Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL Be careful what humorous messages you leave in your app, for you never know who might see them. Welcome to Who, Me? Our story today is a return for a reader Regomized as "Philip," who does not have the highest opinion of the sales profession. "We had three developers," he recalled. "One was responsible for UI, another for the …
Including a commissioning engineer (this was the early-mid 1990's) who used to think it was funny to upload hardcore porn into the company kit during commissioning, believing it would never be seen or even found.
As you can imagine, it was. I am not sure what the whole story was but he did lose his job, unsurprisingly.
It is simply never a good idea to "hide" something unsavoury inside code or on drives etc. It will eventually be discovered.
On a much tamer note, I know of a database consultant whe had a thing for the name Alice, and tried to shoehorn that name in somewhere every new job he had. That is why there are a number of servers in the world that are probably still named Alice to this day.
My head has already filled in the error for when the server can't be found...
Didn't he also work for a Telco operator in Italy?
> It is simply never a good idea to "hide" something unsavoury inside code
Fully agreed, but that's not the case here.
As the article correctly points out, it's a powerful literary reference which every educated Italian speaker will recognise.
It might be seen as somewhat sarcastic, but the Italians have a much more receptive approach to that, as anyone who has read the late Umberto Eco will know.
As the article correctly points out, it's a powerful literary reference which every educated Italian speaker will recognise.
Many of us will recognize the English version and have probably used it ourselves. For years I had it hanging over the door of the IT Lab where I worked. Now that i think about it, I probably should have used the original Italian.
> Many of us will recognize the English version and have probably used it ourselves.
It's not quite the same thing though, due to the cultural context.
It's a bit like if I drop a mention of the dardi e frecce dell'oltraggiosa fortuna in conversation with an Italian. Even if they happen to recognise the reference, which is unlikely even though they might have heard it before, it just doesn't carry the same force or connotations.
" it's a powerful literary reference which every *educated* Italian speaker will recognise."
Actually, Dante' 'Divina Commedia' is a standard text for the Italian "maturita'" (school-leaving exam), and the inscription over hell's gates is one of the most famous lines. So pretty much every Italian, howver badly educated, would get the reference.
And yes, it absolutely would appeal to their sense of humour!
> It is simply never a good idea to "hide" something unsavoury inside code or on drives etc. It will eventually be discovered
I recall a gentler time when computers (mainframes only back then), were demonstrated with a file containing just the words of "Eskimo Nell". That impressed management far more than the computer generated graphics of a ball bouncing endlessly up an Escher staircse, or the ability to update and print the daily production and sales reports in just a few minutes.
I damn near killed an idiot who insisted on commenting in Klingon, but only on bits of inline assembler embedded in C ... I wouldn't have cared, but the comments popped up during a surprise visit from the CEO with a couple clients in tow looking to see how their customized version of the code was coming along. The customer knew Klingon. Including the cuss-words.
You're not alone. The one I attended was in Skylonda, in maybe 1990 ... The setting was entirely too beautiful for the language and some of the costumes[0], but the bride was happy, so who am I to say.
They are still married.
[0] Me? I wore my racing leathers, as did my wife ... Not riding up there without 'em. (Yes, in response to the other thread, we did stop at Alice's for a cuppa coffee on the way home, why do you ask?)
Upvote for you, but please pass on the upvotes to the idiot, if for no other reason than their creativity and total commitment to geek-ery.
I'm not overly concerned with the appalling idea of commenting in Klingon, given he was playing with inline ASM anyway:-)
A long while ago, in a workplace far away, and shortly after we found a Klingon TTF, us engineers geeks enjoyed passing docs around with English text set to 'Klingon', and with the font embedded in the doc, We loved it...managers hated it as they generally didn't know enough to change the font back..
I actually bought him a couple beers to compensate for the public dressing down (he and I both got yelled at by the above mentioned CEO). Gave him a well above average review, too. Good coder, nice guy, lived down the street from me for awhile. Last I heard he had founder's stock in a software company borged by alphagoo and has supposedly retired to a house out on the Sonoma coast. I should probably try to find him, he's a relative neighbor again.
If your product is not already available in a language, why did you let the marketing cockwomble survive long enough to complete the sale?
It's a non trivial task to do a proper translation. It costs serious time, money, & employee hours of making sure every last bit of text/graphics have been properly translated lest a mistake cause the client to come after you with a hammer & a very bad attitude.
A previous employer had asked me to do a quick & dirty English>German translation for them. I refused. They promised I'd not get in trouble. I flat out dug in my heels & said hell no. So they got someone else in the company to do it rather than pay for a professional job.
Guess what? The German speaking customer the translation had been for found a few inappropriate translations, was _seriously_ not amused, and threatened to sue for libel. Why? Because the German words for some things is only a letter or two off other words that are slang for some very NSFW sexual acts with animals. Want to guess what the customer saw in screens that would have been their-customer-facing? Not. Good.
The employee that did the translation got thrown under the bus. I felt bad for them because of that fact, but then I also told them not to do it unless they got that promise in writing first.
If the sales turd sold the product with a promise that it would be made available in a different language, either take the cost of that professional translation out of said sales shit's pay, or publicly stand them up against a wall & shoot them with squirt guns filled with skunk stink. One way or the other, the dipshit needs to be made *painfully* aware never to do such shite ever again. =-|
I used to work for a large multi-national company who sold websites alongside their main business. It was all highly templated stuff without many bells or whistles, the better to mass-produce them. Of course, said company also had an absolutely huge sales team, a few of which appeared to have no kind of respect for, or understanding of what a template was.
So despite the fact that the whizziest feature we could offer was a slide show on the Home page (and nowhere else), the sales team were promising all kinds of things like user accounts, custom image upload galleries, the works. And whenever the back office couldn't fulfil said ludicrous promises, the customer's wrath always came down on us. Senior management didn't bother to reprimand the sales team, because "they were the ones making the money".
I quickly arrived at the opinion that said company's name rhymed with "Hell" for a very good reason.
Nobody knows a foreign language well enough to do a proper translation, except trained professional translators.
It's one thing to speak <insert language> with english words if you are at a conference or somewhere else; but it's an entirely different thing to do translation.
My significant other is a professional translator, and the things that the non-translator people come up with when they translate themselves are at best hilarious at worst cringy and wrong.
"The component X has been foreseen to do Y".
False friends are not your friends, when it comes to translating languages.
After putting together a power supply, in order to install it into the chassis I was once enjoined by the instructions to "offer up the assembly".
Then there was the copy of the IBM assembly language manual for DOS that came with an early Japanese PC clone. It had obviously been translated from the original IBM version of English into Japanese and then back into supposedly standard English. It was fun to read (if you're into that kind of thing, and can grasp the humo(u)r), but from a technical point of view it was much less than worthless.
I used to translate German into (UK) English. I was asked to translate an instruction manual for a piece of recording equipment that originated in Italy. The German manual was almost unreadable, made very little sense, so it had obviously been translated from the original Italian version by a non-German speaker. I had to track down an original Italian manual and use that as the source material, and incorporate some of the German translation as well. I had my relative, who is an electronic engineer, look over the circuit diagrams, and he found a couple of mistakes in the Italian original that had been carried over to the German version, so we put them right in the final document. He also came up with a list of modern valves to replace the original obsolete ones. The (American) customer was well pleased with the result, and the equipment is now installed and working at a museum in Seattle.
I had a client, during my website days who wanted a mandarin version of their English site. Although they were mandarin speakers, they were not all that great with the formal variety.
So we had to get an external translator, who claimed to be able to translate the site. After a week we got back a response and supposedly looked like a google translate job (according to the client). We had to get a second translator who seemed to have done a better job, as the client accepted that.
Luckily I was not anywhere near the translation bit of the job.
I worked for an international company. I simply put all the text in a DB table with a language column. The I created some stored procedures to read the text from the DB in the chosen language, defaulting to English if the chosen language wasn't there. A procedure to show them which text wasn't there in their language and a user that had the rights to modify their language comments.This of course worked in English too so the salesbods didnt have to get on my back every time they came up with something stupid. Did the same with CSS for their view of the site for the webs stuff.
No professional translators required - everyone got control of their stuff and I didnt get woken up at first Adhan in Istanbul. Giving people responsibility for their part of the business has many many benefits.
General rule for me has been to get translations *into* the translator’s native language when critical, although nowadays English is frequently well understood by most people involved with international business (at least for those supplying the English-speaking world).
Many years ago, some of the Japanese semiconductor vendors would provide (translated) datasheets in English.
Those suffered (in an amusing way, although it could be frustrating) from precisely this effect; one that comes to mind is NJR (now part of Nisshinbo apparently).
I think they now employ properly trained translators.
> Nobody knows a foreign language well enough to do a proper translation
Well that's not true. Lots of multilingual people with multilingual experience in a particular domain will be able to translate very adequately and usually better than a professional translator with poor subject domain knowledge.
But agreed, in the general case you would want a professional translator working in close cooperation with your team (which is what I do)
Back in the day, I was more-or-less bi-lingual in English and French*, including the argot, and so got to deal with the support calls from French customers. During a 'to board level fault diagnosis' call, and knowing the person on the other end of the phone well, I was able to substitute the word 'défectueux' with 'foutu' successfully....far more so than a non-French speaking, eavesdropping, colleague who thought they could get away with it in a later call...to someone more senior.
Bonus points if, when in a crowded English restaurant, you can get someone with a strong Parisian accent to shout the name of the dog in 'The Magic Roundabout' as it was in the original French.
[*] No longer it's seems...I'm sadly out of practice.
"Nobody knows a foreign language well enough to do a proper translation, except trained professional translators."
That's a slight misconception. Even if you don't speak a language well, you can produce decent translations with enough research, looking up every word in a dictionary, checking which synonym is actually appropriate, etc. Slow, painstaking work without good language-knowledge, but not impossible.
The problem is more, as mentioned, when people who think they speak a language quite well decide to do approximate translations without putting the work in.
Even professional translators, IME, spend a lot of time and effort making sure they have the right word for a given context.
Generally, people seem to confuse interpreters and translators. The former need to know both languages well, but aren't expected to translate every nuance. The latter need to get it right.
Even if you don't speak a language well, you can produce decent translations with enough research, looking up every word in a dictionary, checking which synonym is actually appropriate, etc.
This might be good enough to produce something which can be literally understood, but it's going to fall down the moment you hit an idiom (see what I did there).
The thing that most people who only speak a single language don't realise is that a language is not only a literal way to represent thoughts and ideas, but that a language, in its very structure, affects those thoughts and ideas, such that certain concepts are very peculiar to the language in which they are stated and don't have a direct translation. In other words, a language can't be separated from the culture to which it belongs. This extends even to different cultures that share a common language, such as the UK and US. Try asking to "bum a fag off someone" in the US and see how bruised you get.
To get a good translation, the requirement is very simple. You need someone who is fluent in both languages, and who knows the subject matter. There's little point in trying to get a translation of a technical engineering paper by someone who doesn't understand engineering terms, for example. Terms like "work", "energy", "tolerance", "stress", and so on, with very specific technical meanings, are going to get mistranslated.
a language can't be separated from the culture to which it belongs
Very true. It's interesting to compare French and Canadian French, for example. The Candian variety tends to use more active constructions (like English), French French is often more passive.
In a similar vein, the farewell recording on the Eurotunnel trains says "We hope you had a pleasant journey" in English, but in French it's "We hope your journey was pleasant". A small difference, but glaringly "unconventional" to a native speaker if you get the wrong one.
Not just English, Malay and Java, which are really closely related, have some differences as well, for instance pusing which in Malay means "turn" but in Java can mean "dizzy" or "headache" as you give me a fucking headache [0]
Also, some words that just don't translate, which was just as well when a four year old Outskette mentioned her bawak on the monorail in KL (goggle translate doesn't have a definition for it but it means fanny (en-gb) in Java)
[0] Any excuse to post a video of the amazing Oly Oktavia
The difficulty with the process you describe is that the non-expert can't tell when they have put enough work in to not embarrass themselves and others.
Responding with "if you had just put more work in then you would have a got a good result" is just hand-waving.
Nobody knows a foreign language well enough to do a proper translation, except trained professional translators.
It's one thing to speak <insert language> with english words if you are at a conference or somewhere else; but it's an entirely different thing to do translation.
There are some exceptions, experts on their subject and multilinguals come to mind. And for general and IT cases, I am a pretty competent translator (and interpreter) for English-Dutch and Dutch-English. Unfortunately, my German isn't at that level anymore due to lack of practice, but I once did a pretty fair job of translating the UI and help text of some software into German (rough draft translation to give a professional translator a good idea what it was all about, was returned with a compliments and a reduced fee).
I once came across a book, that was similarly either machine translated or translated by a bad translator.
The phrase "Jesus, it's hot in here" or something to that tune was translated literally into my native language.
Nobody starts an exclamation with "Jesus, <insert stuff>" in my language.
At Xerox there was a natural language understanding project. They built a small database of airline schedules and let people try it out:
"Book me a flight from San Diego to San Francisco."
"I have a flight leaving at 12:00."
"I'd like one a little closer to 6:00."
"I have one at 12:01"
[There was a flight at 6:00 but the customer specified "a little closer." He meant a lot closer.]
It's a non trivial task to do a proper translation.
It often seems simple enough; replace literal strings in printf with a variable and load that for whichever language is used. A potentially large but straightforward task. Job done.
Then comes the realisation that 'adjective then noun' rules and the like are not the same across languages, and can vary on the adjective or noun themselves. That printf then needs replacing and a more complicated and dynamic output constructor is required. And that's not as simple as it first appears.
Those who promised it will swear the client will accept whatever they get. The client inevitably sees things differently. Sales will have moved on in search of the next bonus while the developers are bogged down in the minutiae of detail they don't themselves understand.
I worked on a design project with a Japanese company implementing a new generation ofone of their exisitng products. All the specification documentation had been translated from Japanese into English (and someone had dutifully applied a rubber stamped confidentially warning on every page!). I remember a day where we had a long design meeting trying to work out how to implement efficiently one particular corner of the specification where it said that if a specific operation failed with an exception then various items of state which ordinarily would have been modified in steps before the exception condition was detected (which was the case in the implementation) were required to be preserved. After some discussion of this one of the Japanese team members present suggested that we adjourn the discussions for a day while he checked something. Next day he came in and explained he'd checked the original japanese spec and discovered that the translators had missed out an important word from the translation ... the word was "not"
"why did you let the marketing cockwomble survive long enough to complete the sale?"
The operative word here is "let". Short of terminating them with or without extreme prejudice before hand the sale would have been completed before anyone else even know about it. The salesman's mode of operation is sell first, tell afterwards and never ask.
“Non” is in the OED, so it’s an English word, albeit a Latin import with obsolete meanings:
‖ non (nɒn). [L. = not.]1. The first word in a large number of Latin phrases, chiefly legal, some of which have been in more or less frequent use in English contexts. The most important are entered as Main words.
† 2. as sb. A negation or prohibition.
† 3. Short for NON PLACET. Also attrib. in non-party.
(The word “non-party” had its hyphen at the end of a line, and there isn’t a separate entry for the word, so my guess is that the hyphen would still have been used even if it weren’t at the end of a line. In this case, it does not represent the usual meaning of the English prefix “non-”, which has a different [and much longer] entry.)
Of course it's not a word in English, silly!
It's a non-word unit of the language known as a "prefix". Has been since the days of Middle English, dating back to at least the mid 1300s.
The hyphen is suggested, but not necessary, depending on which style guide you choose to adhere to.
HTH, HAND
If your product is not already available in a language, why did you let the marketing cockwomble survive long enough to complete the sale?
Spot on.
Its not just the language, there could be any number of things required in Italy not factored in to the code.
Siesta breaks , mafia payoffs , anything .
If your product is not already available in a language, why did you let the marketing cockwomble survive long enough to complete the sale?
You've clearly never met anyone who works in sales.
We recently had to do some "internal training", which is a box-ticking exercise for the company to continue to be allowed to operate, or somesuch. This included "fraud and corruption training" (how not to, although the "course" name may be misleading).
One of the items here describes in detail how it would be a criminal act of fraud to sell something to a client on false pretences. Apart from the obvious observation that this course, whilst mandatory for all employees, is clearly aimed at sales people, I can think of at least one instance, in the last couple of years, where this is exactly what the salesman has done, creating a whole world of ball-ache for everyone else in the organisation.
Anon, for obvious reasons, although I suspect this tale is so commonplace, I could be anybody.
I got caught with that one once. On joining the company I got given responsibility for a product which had been a director's first venture into C from Cobol which wasn't a good start. What made it worse was that the implementation wasn't fit to be sold as it stood. It had been developed in conjunction with a client who was obviously happy to let any one in any part of the organisation see the entire data set, not just the parts applicable to their job.
In trying to straighten that out I ran into the director's abuse of the C pre-processor to create macros that were a bit Cobolish - let's call them Cobollocks. That would have been OK if I hadn't needed to change some instances; in the end I ran the whole lot through cpp and made that my starting point.
Then, while I was starting to unpick the rest of the spaghetti in order to partition user access, sales promised a new customer that it would be more or less a drop-in for their existing application. Looking at that application I could see that our database design wasn't that close a match to the way it did things. Fortunately I managed to escape after a few weeks.
> The German speaking customer the translation had been for found a few inappropriate translations, was _seriously_ not amused, and threatened to sue for libel.
I have great difficulty believing that story.
The customer would have been aware that it was not a professional translation, if it was done by a non native. You would probably point out that the translation needs work and ask for it to be fixed (or a big discount) but that would be the end of the story.
If it was done by a native, regional variations can sometimes be an issue, as expressions that are quite innocent in one place can be vulgar or have unintended connotations in others (more so than in English), but you normally spot what's going on straight away.
The last option is that your translation was done by someone who knew feel well what they were doing, in a passive aggressive sort of way.
"If it was done by a native, regional variations can sometimes be an issue, as expressions that are quite innocent in one place can be vulgar or have unintended connotations in others (more so than in English), but you normally spot what's going on straight away"
I've lived in Northern Ireland for almost three decades. Prior to that I lived in England, mostly down in the West Country. I have an invisible language changeover switch in the middle of the Irish Sea that I have no control over and for which I'm quite grateful because much of the dialect in one place has absolutely no counterpart in the other. I've frequently found myself in the position of translating the conversation between my wife (Irish) and friends (English) because the idioms are just so different.
"... expressions that are quite innocent in one place can be vulgar or have unintended connotations in others .."
I have a hazy collection that one of my process engineering books or dictionaries claims that the European Spanish word for 'heat exchanger' means 'brothel keeper' in South American Spanish (or the other way round, can't find the book right now).
Any hispanophone Commentards out there who can help?
Nope, that's not true.
There are a few examples such as the verb coger, which in Iberian Spanish means to take (something) whereas in South America it refers to the coital act, or “correrse”, an intransitive verb meaning “to step aside” in Latin America and to ejaculate (or orgasm) in Spain.
But a heat exchanger is just a great exchanger everywhere.
i was once explaining to a vague acquaintance of my wife's the size of the village in which I was living at the time, emphasizing how tiny it was by means of the illustration "Its so small the vicars wife has to double as the village hooker". With grinding predicatbility, the acquaintance smiled and calmly announced that her husband was indeed a vicar. I hid under a rock.
Back in the 1990's I produced a lap timing system (computer, timing beams, radio links, in-car telemetry) primarily for F1, but over the years it filtered down to other formulas and bikes.
In the computer there was one EPROM with the 64K of assembler code and the other EPROM socket was loaded with the text that would appear on the screen.
However, the laptops (Epson PX4) had limited screen size and text had to be abbreviated on almost ever screen.
Everything was fine until a customer insisted that it had to be translated into French. (At their Magnicor site everyone had to speak French all of the time, despite the fact that the majority of the engineers were English.) Now, I could speak a liitle French, but even in those days I had enough sense to get a native French speaker to work out what the abreviations would have to be.
I never had to have it translated into another language, but I received so much qudos for having the text in the seperate EPROM. I even confessed that it was only there because I had run out of space on the first EPROM and text was the best thing to place in a 'slower to access' second EPROM.
I Worked with a Welsh Council many years ago who were sold a Council Tax application.it needed all customer facing documents translating into Welsh.Testing had gone reasonably well especially as the proposed legislation had not been passed before The application was written so changes were required several times a week. It took weeks and weeks to find an English / Welsh Translator willing to take the job on due to the tight timescales and the technical nature of the documents. The translator finished and handed over the translations, it had been a tough job as the text had to fit into the same size text boxes as the original English.
On handing it over she asked the senior manager who he had engaged to do the proof reading. Needless to say another several weeks were spent finding somebody qualifies to perform the proofreading
Timescales were incredibly tight as Bills needed to be sent out on time.
That perfectly illustrates the problem with Welsh, that even native Welsh people don't speak it as their first language. Hardly anyone can speak it properly. The only reason it still exists as a language is because of government intervention to try and stop it from dying out, by putting it on signposts and documents, and making it compulsory in schools.
You could probably send out the documents with all kinds of errors in the Welsh text and nobody would ever notice because they will default to reading the English text.
There was a story in the news a few years ago about a sign outside a Welsh car park. The council had sent an email with what they wanted translated, and they printed what was sent back.
Turns out the message that was sent back was something along the line of an out of office message.....
Alpha demos are usually peppered with sofwtare landmines.... and everyone does know it.
I remember having a wait box that appeared for an alpha demo, that rather than saying 'Please wait - processing' said....
'Always look on the briiiiiight side of life, duh, duh....duh,duh,duh, duh, duh duh'
That certainly lightened up a room....
I produced a system many years ago to measue the pH of cat urine (basically, the only simple means of measuring their health!) This was for a company that made cat food and they wanted to test the recipies.
The cats were trained to urinate in a shower tray and my sensor was under the outflow. The pot had to be emptied and replaced after each filling and so I set up a voice annunciation to inform the staff of this. e.g. "Cat number 23 has urinated".
It was so 'popular' that I also had to place an example on a button that the staff could press when they were conducting tours!
I was messing about during my lunch breaks with the Microsoft Agent software and wrote a program that would monitor my email inbox and play a sound, followed by an agent (wizard, robot dog etc) character popping up, who would then read out the subject line of the email.
One Friday, I forgot to switch it off and some colleagues, who were working over the weekend, were surprised to hear it announcing my emails when they arrived.
I came in on Monday to find my inbox full of messages with the most disgusting subject lines you have ever seen! They had lots of fun that weekend.
Worked for a UK based fruit machine manufacturer a few years ago (Barcrest) that was purchased by a US gaming company (IGT). I was the sole developer on a project to put some more interesting aesthetics on their frankly dull one armed bandits. This involved replacing the neon-tube light box above the game with one that had its own CPU. The Barcrest code was a mixture of Forth and 6809, so plenty of voodoo involved.
Got ushered into my bosses office at a later date with regards to my source code. Apparently the Nevada Gaming Commission took a dim view of some of the comments in my code, for example:
; Entering Bodge City in a bus with no brakes
In my defence, I wasn't told my source code would be submitted.
Many years ago I was a member of a Fleet Air Arm squadron (F-4 Phantom II aircraft) and the powers that were wanted to get 'up to date' and have the squadron motto in English rather than latin (as many were at the time).
The motto was 'Strike Unseen', but the literal translation was 'Lash out blindly'.
Indeed - fraught with danger.
"Translation is easy.
Ha Ha"
UK English native speaker would (hopefully!) think the ha ha line conveyed a sarcastic laugh, a literal translator might end up with a description of a ditch and wall construction for keeping sheep off your land (what a "Ha Ha" is as a noun).
Arggh, no. Next I'll be hearing it as a failed Welsh translation?
From the original project to automatically translate Russian to English, and when they realized someone else had an offshoot project to translate English to Russian. Usual short-circuiting attempted.
(A professor of mine was a German who semi-participated in some defence oriented way...)
The other more ambitious example was "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak". Became "the wine is good but the meat is rotten"
Those old translations were usually quite approximate at best, and that's a good example.
It simply follows the Italian word order, which works fine in Tuscan and many other romance languages but it completely and unnecessarily murders the more rigid SVO order of English sentences. It doesn't convey the original sense at all.
Yes, totally agree. Just because a translation is older and has "ye" in it, it isn't necessarily any more accurate.
And while an idiosyncratic word order might be more "poetic" in English sometimes, there's no point doing that if the original doesn't have a distinctive tense or style that you're trying to echo.
One of my pet peeves is older translations of non-European languages that are full of "thee" and "thou" when the source language never had a distinction between the formal or informal "you". But translators thought it sounded more "exotic", so that's how they rendered it.
I worked in the Netherlands years ago, in a company which allowed no external internet access, but had an internal translation dictionary to allow us non-Dutch speaking people to look up words and save us having to ask every five seconds what fields on a screen meant.
I was making an effort to learn the language and mailed my team lead a reply including a line of pidgin Dutch. He replied slagging my appalling grammar, I used the dictionary to look up the Dutch translation of a very mild insult (I think it may have been something like "fool") in response. I even took the precaution of checking the translation back to English first.
He arrived at my desk two minutes later looking quite shocked and explaining I could be fired for what I'd just called him, which was one of the worst words I could use in Dutch. Turns out the dictionary was a little too complete and the Dutch side included numerous not-quite-synonyms for each translation which in this case had ranged from the mild to the extremely vulgar, and of course I'd randomly picked the worst. Helpfully the English side seemed to have been sanitised so there was no way of telling that.
Lesson learned, don't rely on translation apps even if they're the company standard
Dutch insults and invectives tend to be very body-forward. Either they are disease-related (kanker-[0] is[1] a very common prefix), or they are simply body parts; the scrotum and its contents being very frequently included. These are bounded around quite freely between people.
Then again, when we moved to Amsterdam in -99, my then-wife asked our relocation consultant what the worst Dutch swear was. After some (clearly uncomfortable) thinking she quietly whispered, "Godverdomme" (lit "Goddamnit"). When we told her it didn't sound too bad she said "it's so bad that when they have to use it in subtitles on TV[2], they just put "GVD" so as not to offend people.
[0] Meaning cancer, not cankers.
[1] Well, I say "is" even though I left Amsterdam in 2007. I'm assuming insults don't change that much over time.
[2] The Dutch subtitle everything rather than dub it. I learned a lot of Dutch from watching episodes of Dawson's Creek, Friends and Melrose Place I'd seen back home a couple weeks earlier before moving.
In my experience, in some European countries the swear-o-meter is particularly sensitive around religiously-themed swears. Years ago I rather horrified a continental acquaintance be referring to someone being a devil to work with. IIRC they suggested that "a f***er to work with" would actually have caused less of an intake of breath.
You have a point, and while I would expect that in catholic countries around the Mediterranean sea, the Dutch never struck me as a very religious people. Then again, the Nieuwe Kerk (lit. the New Church) in Amsterdam is from the 15th century. (The Oude Kerk, right in the middle of what's now the Red Light District was opened in 1306.)
It's more or less the same in English! "Effing", obviously named for the F-word, is mostly biological in origin; whereas "blinding" (from "God blind me!", which got corrupted to "cor blimey") is mostly theological in origin.
"Bloody" -- which you might naïvely think was obviously effing -- is actually an example of blinding, as it is a corruption of "by our lady".
Umberto Eco wrote about this in, I think, “Dire quasi la stessa cosa” (Experiences in translation, in English, which is a bit meta).
Romance cultures tend to be far less shy when it comes to religious references compared to Germanic cultures.
I can attest to this as a speaker of both romance and Germanic languages. A memorable outburst from a Catalan guy I heard once included scatological references to Our Lord's fried testicles and His mother's allegedly unvirtuous occupation. And he was only very mildly annoyed about something trivial.
"I'll be back, need to use the little squirrels room." is one I sometimes use.
I've also learned that saying someone is "powdering their nose" can mean a totally different thing involving "snow".
Tends to tell you more about a site when someone makes that connection vs the normal "is using the restroom".
Even going from British to American English I've found that some variance in forcefulness and crudeness. The problem now is I've worked with so many non Queen's English folk that I forget what is acceptable where. There in lies trouble.
It is quite easy, Americans get offended by colourful language, British (like Europeans) get offended by guns. As far as I am concerned, those Americans are mewling quims ;)
I would love to know the thought process of whoever considered that including so-offensive-you-could-get-fired swearing in an internal document designed to help foreigners communicate with their local work colleagues was a good idea. What did they think would happen? Why wasn't it marked with "Do Not Use This Word" in big bold letters?
"In a previous job - had an app that supported some European major languages (can't remember which ones), and a saleman that promised a Belgium customer that "We can translate it into Belgium for you, no problem!""
I'll be happy to proofread it for you, for an appropriate fee. (see icon)
Google Translate came up with: Leave all hope, you who enter
Whilst Bing mangled things into: Leave every hope, you who entertain
For British English Deepl managed to get: Abandon all hope, ye who enter in
For US English Deepl went with: Leave ogne hope, ye who enter in
There used to be a game why you put an english phrase into google translate, asked it to translate to japanese. then translate the japanese back to english. repeat until the translation returned the same english phrase twice. You could get quite a lot of iterations with some phrases.
That was quite fun
"fun is in reading YouTube's machine generated subtitles".
And there was me thinking I was the only one who noticed.
Part of my aversion to 'AI' or 'ML' is caused by the output of whatever generates these subtitles. You sort of expect errors in translation, and the 'Audio to text' task is hard in the first place, but the audio--> text error rate is far too high for my liking. It's only the odd word missing or mis-translated but this is usually more than enough to skew the text into something a long way from the audio. I guess the 'English Audio to {Other language}' task is harder and more prone to error, especially as us flesh-sacks can't do that properly either!
It's one thing to argue about translation with a human.....but how do you argue with a machine about it's translation? Personally, I can't wait for someone in the legal community to submit/try to use some machine-translated text and expect it to remain unchallenged.
...when the IBM AT was brand new, my first IT job was at a chain that sold IBM exclusively (what else was there!) and the push was on to sell as many units as possible. I was assigned the task of un-boxing and setting up new ATs for customers.
While formatting the hard drive you were asked to name the volume. Every machine as part of the boot process was to run chkdsk /f in the autoexec.bat which would display the volume name and then the hard drive stats. I decided to name them all "Buying Pays" so when chkdsk would run it would then display "Volume Buying Pays".
The store manager had a potential customer in to demonstrate the shiny new AT. Of course when it booted up the first line on the screen was "Volume Buying Pays". After the demo I was 'instructed' to never do that again. Don't know why, I thought it was Clever Marketing! He didn't agree....heh
Once had a client issue with some well-know PPM software - an obscure crash with meaningless/generic exception message when certain input criteria were met.
As I was considered to be the 'one-eyed man', I was tasked with tracing the problem. Time passed as I installed the appropriate coding/debugging tools (I wasn't/am not a developer), downloaded the code packages and de-compiled the code ('Support' weren't).
Days passed as I slowly (a) learn't the debug tools, (b) learn't the coding language (did I say I am not a developer?) and traced a path through the code. Finally, there it was, in plain sight in the code, just where the clients unusual input criteria had taken me - the developers comment 'We should never get here'
Worked for a firm that wrote applications for banks. We had sold a application to numerous foreign customers and they were happy to have it in English as all the users needed to use English in their jobs. Until we got a French customer who wanted it translated to French. It was agreed that we should ensure that all strings/UI components were in translatable resources and then the customer would do the translation and we'd build the app with their translated resources. So not an insignificant amount of work later we had the resource files and set them to the customer. After a few weeks the customer saw the size of the task and decided their users would use the English version just like everyone else.
Worked on a desktop app many years ago with a *lot* of fancy UI. We localised it into the usual languages (English, French, German & Italian) and some not so usual ones (Polish).
About every 18 months, sales would come in and say:
"If it only it supported Arabic, we could sell thousands of licenses and make the company loadsa dosh!"
Arabic is a RTL (right to left) language which *really* messes up the UI. Supporting this is non-trivial.
We would then spend a lot of effort, translating all the UI strings, testing, finding and fixing all the bugs.
Number of additional sales: zero
My boss asked a client what the syetm should do if somebody tried to access an area they were not supposed to. "it should tell them to bugger off!" was the reply.
When demonstrated, the system (running on MSDOS before the days of GUIs) scrolled up a message in ASCII block characters which said "BUGGER OFF!" in red (my involvement was to have it play the Monty Python theme through the PC speaker while scrolling - all written in Assembler)
For some reason the client's boss was not happy!
I have a utility that dumps "Something went haywire." to shell when it gets a dirty exit/unhandled input.
I've also left a "Hello Tim, what do you want me to do today?' (Tim being the project lead.) screen popup easter egg in a system once, that triggered whenever someone plugged in the programming cable after partially disassembling the machine to get at the port.
I figure if their name wasn't Tim, they didn't need to be in there, or know how to get there, so they would never see it, and if they did, they'd wonder who Tim was.
What's wrong with that?
The following will return true.
bool CheckDisney'sClaim()
{
bool Result = true;
for (auto Thing : AllFilmsAndPromotions)
{
if( ! Thing.MayNotBeAvailableInAllTerritories)
{Result = false; break;}
}
return Result;
}
EDIT: Sorry, the comments section ate my whitespace.
testing out our new engraving software with engraving something with "FOR DESTRUCTIVE TESTING ONLY" and "FOR FEKS SAKE DONT PUT THIS ON AN AIRCRAFT" on the other side count?
Guess where we got a phone call from..... after our customer had assembled the fitting using that plate and then sent it on to their customer...
Also they complained about the lack of labeling on the part for destructive testing and the fact they were 1 plate short.....
And my boss wonders why I sit in my car outside sobbing sometimes......
People have funny ideas about Salespeople. Personally, I try and avoid dealing with them.
At work, a few years back, one of our lecturers was talking to me about how I go about finding which equipment to recommend. I said that when I'm given a task that needs a given piece of equipment, I read up in any relevant magazines, and look on relevant website to determine the best piece of equipment.
He told me I was wrong to do this, as magazines and websites can be bought. I need to go direct to the company sales people. To which I pointed out that the only reason they can't be bought is because they are the ones who would be doing the buying.
My experience as a programmer ( Native speaking English ), working in a French company was it was better to
improve my French to read original French Documents rather than wait 6 months for a badly translated technical
document ( Badly translated as original document was deeply technical so a lot of field specific information was
'Lost in Translation' ).
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