For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..
Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet.
Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language.
There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.
Now Firefox added stupid popups offering translating websites written in my native language because the OS is set to English. And they didn't see a need to create a checkbox for that outside of about:config (Mozilla, if you want to get rid of me you can just say so instead of spamming me with popups)
A fun trick is that if you install Windows 11 with the "English/Europe" locale, it doesn't install a lot of the bloatware because it's not defined for that location.
Even the keyboard on my MBP is physically US ANSI, because if you've ever coded more than a hundred lines using brackets on an ISO keyboard you know why.
I managed to get everything right in KDE on my PC though, by some weird way of using "Danish (UK)" or whatever it's called in some specific settings -- I don't even remember how or why but everything worked just right. Sorting, decimal point, app languages, everything. Could never replicate it though.
When I travel to the US/UK I _do_ actually want to start seeing distances in miles (I'm "bilingual" with m/km, it's useful to think in distances that locals understand and that match signage). So "just use my home locale's units all the time" wouldn't work (especially for speeds!). So yeah I guess localization is indeed hard!
Honestly I've now just started trying to learn Farenheit! 90 is hot, 70 is nice, 50 is cold, 30 is ice.
It drives me nuts, most sites are geolocating me instead and serving me Spanish content. My browser is always sending accept language, and it's most often ignored than not, even frommthe big old web players (Google and Wikipedia to name a few)
The real question is why the weekend was defined as straddling the last and first days of the week. Weird.
> However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc.
but also sensible sorting. I'm currently mixing en_DK, en_IE, en_US, C and cs_CZ (my native language) locales for various LC_*, but it's still not perfect and some apps (such as Thunderbird) ignore this anyway and others (Slack) have only one language setting, so I can select either US with 12-hour time or UK with UK spelling. Does anyone have a solution? Should a write a new locale?
Room temperature is approximately 293 K, twice that is 586 K / 595 °F / 313 °C. Hotter than your typical oven cooking temperature.
We often don't realize how warm the world we live in truly is, from a physics standpoint.
Which will probably even match your subjective feeling.
Celsius scales thermodynamically logarithmically. You can’t just double the numbers. (The same with sound etc.)
This is as opposed to decibel for sound, where +10 decibel means X10 power exactly.
Except for the ones that go at different rates.
When talking about the weather or everyday objects, one could argue that the border between "hot" and "cold" is somewhere at room temperature, so around 21°C. At that temperature, it's neither hot or cold. If it's 30°C, it's 9°C of "hotness", so 39°C would be twice as hot. I don't know if it feels twice as hot, as that's quite subjective, but if you want more precision we should switch to another vocabulary entirely.
- I know someone who wears a puffy jacket indoors if it's 24 degrees.
- You will find sitting in 20 degrees with 88% humidity much more miserable than 20 degrees and 33% humidity.
- 42deg with 20% humidity and slight breeze is fine, 38deg with 90% humidity can make you pass out in minutes if you need to walk anywhere in the sun.
See also my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37928268
Incidentally, why is the degree immune to disappearance in division unlike all other units? That is, if I divide a distance (m) by a speed (m/s) I get a duration (s). From sheer memory, degree doesn't work like that. Any clue why?
Or cold? There is a big ball in our solar system sitting at tens of millions of degrees K, and you think 273 degrees is warm?
The difference between 20°C and 25°C is 5K.
(68F is not a temperature — it’s a seat number.)
It's another question how they obtain that from coulombs...
[1] https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html (number 15).
Never did that again.
I appreciate the ASCII-only excuse, but I've corrected the omission anyway. Non-ASCII characters in randomascii - what will they think of next?
68:degrees:FThe solution is to not localize for Americans.
All American countries outside the USA already use °C
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/weights-an...
Nitpick: Celsius is not an SI unit.
Answering the substantive point: it’d be nice if we switched to SI units (plus Celsius); personally my phone is already set to display those and I wish we’d join the rest of the world and do standard stuff. However, I think it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen. The deadlocked US political system makes it impossible to enact any reform on any topic that anyone can create controversy about, and that includes switching to international standard units.
C is the global standard
Some videos really only need the title translated and can be now enjoyed by more people: Top 5 Mike Tyson KOs, amazing woodworking techniques, best trick shots of 2023 compilation, dash cam accidents.
If you visit YouTube with your account logged out, these videos are popular and always show up as a recommendation.
Also, some language combinations have pretty good "auto translate captions" experience, so you can turn on the subtitles, too, then you can even enjoy a bit more sophisticated content.
I worked on a package to globalize a consumer-oriented fintech reporting product. With ESG reporting this has become increasingly important to get the unit conversions and Delta's right. You end up mapping the data source units to locale targets.
In Python, the Pint framework plus Babel locales are excellent.
They’re pretty much part of the guardian’s dna:
> Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1970s, a nickname still occasionally used by the editors for self-mockery
If I say "recalculate the celcius to farenheit rewriting as little as possible in this sentence: Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 20C above average"
Attempt 1. Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 36°F above average.
Attempt 2. Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 68°F above average.
----
Reading the article I found this:
parts of Malawi saw a maximum temperature of 43C (109F), compared with an average of nearly 25C (77F)
As I expected the actual temperature increase was 32 °F, not 68 °F.
---
Except the error should have been 32 (which you go on to explain, because we add 32 to start a conversion) and the correct temp difference should have been 36 (20 * 1.8) which is shown later in the article.
I can see getting that wrong, but the actual temps quoted seems to correctly portray 32 opposed to 36 like we would expect.
Just rounding errors or some other oddness?
So a temperature of 43 degrees Celsius is 18 Celsius degrees hotter than 25 degrees Celsius.
32 Fahrenheit degrees are equivalent to 18 Celsius degrees; but 32 degrees Fahrenheit is equivalent to 0 degrees Celsius.
(There's no real need to do this when using absolute units, but I'd still pluralise the interval and not the absolute value: 316 kelvin is 25 kelvins hotter than 291 kelvin.)
Modern SI no longer bothers, and just calls the unit ‘kelvin’. Why should you?
I learned this relatively late in my life, but it was so an insight. From one hand it is just obvious facts, but from the other hand they are nicely categorized and so feels like you have learned something completely new.
(−): 𝗔 × 𝗔 → 𝗩 — gives the translation from a point to another point, and
(+): 𝗔 × 𝗩 → 𝗔 — applies a translation to a point.
(For convenience we can also write 𝒂 − 𝒗 = 𝒂 + −𝒗 for all 𝒂 ∊ 𝗔, 𝒗 ∊ 𝗩).
The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales are affine, and technically should have separate units for temperatures and temperature differences so that mishaps like in TFA would be less likely to happen.
My favorite anecdote is the scientist who carried arround and shook a bottle for two weeks to distill the water for experiments in finding when water boiled. When the water exploded after heating he found that not only did he not know when water boiled, but now he wasn't even sure what boiling was.
Correction, 68°F.
> So 20 °C is either 78 °F
It's still 68°F.