Comments on: Unnatural by design

By: mitcho

mitcho — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:43:23 +0000

kourge - thanks for your detailed reply! It's great to see how these different word orders and structures are natural or unnatural in Chinese… this makes a good case for offering strings to localize in terms of "usage contexts" instead of simply individual words.

By: Axel Hecht

Axel Hecht — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:47:53 +0000

Japanese is a prominent edge case in quite a few places where we concatenate strings within Mozilla UI. They're the one language I know about that hides "Firefox" in the UI every know and then, for example.

By: kourge

kourge — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:28:22 +0000

One of the unnatural structures that I commonly face when localizing something is a string taking the form of something like: "Downloading %s", where %s could be a new version, an add-on, or some component; in other words, clauses with a verb in present continuous / progressive form. (現在進行式)

The good thing is that in this case, there is a placeholder %s. The problem is that lots of programmers assume such a structure and only give out the string "downloading" to the localizer with no context or placeholder whatsoever. "Downloading?" Downloading what? "%s is downloading?" "Finished downloading %s?" "Downloading %s?"

With no context at all, I could translate "downloading" into any of the following forms in Chinese: "下載 %s 中" ("[Download] %s [-ing]") "正在下載 %s" ("[In the process of] downloading %s") "目前正在下載 %s 中" ("%s [is] currently [being] download[ed]") "%s 已下載完畢" ("%s [is] finished downloading") or even: "已下載 %s" ("Downloaded %s")

Of the above five forms, if the developer assumed that no placeholders would be needed, the feasibly possible translations would be reduced to only three.

To a larger scale, the very common passive voice in English sounds eerily unnatural in Chinese. These kinds of sentences usually get translated into an active voice with no subject. Even though Chinese isn't as pro-drop as Japanese, a null subject sentence still sounds better than one in a passive voice. When a developer decides that the subject needn't be a placeholder in a string, the Chinese translator / localizer is, from time to time, forced to translate the sentence into one with an unnatural passive voice.

By: Alberto Santini

Alberto Santini — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:22:50 +0000

Near the army barracks I read quite often a signal warning "Uscita militari" (literally "exit militaries"), meaning "soldiers exit". This is an error because (in italian) there is a past participle with an adjective (and not a noun) resulting the sentence not well formed. I think it was a fault due to shortening the sentence "Exit military men": why not cutting "men" word? A case of (false) naturalness vs. correctness.

By: hangfromthefloor

hangfromthefloor — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:32:17 +0000

It seems "unnatural" to use 配 (pèi) here as well; according to what I've been taught, 和 (hé), and sometimes 與 (yǔ), serves the purpose of the preposition “with.”

But I could be wrong – you're the linguist )