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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Solved Problems Repository - Less Wrong
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My only problem is the fucking annoying habit of software corporations to translate everything, not just the GUI which makes sense, but even stdout error messages. This means not only translating back to English but even guessing the original wording, then googling. The worst part is they seriously think they are helpful here, thinking even IT people who read console error messages not always read English. How the heck are they supposed to solve problems then? I don't think they still think people read documentation, do they?
Yeah, it's a tricky thing. I've actually been involved in translation projects for global software, and the closest I can come to an answer is that they don't really think anything at all... there's several different divisions involved, and each one has bits of the picture, and it all just chunks along without anyone thinking it through end-to-end.
Really, a lot of software development, and of organizational activity more generally, is like that.
All of that said... yeah, the "user googles the error message for instructions" use case is not one that gets taken nearly seriously enough. This is also why you get error messages in dialog boxes that don't support copy-and-paste. If it were, every error message would have a unique copy-able ID code .