Translation of developer utilities themselves is the final layer of hell. I'm not hearing anybody out about this kinda stuff - after microsoft decided to TRANSLATE THE EXCEPTION MESSAGES IN .NET WITH NO WAY TO BYPASS IT making them unclear, unusable and ungoogleable, I realized what a terrible idea it is to fragment developer knowledge by language.
Let's just stick to a lingua franca, please.
I hope this is a joke because the Arabic translation is so wrong. It's also confusing because Arabic is written from right to left so it'll just create a mess. The translators are using "letter case" and translated it literally to Arabic. The word used doesn't mean "letter" as in a letter in the alphabet but "letter" as in what you send in the post office. These are totally different words in Arabic.
This reminds me of a similar experience.
The first release of WSL(2) 1.0 (this versioning alone is worth another post here, but let's not talk about it) have its CLI
--helpmessage machine translated in some languages.
That's already evil enough, but the real problem is that they've blindly fed the whole message into the translator, so every line and word is translated, including the command's flag names.So if you're Chinese, Japanese or French, you will have to guess what's the corresponding flag names in English in order to get anything working.
And as I've said it's machine translated so every word is. darn. inaccurate. How am I supposed to know that "--分布" is actually "--distribution"? It's "发行版" in Chinese and "ディストリビューション" in Japanese.At last I had to switch my system language to English to set a WSL instance up. From then on I never use any display language other than English for Microsoft products. Sometimes "translated" is worse than raw text in its original language.
Related links if you like to see people suffer:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4111PS: for the original post, my stance is "please don't make your software interface different for different languages". It's the exact opposite of the author has claimed: it breaks the already formed connection by making people's commands different.
It's the CLI equivalence of scrambling every button to make sure they are placed differently in different languages in GUI. I hope this sounds stupid enough so that no one will try it.
A not-so-stupid way that I can think of is to add a "translation" subcommand to the app that given any supported flags in any language it converts them to the user's language. Which is still not so useful and is not any better than a properly translated documentation, anyway.Ah yes can't wait to switch keyboard layout mid-command every time, so nice!
Too half-arsed.
For one,
grepisn't translated. But more importantly, you have to use the english--use-locale-option to set it. Pah!Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as
oand notwo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:- 大文字と小文字を無視する
- だいもんじとこもじをむしする
Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That's the sanest suggestion (who's with me?):
- ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル
Of course, you're kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don't generally render unicode...so let's go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.
Why though
Excel does this, so that German guy you forwarded a sheet to has to manually replace all the Polish function names before it works
