Internationalization and Localization
8 points by abhin4v
8 points by abhin4v
The Hindi फ्री कैंसिलेशन is a transliteration of “free cancellation”. Locale en-Deva, if you like. I can’t read most of the Devanagari script, so the funny thing here is that I was actually looking so that I could mention changing it to hi-Latn, which is pretty commonly used!
I don’t know if people would write/say that, or something more like Google Translate’s suggestion मुफ़्त निराकरण (in hi-Latn: muft nirakaran). Definitely in Hyderabad a lot of English makes its way into people’s Telugu and Hindi speech. I can follow a lot more of conversations than I should be able to.
(Don’t know about script subtags? BCP 47 defines language tags, with script subtags in RFC 5646 § 2.2.3, and it defers to ISO 15924 for the script codes, and Wikipedia has a list. In practice, the main ones you see are Cyrl, Hans, Hant and Latn.)
Using an ISO date would at least solve 1/3 of the (potential) issues. Not sure why I would ever show someone a booking without the year. You might not like 2026-09-07 but I've never heard from anyone that it's misleading or open to interpretation, just ugly.
I bet you dollars to donuts that if you launch a site in the US with ISO dates the second piece of feedback you'll get is that the date is weird, please use normal dates.
(First piece would be complaining about lack of dark mode)
Another two classic problems are translating words without context so that you get the entirely wrong word (e.g. save means both grant salvation and store) and using the same sentence structure in all languages.
I have seen this countless times with the word "open" as well. It can either be the state of being open, or a button you click to open something. Translators have no way of knowing when faced with the word on its own, so I see lots of file dialogs where the button says it is open.