cannot translate this

On this page: http://www.librarything.com/vox.php
is one sentence where fourteen cannot be translated:
* LibraryThing is hot, with over 88,000 members adding fourteen million books.

Finnish:
LibraryThing käy kuumana kun yli 88 000 jäsentä lisää fourteen miljoonaa kirjaa.

Swedish:
LibraryThing är hett, med över 88000 medlemar som lagt till fourteen miljoner böcker.

French:
LibraryThing est dans le vent, plus de 88,000 membres catalogue fourteen millions de livres.

>1 Anneli:

<sidestep>
Your link is broken. Better try those ones : http://www.librarything.com/vox.php (absolute link) or better yet : /vox.php (relative link)
</sidestep>

You might have remarked that I have been asking/begging/hammering over and over again please NOT using hard coded English only text snippets any more. At no avail, yet, it seems, for LT staff members are purporting their developing for a monolingual English only website. This makes for lots of frustration indeed. We cannot know whether LT staff is doing this purporting their hard coding text snippets on purpose, either by negligence. Whatever the case, it seems/turns out that they do not bother this matter that much.

Though this might sound quite harsh, we cannot help but conclude that their not bothering results in so-called cooling out international Thingamabrarians.

"Internationalisation" was hyped while LT was in the run for Tim attending the Frankfurter Buchmesse. The latter is over now. Alas, the former too, or so it seems. Priorities have changed. Worse : LT staff doesn't even bother any more. Hence, translation possibilities as well as translations are discontinued. Mind that translations of "fourteen" are ready and available at LT's. Then again, present LT staff couldn't bother less.

All the while, we have got the message, loud and clear : If you don't feel like using English only, you morons, you 'd better shut up.

Pun intended.

What a pity it is.

Well, sounds hopeless... It really is a pity. I feel a bit cheated. Why bother to make international versions, if they are not done properly?

The Vox page should now be translateable--fourteen is separately so. It's tricky insofar as it involves a changing translateable piece within a changeable translated piece. You'll notice the 88,000 didn't change. The trick is to make it change and still be translateable.

Our hatred of Voxers, non-English speakers and other miscreants continues unabated.

Seems to work now. In French at least.
And in Finnish, if "neljätoista" means "fourteen".

Our hatred of Voxers, non-English speakers and other miscreants continues unabated.

Hmm. Tim doesn't speak French.

No, I do, albeit badly. I manage. I've got a horde of French cousins. My grandfather married his French teacher—then worked for the OSS in France.

In response to Anneli (message 3): LT now has 214,000 members. I have no idea how many are paying or how much they have elected to pay, but I do hope that Tim can run the company on the revenue. Of these, 1656 use the German language translation (almost 0.8 percent, see the Zeitgeist by language page) and 235 (just above 0.1 percent) use the Swedish site. If a quarter of the Swedish users are paying customers and each has paid $10, that's still not a lot of money. Clearly, we cannot demand that this little money would buy us a whole lot of attention. What we can do is to improve the existing solution on a volunteer basis, then try to recruit more Swedish users, who hopefully become paying customers. With time, the international users will perhaps become a significant part of LT's income.

Tim, je m'excuse. Sorry for underestimating you :-)

If you want to practise, go see Paris je t'aime. I don't like Paris, I don't like Parisiens at all (or rather, they don't seem to like me) but I love that film. I'll go see it for the second time tonight.

LA2 wrote: "Clearly, we cannot demand that this little money would buy us a whole lot of attention. What we can do is to improve the existing solution on a volunteer basis, then try to recruit more Swedish users, who hopefully become paying customers. With time, the international users will perhaps become a significant part of LT's income."

That is true, but if you cannot translate things, so that the outcome is good and grammatically correct Finnish or Swedish or whatever language, it is not worthwhile project to anybody. I think (but maybe I'm wrong) that bad translations are not pretty to look at. If LibraryThing looks ridiculous in other languages, it probably is not good for the business, either - even if not many people see the problem, or care.

I quote myself from another topic:
Another, even more difficult problem is that one and the same translation of a word is used in different places. In Finnish language we have different forms of the same word (inflectional morphology), for example the English word 'books' cannot be translated only into 'kirjat' but we need also 'kirjoja', 'kirjaa' and other inflectional forms in order to get sensible sentences. '5 books' cannot be '5 kirjat'.

I think there are lots of other languages that have the same kind of problems. One way to solve this problem is to avoid using the same translation in many places. It is handy in some languages, but not in all.

How Finnish words are put together
http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=25834