Having a laptop with a German keyboard after almost three decades of using a UK keyboard brought home a few issues with software localisation and translations which are not as up to par as I thought. This simply came to attention because packages have this inherent behaviour of installing in that language if a particular locale or keyboard is detected, which is usually the wanted behaviour. I didn't notice it before because a British English interface was always fine and English in general is well supported in the IT world, with all its relatively small variations.In Linux, smaller distributions in particular have an issue with well done localisation, the bigger ones have this sorted as far as I can tell. It also seems to depend on the desktop environment but this alone is not an excuse. For instance, the Cinnamon desktop in a standard Linux Mint Debian install is well translated and fully localised from the start. Trying the same in Artix though with their Cinnamon edition offering yields a half-baked, half-localised desktop where parts of the menu, the submenus and application entries themselves, and interestingly all Gnome and other applications that are not part of the Cinnamon desktop tools have fully translated menus and options but the Cinnamon desktop, including its control panel/ system settings and file manager are not. This can hardly be due to missing support because it works in LMDE, so the use of English is certainly not hard-coded. Perhaps it's missing a language pack somewhere, but the real reason is down to QA and probably, in the case of smaller projects like Artix, lack of manpower. And that's understandable.
What I am trying to say here is that localisation in Linux is still an issue in 2020, but one would only notice if actually trying to use something other than American English, or any form of English. That reminds me, I've never tried the South African English locale.
Brave is a browser I've been enjoying quite a bit lately as a well supported Chrome and Chromium alternative where you do actually get updates, in contrast to the Debian world where even using the latest stable release means outdated libraries are keeping us on Chromium 73. That or install the privacy invading Google-Chrome. Brave has got a few good features incl. effective built-in ad-blocking and stripping out a lot of Google's tracking and API's so that I'm now using it in all my installs.
However, as with most software, translations are a bit hit and miss. This time it's not about a half-baked, mixed environment of English and German in my case but about their development team simply using the wrong translation. It's of the kind I came across in marketing when working in market research many years ago, where the English saying 'Knocks your socks off' had been translated literally for a marketing slogan. The German variant however is slightly different: `It takes your shoes off' would have been correct.
Both in the Bandwidth and Time Saved statistics in the upper left 'saved' has been translated as 'gespeichert'. It's obvious that this has been translated by a machine using Google Translate or similar and not by a human native speaker. 'Gespeichert' means saved to hard drive or stored or even remembered, as in stored to (or in) memory but is wrong in this context.
The word needed which is the correct one in this context is 'gespart', as in saved money, saved time, saved bandwidth, i.e. 'Bandbreite gespart', 'Zeit gespart' or 'Gesparte Bandbreite', 'Gesparte Zeit'. It's not just English where words can have several meanings.
I have written to them.
Update 16-07-20: The just released v1.11.97 solves this. Nice to have a company that listens!
