Catch-all for translation errors and untranslatables (technical!)

(Thread reanimated in March 2013)

NB! This is not a thread to complain about the quality of a particular translation, but to collect instances where it is technically impossible to make a correct translation. If you disagree with the translation of a particular translation, discuss it in the "LibraryThing in ..." groups or attempt a better translation yourself :-).

This thread is meant to be a collection of those pesky little rests of untranslatable snippets and wrongly constructed sentences on the non-english sites. Since we are down to something like 0.05% of untranslated or wrongly translated content, I thought it a good idea to consolidate all the new ones in one thread, instead of having Tim&Chris looking at a number of threads in the Translating LT group or other groups.

So: If you find a (grammatically) wrong construction or a missing translation, that you cannot correct yourself by using the translation interface, add it to this thread.
Be sure to add the URL to the pertaining sub-page and the context of the word/sentence, so that the LT developers can find it easily.

If "yellow text" shows up, that cannot be translated, or shows up in places that you are sure have been translated, give it 24 hours before trying to re-translated or adding them here. Often these sort themselves out when one cache or the other is refreshed.

http://www.librarything.de/groups/discusslibrarythingi#forums

"Languages" (as in allowed languages for group) gets translated to an anglicised plural of "Spraches" instead of "Sprachen". Possible reason: Only singular "language" is translated and a catch-all plural s is attached. Doesn't work in German, but there is no place to translate the "language" label sing./pl. on that page.

There are some problems in Polish translation (and probably in some other Slavic languages):

General problem with plurals - we have TWO forms depending on the number:
1 - singular
2,3,4 - plural I
5, 6, ..., 21 - plural II
22, 23, 24 - plural I
25, 26, ..., 31 - plural II
32, 33, 34 - plural I
etc.
(probably it would be difficult to implement in the whole site but who knows...)

Read/unread in Talk, connected with plurals:
In Polish language adjectives change according to the grammatical gender and grammatical number of the noun. So:
Unread (message) = nieprzeczytana
Unread (messages) = nieprzeczytane (plural I), nieprzeczytanych (plural II)

Right now there's only one form for "unread" which makes it completely impossible to translate. The same form is used for showing the amount of unread messages in a topic (http://pl.librarything.com/talk) and to show in the message header that the message is unread (http://pl.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=44662 or any other with unread messages).

Unreachable text snippets in the "add books" page, right hand results box, after getting "no results" in a search:
http://www.librarything.de/addbooks

"Keine Resultate gefunden für "caulfield your only man"
Check your spelling or try a different source.
Probier das aus:"

Thank you GirlFrom Ipanema! Great idea for a thread!

From the top of my head this is what comes to mind:

* At the personal homepage in the Early Reviewers' block in Swedish there is what appears to be a machine translation of the English text "Request by Sep 30th." In Swedish it is shown as the totally non-sensical, meaningless combination of words "Förfrågan av Sep 30th."

* Site-wide (still referring to the Swedish LT), dates and times are displayed in English, except for the the names of the days of the week and the words "today" and "yesterday" which are translated correctly.

* Thirdly, some weeks ago I added an event to the calendar. There was a drop-down list where I should pick an appropriate description of what the author would do there. I opted for "discusses." As I remember it, the translation was correct in the drop-down, but when I had submitted it the display of it was wrong. Instead of saying something like "NN diskuterar sin bok X", (= NN discusses his/her book X) it said "NN diskussioner sin bok X" (= NN discussions his/her book X.)

On the Connections subpage of my Profile page
http://www.librarything.de/connect ,
the second row of tabs:
Home/Profil/Connections/...
The word "connections" has been incorrectly translated to "Verbindungen" (it is "Netzwerk"/network everywhere else, which fits the purpose much better).
I corrected it in the translation interface, but it doesn't catch (waited a day, and other corrections did catch).

I started the topic list of things that cannot be translated after discussing Abby (I used to send her lists of translation problems), but it has been a while since anybody has done anything to the problems discussed there. I wonder if any of the LT staff reads this topic, either. There are so many other things going on now. Translation problems are mostly difficult to solve and they are not important to the majority of members. The translation system is not very flexible, so we must compromise between bad and worse.

>5 Annix:
As I remember it, the translation was correct in the drop-down, but when I had submitted it the display of it was wrong. Instead of saying something like "NN diskuterar sin bok X", (= NN discusses his/her book X) it said "NN diskussioner sin bok X" (= NN discussions his/her book X.)

I changed this. Translation was in a different place than the drop-down list. If you look the page Librairie Agora: kommande evenemang you see that it is now changed (doesn't show until tomorrow, I think). I hope it is OK now.

Anneli: "Translation problems are mostly difficult to solve and they are not important to the majority of members. The translation system is not very flexible, so we must compromise between bad and worse."

That's why I opened this thread, to collect technical problems in a place where they might be seen (The different translation groups seem mostly dead now). Most of the remaining problems in the German site are of the type: "Have been translated correctly, database hiccup happened, newbie re-translated them wrongly (only in one place), translation system locked the translation". I don't really care for the odd wrong word somewhere in a text, but when the top tabs are concerned, like the problem in the profile above, it's more important, I'd think... (a newbie retranslated "connections" to the wrong word, only in the tab, of all places...).

I get headaches reading the German Flickr site, in part it looks like it was translated by Babelfish --hey, we can do better here at LT, can we? ;-)

>8 GirlFromIpanema:
I get headaches reading the German Flickr site, in part it looks like it was translated by Babelfish --hey, we can do better here at LT, can we? ;-)

I wish we could! And often we can. But languages like e.g. Finnish or Polish are so different from English that I doubt if it is possible to do good translations (fluent and grammatically correct) in the current translation system. I wish I knew what members who use only the Finnish site think about it - do they understand everything that they need to understand. There are lots of things that cannot be translated.

EN --> DE translation doesn't catch

A few days ago (about a week) I saw that the locked translations had been unlocked and went to translate the "connections" tab and the still-english "common knowledge" menu on the German site.

It was possible to translate now, but in case of the "common knowledge" menu, although it is correct on the translation page ("Wissenswertes"), it doesn't show up on the book page: Example:
http://www.librarything.de/work/8051223/reviews/

Giving the thread a bump, because #10 is still active (i.e. English text on German site, translation doesn't catch).
:-)

probably for all languages:
A Java-Script window, that should pull its labels from the standard work/book pages but doesn't (still fully in English):

My library in cover view

single left click on cover

the window that opens is completely untranslated

"Read" doesn't change when conjugated for tense or imperative in English. It does in Swedish. Thus the imperative "read" in the Hot reviews takes the "read" used for past tense.

Okay, I am going to reanimate the thread, in the hope that a few of these pesky ones can be exorcised from the site ;-).

On the main page for each Talk group, the text in the top right-hand corner is English and untranslateable:
http://www.librarything.de/groups/bugcollectors
E.g.
Group member (verlassen)
or
Watching group (aufhören)

On the thread page of a group, which you need to join to be allowed to post: at the very end below the last message:

"Join to post"

Example: here (only if you aren't member of that group)

Untranslatable, not in "all translated texts"
(it was wrongly translated without referring to the source text context or just a dictionary, and so now requests to "log-in" rather than to "join"...)