Languages

Bas said:

So, I just went to C9 and I noticed that parts of the site were in Dutch. Specifically, the Sign In button and some text in the column to the right of the Live ID sign in control. Then I signed in, and everything was in English again.

Is this another instance of the "C9 randomly switches to another language" bug that just happened to be in the correct language by coincidence, or is something else going on?

It isn't a bug, we had a lot of our string resources translated into a variety of other languages, including Dutch. It maybe a bug though, if you are only seeing a couple of things in Dutch... it should be a lot more than that.

When you weren't signed in, it was based off of your accept language in the browser, but once you signed in it switched to the value in your profile... which was set to english. I just jumped in and set your profile to nl-nl ... hopefully that's ok... if not, just switch it back

I remember that bug, it was related actually ... some bad caching of translated strings.... essentially we forgot to put the language into the cache key so someone would hit the site with their browser set to german, we'd get back Menu.Home in german and put it into cache without specifying a language... then the next user would hit it with their browser set to another language, and we'd give them back german... fixed that though, this is intentional.

As far as the missing translations or weird translations... I would love your feedback on anything (like the reply to root one) that you think should change (and anyone else who wants to do the same for languages they are proficient in, much appreciated). I believe we have good values for the bulk of these strings, but you (and the other Niners) have a better understanding of the context and I'm sure you'll have a great many changes to suggest. You can post feedback here for now... I think I'll create a wiki page with a table to track these in though... but in the morning, I'm done for the night here (2am).

Bas said:

The translation is okay, but it's kind of odd that some things are  still in English. Like "Active Forum Threads" or post dates that say "May" or "Today", or forum descriptions. All in all it looks pretty good, though.

dates are definitely an area we need to add translations for... when I worked on MSDN, we actually set the culture info of the thread in the BeginRequest .... then we'd just use .NET's normal date and numeric output ... I don't want to do that here, it caused a lot of problems in the MSDN code as I remember, but we have the user's language when we are creating the output so I believe I could just construct an appropriate cultureinfo object and pass that along to the formatting functions... It wouldn't cover "Today", "Yesterday", etc... so that might be something I'll need help with

Thanks for all those Bas, I'll work on getting that wiki page up... in a world of infinite resources, we'd build some cool way for you to click on any bit of text and submit new translations which would then be voted on (Erik tells me that Facebook does this, sounds awesome!) ... but in our real world we'll probably just collect feedback and new translations in the wiki and manually update the DB from time to time

Oh, and I think you are right... we'd generally want to go for more familiar on this site, which would have been great information to give to the translators ... I believe they normally work on Microsoft products, where it is probably safest to be polite and formal

bah, I said I was going to bed, didn't I?

We have the ability to go as specific as that, Dutch (Netherlands) vs. Dutch (Belgium)... the code as it is now looks for the specific locale you are using and then falls back to just the language and then back to english

We can specialize on a value per value basis if desired, 90% is the same and for 10% we need different versions for the two Dutch locales ... whatever we need to do we can do

Considering your extremely good English, you aren't really the target audience (of these translations)... actually most people who already use the forums on a regular basis probably aren't the target ... the issue is folks that would be completely lost without at least some level of translation.

How much of an issue that is probably varies from country to country. I know the Microsoft Japan team was really set on having the navigation of Channel 8 in Japanese before they started to promote the site in their region.

I'm hoping to do a en-ca translation soon though, adding some u's in the right places, etc...