zing_och | translation: how not to do it (Reply)

(Does anyone know how to add alt-text on Picasa? I'm technologically ignorant and can't find it.)

Yesterday I was reading the latest

news post, giggling along (refusing to cut pictures that don't even work in their own layout! Saying that they just don't feel like cutting, even though people complained a lot over the last uncut post! quoting people without attribution! changing the userinfo after someone pointed out that the post didn't agree with it!) ... good times.

So I thought: It's been a long time since I deleted my LJ. I wonder what changed? And I decided to try it out.

Ok. When I left, there were efforts to translate LJ. This is what became of them.

From lj sign up process

(Click through for bigger pictures.)

The first page. Well, they do have three German words up there... Also: Windows Live? Huh? Nice of LJ to default like that. Even nicer that they put the radio button right back up there if you get an error and have to return here.

Notice the password hint. I got this error message:

From lj sign up process

Would have been nice if they told me about this earlier. It's probably implied by "secure" but I didn't know that.

From lj sign up process

So... which date format am I supposed to use here? US or German?

Next screen!

From lj sign up process

The only German here: the title (as you can see) and the Gender question. Good luck, Germans who don't know a lot of English. By the way, Gender options are "(Keine Angabe)", "Männlich", "Weiblich". Of course, I would have been surprised if they'd included anything else.

The "finish" page:

From lj sign up process

German - English - German - English - German.

Then I got my Welcome Email:

From lj sign up process

Look, this isn't just nit-picking bitchery on my part. It's not "well, better than nothing". It's worse than nothing (by which I mean English-only) - it's so far from professional that it isn't funny anymore. I'd never sign up somewhere that looks so dubious, and I doubt anyone else will either. They certainly won't throw any money LJ's way if that's what they see. (Funnily enough, it does get better once you're "inside". But even then the translation's usually pretty bad.)

There are good reasons for translating, btw, even if you can assume most people know some English (see

rodo's post here). But the way it's done here is completely useless. I know that this work is probably done by volunteers, but that's no excuse for it being so messed up. I guess LJ just isn't interested in this anymore - in which case they should just drop the whole thing and return to English-only for non-cyrillic LJ.

I'll let LJ have the last word. This is on the homepage, livejournal.com. The very first page you see.