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A translation doesn't have to be worse, especially in a technical context. It's just that the translation market has been steadily going downhill since the 90s, and nobody cares about quality any more. My parents are software translators. They've been in the business since before I was born; back when software was just starting to be translated. You have no idea how much prices and quality have fallen. It's really, really sad. Software localization used to involve the localizers working together with the developers, making UI changes, testing the real software, and using translation memory tools as an aid to ensure consistency. These days people just get a pile of strings to translate with no context, machine translation is used by default (and agencies pay less because they give you a garbage MT version to start off with, as if it doesn't take as much time to fix it as it would to transalate from scratch), and translation memories are used with no cross checks, often translating things wrong due to entirely different context. Further, localization is often treated as an afterthought, with developers having no idea of what the technical requirements for good localization are. Plural forms, placeholder reordering, etc. If you want a good translation, you need to pay for it, but nobody wants to do that these days; they just want the bare minimum so they can claim to have their software available in such and such language. |