Wednesday, August 18, 2004

L10N, I18N and Editorial at it's finest

For those unfamiliar, L10N = Localization, I18N = Internationalization.

As my old DIVX player started giving up the ghost, and Blu-Ray is not yet available, I needed a low-cost option to keep my movie habits going.

I found a great deal on a Daewoo DVD player at Target. It's cheap, but has optical audio and component video outputs, so my Denon amp and my ears are happy!

While reading the owner's manual (hey, I started out as a tech writer, and SOMEBODY has to read their work. Kind of a brotherhood thing...), I found the following troubleshooting tip for the DVD player:

SCREAMING

  • Keep the phone far away from the speaker
  • Turn down the volumne
  • Turn down the volume of phone and echo

Hopefully, this isn't related to my new DVD player or their tech support experience! :-)

Perhaps this belongs in one of their phone manuals, though SCREAMING still doesn't seem appropriate.

Maybe these folks should take a look at the XLIFF project and improve their translation markup.

I'm sure other companies have this same problem, but this one was pretty funny. I also enjoy watching Headlines every week on Jay Leno (I used to be a technical editor, too).

For more fun with translations, be sure to check out Babelfish. Though I wouldn't recommend it for publishing your technical manuals...

Anyone have any good Sun translation snafus?

See also:

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