and they each translated differently. /s
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.
I remember when IBM translated hard disks as “rigid disks” in French for some reason, in defiance of the established usage.
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.
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.
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!
Some Windows 11 versions had translated ZIP (i think the archive format) as postal code in not US English. Not even English is safe.
Shown’t number
Bing Translate is jest the best.
AI will keep us from having to pay translators, they said…
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)
Bave my document please
Dokument Bichern
Bewahren?
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.
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.
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)
I’m assuming OP is forced to use Microsoft’s shit at their job but for everyone else:
I’m using Libre Office at my job. Whenever I can get away with it I use the open document format as well.
Huzzah for Kazumara, our local office software hero!
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.
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.
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
LibreOffice for the win
