[Joker_vD]

Windows XP used to have "Welcome". It was a better choice... in the English version, that is. Apparently properly translating that word was difficult because e.g. in Russian version it said something that'd be roughly equivalent to "a welcoming" in English: they've used the word that means "greeting" but can not by itself serve as a greeting. The overall effect was that you were left mildly puzzled: "did they just forget to put an actual greeting in there or?.."

[mananaysiempre]

What software translators (who are usually outside contractors) get is a list of strings with no context, no opportunity to ask what was really meant (including part of speech—blame English—and the intended meaning of this or that %s), and frozen code even if the programmers screwed up (show of hands—ever built up a sentence out of interpolated parts? there, you screwed up).

If you’re lucky, you get English string IDs (and not Chinese or numeric ones). If you’re lucky, the list is complete and in order (and not stripped down to only the untranslated parts so you don’t see how much the agency is avoiding paying you). If you’re lucky, the customer has an localizaton QA department (i.e. a couple of guys per language) which will walk through the UI to try and find the most obvious screwups (and won’t not just merge the Trados back into the source and run the resource compiler).

Every professional involved understands it’s impossible to get a good translation that way. None of them can do anything about it, because the agency will just switch to a less picky one. The good ones try to make something of what they’re given; the bad ones just give up. Almost none of them actually use localized software; almost every one of them looks on wistfully when you show them the Gnome sources with the paragraph-long TRANSLATORS: explanations for every other string. (That’s why Crowdin and Transifex drive me into such rage, BTW—they essentially reproduce the commercial broken-by-design process for hobby developers.)

You know what the most recent innovation is? Have the translator edit a machine translation.

Give your translator something to work with. And for goodness’s sake, if you can afford it, find a couple of freelancers and listen to them—that’s who is going to do the work anyway, might as well give them the whole sum and not the ≤ 30% they will get after the agencies’ cut. (Yes, a small but sizeable portion of candidates will be blatantly incompetent and/or try to screw you over. Duh. It’s a freelancer market.)

[mr_mitm]

Zoom used to translate "Quote" (as in "quote this message") in their German app to "Kostenvoranschlag" ("estimate of cost").

[fhars]

My all time favorite machine translation was from a very early online service (I think it may have been by AltaVista) that translated "Würzburg" as "peppering castle".