Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

To be fair, everyone is committing this crime: Amazon, Google, IBM... as a native spanish speaker, I have never wanted to read documentation in spanish: it is usually of lower quality, not up to date and uses translations of technical terms that make it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the literature (I'm looking at you, dragon book translation. Nobody says "canaletas" instead of "pipelines").

At least before the translations were done by profesionals, but now they are done with tech capable of hallucinating new stuff itself... I'm trusting translations even less than before.



Not everyone, just American companies. When people don't value something (like foreign languages) they dump the job to the AI.


It goes beyond that, a lot of content really shouldn't be translated to begin with.

I'm Spanish, yet I set my system to English because I know that at some point I'm going to look something up or I'm going to come upon some error, and it doesn't matter if the system is perfectly translated, the information I'm going to be able to find is different. There's a flexibility, a leeway for words that go from one language to another that distort terms and make finding information harder.


“Shell script” - “libreto de cápsula de sesión” :) (and mind you, this translation _was_ done by a supposed professional back in the 90s where it was basically the only option.


The only 3 languages worth writing documentation in are English Chinese and Japanese as far as I'm concerned. I only include Japanese because I've read some Japanese game console docs and they were done pretty well


I would add Spanish to that list. It's the 2nd most popular native language in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...


"Spanish" as one single standardized language is being a bit charitable though.


As opposed to English?


English has a pretty heavy thumb on the linguistic unification scales via American and British cultural export weight.

If India and Nigeria kindly did the needful and exported more English-language cultural content, the situation would be more similar to Spanish.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: