Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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As a tiny followup on Saturday's ordeal on Translating, I was far less than impressed when I realised that many keyboard equivalents in Safari vary between the German and the English version of the program. I don't consider that a good idea as far as preserving consistent usability between applications is concerned. Users of English Safari may not enjoy the Command-Option-S consistency I thought to have discovered lately.

Poor translation in Finder's status bar Another translation due to poor analysis of the grammar used is to be seen – and in fact blatantly obvious – in the German version of the Finder: When selecting an object in a Finder window, the status bar will change from stating the total number of items displayed to the number of items selected. In German the latter reads 1 von 102 Objekte, although everyone with a basic grasp of German grammar will know it should read 1 von 102 Objekten instead. I assume they just blindly translated items without having in mind the grammatical variations.

Not only is this a really good example for one of the problems I tried to describe, its obviousness once more raises the question whether Apple actually try out their own software before shipping it.

I could use the opportunity to bitch a bit about the general creepiness of the OSX Finder, but I won't.

June 2, 2003, 17:11

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