What happened to java.com?

[Abuse]

This is about the laughable translation, it needs a serious revision.

I think Sun took the bold move of deprecating every language other than English American. 

[Riven]

And they annotated this thread with @SuppressWarnings

[wazoo]

Well....it's not perfect, but it's a sign of some kind of movement by Sun.

It's too bad they didn't start it three years ago...

Brevity is I think "less scary" for most of the general public though. It's funny because more people would probably download it not knowing what it is, then if they had instead posted some diagrams or documents explaining (in laymen's terms) what the JRE is.

It's kinda like explaining technical projects to non-technical managers...the more meat you give them, the more freaked out they get and want to involve more people in the decision making chain. 

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Eli Delventhal]

Yeah it's kinda weird. "Java + You?! Java + Me? I had better download this!" Then they'll install it and nothing will happen. Makes more sense to cater to developers so more people develop in Java, then the people trying to run their apps will be told to install Java. "Oh, I need to install Java to run this super awesome app." Then they install it and the app works.

That's much more logical.

[Riven]

BUMP. This is seriously wrong!

Want to get in touch with your consumers?

At least do a proper job in your translations!



I'll post this image again, for those who forgot.....

[trembovetski]

Thank you for your feedback. Sun's professional translator and reviewers disagree with you and consider the Dutch translation on that page correct.

Dmitri

[kevglass]

Apologies for pushing the point, but these translators believe the Dutch translation of:

"Experience Java in Action"

is

"Experience Java in Action"

? If so, cool, that means I can add Dutch to my CV

Kev

[Mr_Light]

Apologies for pushing the point, but these translators believe the Dutch translation of:

"Experience Java in Action"

is

"Experience Java in Action"

? If so, cool, that means I can add Dutch to my CV

Kev

It's not uncommon to use the word experience in marketing but Action should be Actie

They also use that at the top. All in all I'm guesing little parts are not i18n-lized rather then poorly translated. Overall dutch ppl don't dislike english in - to put it in context we rather have english with subtitles then lipsynced dutch.

In the German one they also use the English line. - though they use a different main line: Java for you - which if also used in the Dutch version Java voor jouw makes more sense then Java + You. this is because in languages like German and Dutch there's a formal and less formal word for the same thing. (We don't use honorific's like in Japanese) Though the mismatch is probably because we haven't been exposed other commercials who also used the plus sign.

bla I think I'm just getting too mild - on the flipside they have at least fixed the title.

[Mr. Gol]

Thank you for your feedback. Sun's professional translator and reviewers disagree with you and consider the Dutch translation on that page correct.

Dmitri

Dmitri, I can understand you defend your coworkers, and I certainly don't want to offend you, but that page is absolutely NOT Dutch. The translation is simply ridiculous, no Dutch-speaking person could ever come up with the term "Java + u". If we take another phrase, "afwijzing van aansprakelijkheid" and Google it, we have 166k results. If I Google for "gebruiksvoorwaarden", which would be my own translation for "disclaimer", there are 7 million results!

Obviously the Netherlands is not a large market for Sun, and obviously correct Dutch translations are not top priority, but don't try to claim this is a difference in opinion between Riven and the translator. If this person is really a professional English to Dutch translator he/she should be fired, I know it sounds harsh but the translation on this page is really below all standards and will make people either confused or laugh.

[Riven]

Thank you for your feedback. Sun's professional translator and reviewers disagree with you and consider the Dutch translation on that page correct.

Dmitri

Thank you for your feedback too, honestly.

But... I most strongly disagree with the professional translator. It's a very poor translation.



I'll quote a few lines from this very thread: (excluding mine)

Markus_Persson:

I just checked the Swedish one, and it's really poor as well.

Mr_Light:

that is funny, seems like some foreign army sergeant really wants you to download java

Erikd:

My god, that's probably the worst localization I've ever seen . And funny in an 'engrish' kind of way.

These are native speakers of these languages... are you truly so confident in your professional translator?

I cannot stress this enough: it is a poor translation.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Tobiking]

The german translation doesn't seem to be that bad. I would also translate "Experience Java in Action" and "Partner with Us" but everything else seems to be quite right.

[bienator]

could be better IMO

translating slogans from one into the other languages in a 1:1 manner doesn't work very often anyway.

"JAVA FÜR SIE, HEUTE NOCH HERUNTERLADEN"
in capital letters combined with
"Kostenloser Java-Download"
in the next line reads IMO a little bit odd in German too... Thats like buying something before knowing what it is.

They did it a bit better:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/
the central message isn't "download me" the page explains what flash is, what it does and whats new.

and yes they even provide java penetration statistics
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
Maybe Sun could put a deep link to those statistics from java.com to keep the web DRY 

[halfwitgoat]

I don't speak anything but English myself, but a few years ago I worked for a localization company. There was one project which involved multiple languages that were split between us and a rival company. We weren't doing Dutch, but discovered that they had screwed up the Dutch translation - I think they had translated it into Belgian Dutch instead of Netherlands Dutch. And there were enough differences to make the result laughable in places. Just a thought.

[Riven]

FYI, it also doesn't match 'Belgium Dutch' Although their expressions also bring a smile on our face.

[thijs]

Thank you for your feedback. Sun's professional translator and reviewers disagree with you and consider the Dutch translation on that page correct.

Dmitri

Argh!
I'm also Dutch, and though I'm no Dutch linguist, I know for fact that the Dutch translation is horrible!

edit: and like Riven said, it isnt anything like "Belgium Dutch" neither, its more like broken English-Dutch translated by an chief Indian alike 

[pcarter]

Hi, this is Carter from Sun's g11n department, I'm currently managing the translation for java.com. Thank you all for your feedback on this, right now I'm trying get a third party reviewer to review the Dutch, German and Swedish translation on java.com. In the mean time, if you could provide more detailed information (for example, where exactly is the wrong translation, how do you suggest to translate, etc) on this, it would surely help us to make the improvement.

[Markus_Persson]

The Swedish translation looks ok!

I don't know if it's been changed since I last checked it, or if I was needlessly picky back then, but it looks ok now.

[pjt33]

The title of the Dutch download page is in freaking Spanish!

That's not Spanish. Portuguese, maybe.

The Spanish version is a bit odd. On the front page it uses the informal second person (tú), but on the other pages it uses the formal (usted). It also has three of the links at the bottom untranslated. On the "What is Java?" page it has two main links (obtain more information, download) which are inconsistent in their expression of the imperative (one uses an actual imperative, and the other the infinitive).

[pcarter]

That's good to hear! I don't recall any change has been done on the Home Page since then though    In any case, we are still gonna have someone review it just to be safe. Thanks!

The Swedish translation looks ok!

I don't know if it's been changed since I last checked it, or if I was needlessly picky back then, but it looks ok now.

[pcarter]

Hmm...if it's really in Portuguese then I suspect the engineers may have made a mistake by putting the wong language file/string back in, usually translator won't translate into a language they are not paid for In any case, I'll have someone check it out.

The three untranslated links link to the untranslated part of the site, you can see when you click them, the English page/site comes up, so I would say it's a by design thing.

I will forward your other comment to the reviewers and if it makes sense, we will have it corrected in our next update.

Thanks for the feedback again.

That's not Spanish. Portuguese, maybe.

The Spanish version is a bit odd. On the front page it uses the informal second person (tú), but on the other pages it uses the formal (usted). It also has three of the links at the bottom untranslated. On the "What is Java?" page it has two main links (obtain more information, download) which are inconsistent in their expression of the imperative (one uses an actual imperative, and the other the infinitive).

[pjt33]

The three untranslated links link to the untranslated part of the site, you can see when you click them, the English page/site comes up, so I would say it's a by design thing.

In that case the "Java in action" link at the top shouldn't be translated.

[pcarter]

That is very true. I don't think it looks good to leave the top link in English, so in that case, I would suggest the design team/engineering team to extract the bottom three words and get it translated although the linked page is still in English. But I will need to discuss with them first, maybe they have their own reasons, I can't speak for them . The word "Sun Wear" probably should not need be translated according to Sun policy because it's a brand used by Sun.

Thanks for pointing that out.

In that case the "Java in action" link at the top shouldn't be translated.

[Cero]

ridiculous

but I only went to sun.com for java stuff
so I didn't notice that change since it sucked all the way

[jojoh]

The Swedish translation looks ok!

I don't know if it's been changed since I last checked it, or if I was needlessly picky back then, but it looks ok now.

It looks quite OK, but "Hämtningar" sounds very strange to me, but then again I haven't lived in Sweden for all too many years. Hämtning sounds like someone fetching toxic waste, broken/trashed cars or at best kids from kindergarten... Anyway, "Gratis Java-hämtning" sure sounds like someone (most likely not me) is about to move some java stuff from somewhere to somewhere else. If you want a formal tone, then "Hämta java gratis" would be better, since that would make me think that I can do it and download it to my machine. More commonly would probably be "ladda ner java gratis".

"Hämtning" by itself at http://www.java.com/en/selectlanguage.jsp made me completely confused but this might be in line with MS Windows broken Swedish, so using strange language in a consistent way might be the least bad if that is the case.

"Java in Action" changes to "Java in action" A -> a. It is sort of strange to have the page mixed English and localized right next to each other. I think it makes more sense to translate it all even though the links go to English pages (possible with some hint that it links back to English). Still having "Action" for the English page and "action" small 'a' in the Swedish page gives a bit of a sloppy feel to it if one cares about such things.

The rest looks as good as localized IT lingo can be expected to be.