• Darren (unregistered)

    Is the WTF the lazy "translation" or is there something subtle that the article isn't making clear?

  • Prime Mover (unregistered)

    What a dikhováno.

  • Steve (unregistered)

    That's a certain kind of evil genius. Because it takes all of 5 seconds to Google 'uploaded in Czech' and copy/paste nahráno ...

  • hakko (unregistered)

    I had the misfortune to read an English document written by someone from Spain that read like that the whole document. Lots of Spanish words, all with correct English grammar and so on. Completely unreadable, but we did get a good laugh out of it.

  • (author) in reply to Darren

    Look closely at the description fields and which property they're applied to.

  • LXE (unregistered)

    I am Russian and the respectively parallel "uploazheno", "downloazheno" sound perfectly reasonable to me.

  • LXE (unregistered)

    Oh, right, the order. But otherwise perfectly reasonable.

  • Ondřej Vágner (google) in reply to LXE

    Yeah. Working for an international company, I've used so many English words mangled into Czech grammar it's ridiculous. "Acknowledgni ten alert, dej notu do logu a naassignuj si ten ticket," is a sentence I could have said any number of times and been understood by everyone around me.

  • Hasseman (unregistered)

    I tend to say my documentation or comments are all in Swengerlands. As they say sometimes: I'm not bi-(or tri) lingual but half lingual. Swengerlands = Swedish, Dutch (Nederlands) and English

  • (nodebb)

    What goes down, must come up. Or the other way round.

  • Mike5 (unregistered) in reply to LXE

    Yes, perfectly reasonable if you want to press "Upload" for downloading a file, and vice versa. (granted, this was not used for buttons but for status - still a f*ckup)

  • (nodebb)

    " You’ve been told to make sure the code is usuable by them"

    Glass house, meet stone.

  • I'm not a robot (unregistered) in reply to LXE

    Would it be reasonable for someone who speaks only Czech (in the article's case) / Russian (in your case) and not English? Because if they speak English, there's no need for the translation in the first place.

  • aalien (unregistered) in reply to LXE

    In Finland we use words like "uploadattu" and "downloadattu" all the time. With very Finnish pronounciations too. It's pretty common to use excessive amounts of English words in a kind-of-Finnish-sounding manner, and we call that "Finglish".

  • ichbinkeinroboter (unregistered)

    upgeloaded / downgeloaded (uploaded / downloaded) are just fine in German ... (though it makes me itch that they have 'd' and not 't' at the end)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Applied Mediocrity
    What goes down, must come up. Or the other way round.

    We all float down here.

    I'll leave the "that's what she said" jokes for someone else.

  • (nodebb)

    Honestly "uploaded" and "downloaded" are pretty terrible terms, just because it depends on which direction one looks at the process from. If a system A sends a file to system B, then system A uploaded it to system B and system B downloaded it from system A. You can try to somewhat get around this by making clear in your documentation that everybody must be sure to use terminology from the same perspective (like everything is always named from the user's point of view), but I've worked in many systems where a user's browser sends something to the web server, which sends it to a back-end processing system, which sends it to some vendor for processing, and saying "upload" and "download" really just confuses things when you're trying to say "goes from system A to system B".

    Anyway, my point is that since I don't know Czech or the conventions that this particular Czech team uses, it may be that what the English team calls "uploads" is the same thing that the Czech team calls "downloads", since they're on the other end of a transfer. So I can imagine the problem here not being the difference in wording, but the lack of a comment as to why the difference in wording is intentional.

    Though no, that's probably not the most likely explanation.

  • sizer99 (google)

    I'm not much of an app by the light of day But by night I'm one hell of an uploadováno. I'm just a sweet cross domain app From Transexual Translatováno. Let me show you around Maybe play you an alert sound. You look like you're both pretty groovy. Or if you want something visual That's not too PHP-mal, We could upload some videos with FTP.

  • (nodebb)

    I think the lame effort at "translating" is a lot more amusing than switching the descriptions on an enum. The second is just a type or a moment of absentmindedness. The first is active stupidity.

  • Fizzlecist (unregistered) in reply to sizer99

    Now I'll have RHS songs going through my head all day...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Ondřej Vágner

    It’s bound to happen in some form in IT (I remember an old satirical book about failures of programmers that had one like that, along the line of “... a output assignuj na flopáč [floppy disk]”). What really drives me up the wall though is the anglicized Czech marketing speak, eq. “katnout badžet” [to cut the budget], proper Czech is “omezit rozpočet”.

  • linepro (unregistered)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

  • richarson (unregistered)

    Or:

    Code: check! Documentation: Czech!

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to pcooper

    That's why some use the convention that "download" means transfer from the bigger system to the smaller one and "upload" vice versa, which may actually be the original technical definition. I've read technical handbook that use it like that.

    So you download something from the internet as usual, but when you e.g. transfer some firmware from your computer to a peripheral, you download it to that device. Not much less confusing, I'm afraid.

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to ichbinkeinroboter

    Some actually write "upgeloadet", but most use "upgeloaded" apparently. Or (Dutch style) "geuploade[dt]" which actually seems nicer to me, without jamming "ge" in the middle of an English word.

    But honestly, this kind of Denglish, though commonly used in informal communication, is better avoided in technical writing. In source code comments it might be acceptable to many. Though in this case, "hochladen" and "aufspielen" are zwo perfektlich kromulente Translationen in Germanisch.

    (Never had so many wavy red lines in a single comment. ;)

  • shcode (unregistered)

    i'm fascinated by how many people here in comments didn't notice the descriptions being the other way around:

    the description for "Uploaded" is "Downloaded", and the description for "Downloaded" is "Uploaded".

  • Drak (unregistered) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo

    "Or (Dutch style) "geuploade[dt]" which actually seems nicer to me, without jamming "ge" in the middle of an English word."

    Bah, just use 'geuploa(dt)' and 'gedownloa(dt)', which is much nicer than appending a 'e(dt)' to the end which no-one ever says.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    @Foo AKA Fooo: In aviation datalink parlance, an "upload" or "uplink" is ground-to-aircraft while a "download" or "downlink" is aircraft-to-ground. Which make a certain sense but is the opposite sense of down = "large to small" that you rightly point out is commonly used elsewhere in IT. Makes me wonder: What standard terms do they use in the submarine service?

    As somebody famous said and xkcd so trenchantly shows us: https://xkcd.com/927/ , the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

  • El guesto (unregistered) in reply to hakko

    You say like a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon?

  • My 2 cents (unregistered)

    I think of uploaded and downloaded based on what ever system initiates the action. Uploading -> sending to another system. Downloading -> retrieving from another system. They're not reciprocal since for any given transfer only one system initiates the action. If system A uploads a file to system B, I would not say that system B downloaded the file. System B was simply the recipient of the uploaded file.

  • . (unregistered) in reply to Ondřej Vágner

    Whoever came up with that system deserves to burn in the deepest depths of hell

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered)

    Reminds me of dealing with banking software and constant dyslexia around credit/debit and order/receipt/invoice/remittance. They have a habit of not always being in the direction you might expect, and no-one ever dare change the legacy code (even a comment) in that brittle stuff.

    Well that and my time dealing with multi-lingual documentation ... I put up a strong case with the Spanish translator that we should be saying "El Raton" and not "El Mouse", the French translator probably had a point in brushing me off when I suggested the operating system should be described as Les Fenetres quatre-vingt quinze and after heated arguments about how to translate "proximity" I had one Russian translator fired and ended up marrying the other one.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Darren

    So company doesn't want to pay for a translator, and then blames the foreigner. Business as usual.

  • Jan (unregistered)

    Seems there had been a small misunderstanding. That colleague that's responsible for the fuck up is Czech. As I don't remember meeting him I can't comment on his English though. In general we do not use Czech in variable names or (in this case) enum options. Mostly because with Czech intermixed with English based method and property names in the core and all libraries the code doesn't read right. It just looks weird if you mix it. All developers are assumed to be able to understand English, at least in the written form.

    This project is an internal tool for a Czech client so it's not internationalized and the web is only in Czech and the descriptions in the enums are used for display. So no translators involved or needed. The code is supposed to use English, the UI is in Czech, the developers are (with a few exceptions) Czechs. Considering that the UI is used by a few employees of the client the Czenglish of Uploadováno and Downloadováno is acceptable, it's the mixup that caused me to curse. That and the fact that as pcooper notes that the terms, in whatever language, are NOT well selected. To tell the truth they are SO badly chosen that I have to go see the code that handles the flag to remind myself which is which and what the heck the flag means.

  • Jan (unregistered)

    By the way here's another lovely enum from the same person. Yes, the values do get stored in an int column in the database.

    public enum PriceGatherSales { Yes = 0, No = 1}

  • Adam (unregistered)

    You’re wrong about perspective. Uploaded is from the client, uploaded to is from the server. Likewise, downloaded is from the client. Downloaded from is from the server. Esperanto provides a distinction in the form of -igi vs -iĝi.

    Verbs need an object and a subject.

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