[Y_Y]

Even trying to use popular software in a relatively big language like Spanish still inevitably ends up producing lots of untranslated strings (or worse, semi-translated nonsense).

I always set my software to en-us, even though that mightn't be my preferred language or dialect, because it's the only way I can be sure the developers actually checked it.

[Tainnor]

I've seen that too and I simply don't understand that. Why do some people half-translate an app? Did they just hardcode some of the copy by accident?

[CydeWeys]

They translated it once years ago, likely using external resources. My team has had this issue; we made internationalized versions of our website once, years ago, and it was quite expensive and used external language contractors. Then the i18n versions gradually fell out of date as we continually updated the English version (because that's what we full-time devs speak). Eventually, years later, the i18n versions were hopelessly out of date and turned down, because it wasn't worth paying for another round of internationalization on them given how little it turns out they were used.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

But if you had put yourselves in a position to accept community contributed translations, this would not have happened, right?

[CydeWeys]

How is a random static marketing website for a corporation supposed to put itself into a position where it accepts community translations? How would you vet said translations before going live with them (which would be mandatory) given that you don't speak the language?

And who in the world would volunteer their labor for free to do said translations?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It was intended to be a strange mixture of snark, cynicism and sarcasm connecting your described situation with what Google is doing, with the hope of illuminating the different ways people might think about their own work.

In your case, describing it as "a random static marketing website for a corporation" more or less shuts down the discussion.

In Google's case, while they probably don't see YT in those same terms, the convergence of the approach towards i18n suggests that maybe they're a little closer to it than they were.

[CydeWeys]

The context of this particular thread, though, is about why the user interface in an app might not be translated well. I responded by way of example explaining how translations can fall behind in a very similar situation, that of a website.

Neither of these are the same as the YouTube situation, because in the YouTube situation you're dealing with user-contributed content being translated, which is a crucial difference. Community contributions were never about translating the YouTube UI (or god forbid privacy policy, ToS, etc.); they were only ever about users submitting translations of other users' content.

[ptx]

Maybe they fully translated an earlier version of the app but more strings were added in subsequent versions and not translated. When there's no translation available for a string, it falls back to English.

[iagovar]

Because either you have to pay some native a decent money to make a translation or because some strings are embedded in code?