| I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the autotranslation feature or people have naturally migrated away from it... in general, I feel that tech, maybe due to being so overwhelmingly from the US, has very poor support for things like multilingualism, which is in fact more common than not across the world (the US being an outlier traditionally - and even there, I think the influence of Spanish is growing). For example: - On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one - It's impossible on Android to have different apps use different languages (unless the app itself allows for it), which would not only fix the issue mentioned above with the badly translated apps, but also be really helpful e.g. for language learners - It took Google Maps years to add a feature where, if you start typing a street name and it suggests a street, it gives you the option of directly filling in the street number too (e.g., I'm typing "Foob" and it suggests "Foobarstraße, 11111 Berlin", but giving me the option to directly type the street number before the comma). My hypothesis for why this took so long to add is that people from the US were totally oblivious to the need for this feature, since in the US, the street number comes before the street name and people could just type "123 Foob" and get the suggestion for the full address - There is simply no way in the Play Store (and I believe in the App Store it's similar?) to see reviews in another language than the one from your store. This makes no sense for me, for many apps there are very few if any German reviews, but I'd still like to see English ones. I think it's even worse for app developers, although maybe they have some separate way of seeing that? Amazon doesn't have that problem btw. - Also, a pet peeve of mine: using country flags for languages. Yeah, nope. and so on ... |
Absolutely not. I saw the i18n/l10n process in practice when I was contributing code to KDE. It was incredibly thorough and well thought-out (I actually learnt most of what I know about i18n/l10n at that time). Not just translating strings verbatim, but stuff like different languages having different plural forms (so you might need to translate "users" differently depending on if you're talking about 2 users or 3 users).
This is not rocket science. We know how to do it. It's just that most businesses don't give a shit. English gets you far enough in terms of adoption in most markets that you don't really have to care about l10n unless you have to fulfil legal requirements. (Also, some markets have bad rates of English literacy, e.g. China, but those are usually served by local app providers.)
> On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one
Where I live (Germany), this has gotten way better over the years. Around ten years ago, cinema chains started offering screenings in original language (i.e. English) for the more popular movies. And cable TV started showing shows undubbed as well. The first thing I can remember there was Game of Thrones airing undubbed on the same day as the US release. I think the major reason was that piracy sites allowed users to access undubbed content easily. If you have the choice of watching the new GoT episode right now or waiting a year for the dub, most people are going to go with piracy. TV/cinema execs saw this and realized that there was a market to tap into.
Having access to undubbed content was actually quite eye-opening to me. Having only had contact with dubs up until that point, I only then realized how eye-wateringly shitty German dubs are. It appears to me like German dubbers don't really consider themselves voice actors (emphasis on the "actor" part). Sometimes it's like they think they're reading a newscast when it's actually an action scene.