Back in 2009, I noted that the “Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen” check box is a dreaded negative checkbox. When is it too late in the Windows development cycle to change the text of a translatable string?
The translation team sets a deadline for when no further string changes are permitted. This deadline usually comes well before the engineering “no code changes” deadline because the translators require a lot of time to go through all the strings and translate them into the many target languages that Windows supports.
Service packs (back when we had service packs) and monthly updates follow an even stricter set of rules. Not only does the translation team set a deadline for strings, but strings that have already shipped in the base operating system or previous service packs or monthly updates are considered permanently locked and may not be changed. The reason is that changing those strings would invalidate the translations, causing the existing translation packs to say, “Whoa, that’s not the string I was asked to translate.” Depending on what language the user has chosen for their user interface, this could result in devolving to the base language (for Language Interface Packs), or if the base language’s translation has also been invalidated, possibly falling back to English.
If you want to change a string in a service pack or monthly update, you have to create a new string, let the translators translate that new string, and simply abandon the old string.
As a result, as monthly updates accumulate, there’s also a build-up of unused and abandoned strings lying around in translation packs. They only become available for cleanup when a major release occurs, which tends to be very infrequent because major releases are quite large, and the installation process of a major release takes the form of a clean install of the new operating system, followed by migrating the state of the old operating system to the new one. Not only is this a much longer process than a normal monthly patch update, it also means that the next time the user logs on, they go through the “We’re getting everything ready for you” screen, which is particularly annoying.
Bonus chatter: While it’s true that there are settings to disable the “We’re getting everything ready for you” screen, those settings don’t speed up anything. They just change what you see while the system is finishing setting up your profile.
Is this still the case?
Growing up, I remember that I was very impressed by the Swedish translation of Windows 95 and other Microsoft applications of that era, and by their documentation. You certainly got the feeling that the translation was done by a group of competent carbon-based translators, knowledgeable about both the involved languages (English and Swedish) and technical terms.
These days, well, sigh. In general, computer interfaces and on-line documentation tends to be very poorly "translated" into Swedish. Unfortunately, this also applies to the Microsoft Windows operating system. If I go through all the pages of the Settings app, I...