For those of you a little confused about what a postcode is, it’s effectively the same as a US zip code; a way of distilling a postal address down to but a few characters. Hence why some rogue auto-translate function in Windows 11 is occasionally switching ‘zip’ to ‘postcode’ in the UK’s Windows menus.
As a translator myself, this is easy enough to explain. Either we’re looking at a terrible machine translation that wasn’t properly vetted, or a translator/reviewer not getting enough context to properly translate this string. As translators, we often get the absolute bare minimum to work with when it comes to software – usually just the strings, and if we’re very, very, very lucky, we might get a screenshot, but that’s a rarity. It’s easy to look at this and think the translator is an idiot, but without any context, some isolated strings, often delivered in a random order, can be incredibly hard to translate in a way that makes any sense in the target context.
It’s just another way the software industry gets away with bottom-of-the-barrel effort, something no other industry is allowed to do. A random package of disposable paper plates has to adhere to more standards, controls, and checks than consumer software has to do. Managers in the consumer software industry face virtually no consequences for shipping the absolute bare minimum in quality, and unlike in any other industry, shipping broken garbage that never gets fixed is the norm, rather than the exception. There’s no other product category in our lives where we would tolerate the amount of brokenness that’s common in software.
And, of course, software translations are no exception. It’s an easy target for managers to outsource and automate to “save money”. This is what it leads to.
If you thought the software industry’s quest to needlessly redesign things every six months was bad, wait ’til you see the mess that replacing paid, professional human testers and translators with “AI” is gonna make… lol
And then they will come up with the brilliant (from their perspective) solution of using yet more AI to monitor, maintain and police the AI.
Myself, I’m waiting to see “Zu Reißverschluss-Datei komprimieren”. It wouldn’t even be incorrect, just weird.
Same in Norwegian. Machine translation in software is too often awful and/or laughable. I never use localized software, and I get [way too] annoyed when software installs language packs and translations based on location rather that OS/display language.
MS has gotten worse and worse with translations over the last decades.
While they initially did a good job at localizing their end-user software (and took over the world by doing so), the most technical stuff was always riddled with meaningless gibberish.
For example, NTFS permissions have totally broken french translations, to the point that every other french sysadmin I ever talked with gets it wrong. Unfixed to this day, and has been so for over 25 years.
Then a few years ago, they started shoving crappy automated translations down the throat of visitors on their support websites, forcing us to constantly and desperately look for the unmangled original documents. As far as I known, they totally gave up doing any real translation work on online technical documentation.
And now every new feature comes with its share of stupid computer-generated translations. The Edge browser’s “Edge Bar” was initially called “barre d’arêtes” in french, which translates back to… “fishbone bar”.
If you’re really disingenuous :). I’d say that “arêtes” would have a primary translation of “edge”, so not that much of the mark (except that “Edge” shouldn’t be translated of course)?
This is because the disposable paper plates industry is not smart enough to hire some lawyer to craft an EULA outlining that their disposable paper plates don’t actually have to adhere to any standards, controls, and checks and that customers also waive their right to class-action (and then print the EULA on the back of the paper label where nobody will see it let alone have any bargaining power to refuse it). Step up your game, disposable paper plate industry!
The way the author talks makes it sound like US persons only recognize “zip code”. I don’t know why he thinks that. Here in the US both zip code and postal code are in common use.
Just as an example, here are instructions from the united states postal service.
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-the-Format-and-Sequence-of-Information-for-the-Recipient-s-Address
I guess in Europe they’re probably taught that Americans say “zip code”, which is true. But the underlying assumption that the US doesn’t use postal code is false.
PS. “Convert to zip file” -> “Convert to postcode file” is still a funny error. Technologically competent humans wouldn’t make this error. However as Thom Holwerda mentions, translators are typically tasked with translating short phrases like this without any context, which is problematic and can lead to open ended interpretations.
I’ve dealt with translated software maybe a handful of times. They extracted all application strings into a database, sent them to a translator, and the software used a global function to do the substitutions at runtime. Even if they were done by competent translators, we as software developers don’t really know if the translations are correct in the context of an application. Furthermore english strings may be updated while the translated string is left as is. Project-wise translations may be budgeted as a one time cost rather than an ongoing service. From this perspective, completely automated translations is very appealing for the development process.
A company of microsoft’s scale probably should have native speakers on staff to Q/A all software releases, but I’m not sure if they do.
You misunderstand the source you are quoting, and that fact, and the source, both invalidate the point you’re trying to make.
That web page is talking about *foreign* codes. It explicitly says so:
> Foreign postal codes, if used,
In the USA, they are called “zip codes”. (I am not American and I neither know nor care how it’s capitalised.)
No other country calls it that, so the USPS page carefully uses “postal codes” when talking about other countries.
One big important difference is that zip codes are purely numerical. Other countries also use letters; I used to live in “CR4 3SB”. That matters because incompetent US database designers only allow for a numerical field meaning that non-numeric post codes can’t be entered, so we have to use a different field in the address record.
Right now I am in Czechia in “616 00” but the number of characters and the spacing still mean I can’t fit that into a zip code field even though it’s all-numeric.
The USPS page is talking about non-US code when it uses “postal codes”, a generic term. It is *not* what you are claiming: an alternative name for zip codes.
A zip code is an instance of the general class of postal codes. The UK post code is another instance. That does not mean that the phrases “zip code” and “post code” are interchangeable; they are not. Nor is the word “zip” and the word “post” which is the real error here.
The faq is not about foreign postal codes though, I read the statement literally.
In any case it doesn’t change the fact that while “zip code” is US only, “postal code” is still common US vernacular I work with US clients exclusively and it’s not uncommon to say post code, so I believe you’d be hard pressed to find someone who really doesn’t understand what the later means.
You can believe differently, but I’ll go with my first hand experience.
Well, revenge is sweet. I almost failed high school English because my cheepo word processor only had a British English spellchecker. I still do not understand to this day how a freaking “English” teacher was marking words incorrectly spelled because they were too English.
Sigh…the answer is simple folks, Windows follows the “every other one is shit” rule and since MSFT has already announced Windows 12, aka “oops our bad” is due out Oct of next year, more than a year before the EOL of Windows 10? Just skip it like Vista and Windows “Have you heard about these things called tablets?” 8.
The fact that every single “feature” that was touted for switching to 11 like Direct Storage is being backported to 10 should tell ya all that you need to know, MSFT knows its another Vista bomb.
As you well know it only follows this “rule” if you miss versions deliberately or contort reality in order to get it to fit.
For a start windows 10 was 14 seperate releases which put a big spanner in there (and yes they were sperate and all had different EOL dates).
The only real bad one was 8.0, 8.1 was fixed some people who may be like you in ways mean they have to burn the name and make a change.
Vista, beyond going overboard on security, which was fixed in SP1 and then renamed to win 7, was very welcome because we needed 64 bit in order to actually use the memory we had properly.
I moved to 11 myself (which is still internally versioned as 10.0) becuase of show stopping bugs that made me unable to game. Going to the previous win 10 would have needed a fresh install, going to 11 was easier and it was prettty much nearlly reaslesd at the time.
I mean what do all people do with an OS that means they notice it so much to say that it is good or bad?. It could be anything under there as long what you want to do works. Why have I stuck on 11? Well no reason not to. A few issues here and there, but nopthing that bad to warrent changing (plus losing dark mode notepad would be a pain on the eyes).
Sigh…just because MSFT decided to use a rolling release style with 10 does NOT make it 14 versions, that would be like saying every time Debian releases a patch that makes it a new OS.
And I had Windows 8.1 and…yeah it was still shite, sorry. Bolting on a crippled “desktop” while still pushing a touch designed tablet UI didn’t fix the pig, it just put on a bit of lipstick. And Vista was straight up trash and it didn’t have anything to do with UAC, it was the fact that you couldn’t download a file and play an MP3 without killing the network, the sound subsystem was so bad I had to keep a reg file on my desktop to reset the Windows sound stack every time it crapped itself, its desktop would just freeze randomly on AMD or Nvidia graphics…it was just awful.
And Windows has been following the rule since win95 when it comes to home releases…95 good, 98 shit, 98SE good, winME shit, XP good, Vista shit, win 7 good, Windows 8 shit, windows 10 good and now windows 11 is shit which means if they stick to the rule Windows 12 will be good
I don’t think it’s a translation error _per se_ and as a Brit I *definitely* do not find it endearing.
What we see here is a search-and-replace error, where some idiot has done a global S&R across the UI localisation messages file and replaced “zip” with “post”.