On Sunday, 23 September 2018 at 20:49:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
There's a reason why dmd doesn't have international error
messages. My experience with it is that international users
don't want it. They prefer the english messages.
I'm a native German speaker.
As for my part, I agree on this, indeed.
There are several reasons for this:
- Usually such translations are terrible, simply put.
- Uncontinuous translations [0]
- Non-idiomatic sentences that still sound like English somehow.
- Translations of tech terms [1]
- Non-idiomatic translations of tech terms [2]
However, well done translations might be quite nice at the
beginning when learning programming. Back then, when I coding C#
in VS 2010 I was happy with the German error messages. I'm not
sure whether it was just delusion but I think it got worse with
some later version, though.
[0] There's nothing worse than every single sentence being
treated on its own during the translation process. At least
that's what you'd often think when you face a longer error
message. Usually you're confronted with non-linked and
kindergarten-like sentences that don't seem to be meant to be put
together. Often you'd think there were several translators.
Favorite problem with this: 2 different terms for the same thing
in two sentences.
[1] e.g. "integer type" -> "ganzzahliger Datentyp"
This just sounds weird. Anyone using "int" in their code knows
what it means anyway...
Nevertheless, there are some common translations that are fine
(primarily because they're common), e.g. "error" -> "Fehler"
[2] e.g. "assertion" -> "Assertionsfehler"
This particular one can be found in Windows 10 and is not even
proper German.
