How could Bloglines fail so miserably with translations?
Unbelievable. The new language interfaces of Bloglines looked promising, but the result, at least in Spanish is plainly incredible.
For instance:
For su conveniencia, usted puede visi�n el website de Bloglines traducido a una diversa lengua. Usted puede elegir entre cualesquiera de las idiomas abajo. El chascar en el acoplamiento fijar� una galleta de modo que Bloglines sepa qu� lengua para utilizar cuando usted vuelve. Usted no tiene que ser entrado, ni tiene una cuenta de Bloglines, para utilizar esta caracter�stica, pero registering es easy!
How could this happen? One of the hottest projects of the net, obviously well conceived and with plentiful resources (in hardware, software and ideas) fails miserably...
Let's be positive, however.
They need to correct the mess, obviously, and they can do so, for instance, promoting an open translation environement, even for more languages, so users could download the original files and strings, and return their translations. As in the Google in Your Language, but, being more fair than Google us: if translations are user-generated content, let all translated string pairs (english / other) be copylefted and downloadable in a format apt for translation and l10n-i18n (.po, .tmx or some other).
I complained through their feedback form, and their reply came last night:
Hi there,
Thanks for the great feedback in regards to the Spanish translation. We are working on correcting our errors. Please bear with us.
Thanks for using Bloglines.