The biggest difference for us would of course be our native language, Dutch.

But personally I would prefer to keep using FME in English.

Same here.

I would not want your developers wasting valuable time translating FME to Dutch. I wouldn’t use it in Dutch, since it would take me waaay too much time getting used to new names of transformers and things.

It’s already taking me a lot of time getting used to the new UI, which doubled the necessary number of mouse-clicks (no idea who ever thought that was useful, but it’s not the first time I think that when confronted with new UI’s...). If trying to figure out what the Dutch name of a certain transformer is was added to that, I’d never get anything done.

I prefer FME over using coding languages, so FME in FME is my choice.

(I am native English so English is fine with me)

This is a difficult question to answer. Especially if you have a multicultural team where the supported language packs aren’t their first language.  It would be great if FME could inherit language settings from the computer.

I would like to develop with my voice. Add a Tester there, put a FeatureWriter here, create a workbench doing that, etc.

Let’s call it FME Voice! I would love to talk to FME Lizard too!

I think that the transformer names should stay as they are, even in a Dutch version. The two parts that would change are the FME interface and the help documentation. Actually, you don’t need to change both parts; you could have the interface in English and the documentation in Dutch if you prefer.

Of course, we would use AI to do a lot of the translations, but spend a little extra on using a good translation tool. There were some horrible results when we used a basic AI model to do the translation!

But I think most Dutch people in technical roles have a good knowledge of English, yes?

Apparently it couldn’t translate the word “left”… 🙃

And yes, you’re right, most people in The Netherlands in technical roles are comfortable using software in English. Having said that, there are sometimes sections of the interface or documentation that can be confusing to people who don’t have English as their first language and/or who are new to FME. 

Finally, I am a very strong opponent of renaming transformers, so please don’t do that when translating the interface 😄

Most folks here in Finland manage fine with “Globish” English, and UI terms/transformer names click quickly. The real difference-maker is documentation. In English sessions with Finns, the back-and-forth language switching is exhausting, particularly with new formats or transformers. Let’s add docs in Finnish, Swedish (yes, neighbors, you’ll use them) or a way to select the language there, as it is online now. You can test Sámi languages if you want to test how your model works with languages with less data. 

I could imagine some users like to use FME in my native language Dutch. But I wouldn't use this feature. It would be very hard to find support having to translate all the transformer names back to english.

And while translating setting names to dutch could help understand what it does it actually could also make it worse because of wrong translation.

I have seen things like: Save translated into Rescue, Exit into Way out, Current into Flow and Request into Interrogate.

So before you way out the program it should interrogate to rescue the flow file.
Translate: Before you exit the program it should request to save the current file.

😂😂😂

Once overheard a Dutch person on the phone: “They should not blow so high from the tower!”

I love Dunglish 😁

Let me just fall with the door into the house. It will be like skating on thin ice. Before you know it, your users can't make any chocolate from it and everything runs into the soup and we are sitting here with baked pears. So to prevent this take a look in someone else's kitchen and keep a finger in the porridge or you will get the wind from the front. And after all, it would be like carrying water to the sea. But now I'm making an elephant out of a mosquito. You have to know, donkey's don't bump the same stone twice.

But you can just upload a werkbank to FME Stroom and run it in an agenda. When you inspect the klussen afterwards it’ll tell you what happened in the logboek.

Yeah… I’ll stick to English.

Or you can just upload an Espace de Travail to FME Flux and run it in an Ordonnancement. When you inspect the Travail afterwards it’ll tell you what happened in the Journal.

Yeah… I’ll stick to English too.

This.

Because you can does not mean you should.

Imagine a new user looking for an error from the log in his native language. His search results will be limited. This is one reason I use English for all my software, the biggest user group uses English, so using logging in that language will have the biggest chance on a result in a search.

Same here. I hate it when my employer sets the language for software and I can’t change it back myself… On my own devices, everything is English. Saves screen real estate as well...

I’ve seen fan in the context of fan out be translated to ventilate before. No doubt translation services have come on since then

Safe is using AI to do the language translation but your point about the usefulness of a Dutch translation is still interesting to us. If there was a high-quality Dutch translation of the GUI elements, the online Help, and the Log messages such that they were all consistent with each other, would you still prefer using the English language? ​@s.jager 

Interesting idea! We are doing some experiments with Screen Readers (more so in the context of the Help) so we will keep this in mind for the future. ​@philippeb 

Absolutely! Transformer names, Reader/Writer Names, Form application names and other technical FME terms (for example “Feature Type”) are all protected terms that have been explicitly omitted from translation. This is true across the GUI elements, online Help and Log Messages. ​@redgeographics 

Thank you, we have not had many requests for Finnish or Swedish so far. When we do a Language Pack for FME Form or Flow, it will include the GUI elements, online Help documentation, and Log messages. However, the user may be able to choose whether they would prefer to use all three of those elements or a subset. ​@antoine 

We totally agree, changing Transformer Names would create problems for both our users and for our support team. For this reason, transformer names, Reader/Writer Names, Form application names and other technical FME terms have been explicitly omitted from translation consistently across the GUI elements, online Help and Log Messages. ​@jkr_wrk 

Yes, this is an area our multi-language support has been focusing on. There are two major approaches we have taken to make troubleshooting a workspace as simple in any language as it is in English. The first is that any error coming from a third-party system (e.g. database, REST API, etc.) will never be translated. The second is that we will always make an English log file accessible no matter which language is being used. ​@nielsgerrits 

Yes, most definitely yes. Every device and piece of software I have enough control over is in English.

But I would also have to admit that I am not very representative for most Dutch users: I am an EN near-native speaker, and considered bilingual (Dutch-English). If you could take a look at my notes from Dutch meetings, you’d find that half of those notes are still in English - even if not a single word of English was used during that meeting 😁 (sometimes switching mid-sentence - half the time I even think in EN 😮).

That said:

If you translate GUI, but not Transformer names, I’m afraid it would start causing confusion, because you’re mixing languages. And where do you draw the line: one can argue that a transformer name is as much part of the GUI as the File-menu, for example. I’m afraid that such a dualistic approach would only create a mess of Dutch (or any other language) and English. 

For that reason alone I would not use anything but the English version. Plus, something I’ve noticed while translating EN to NL and vice versa: EN is much more concise. An A4 of NL text, when translated to EN, takes up about 2/3 of that same A4. A looooooong time ago I wrote some software that I sold in NL, BE and the US, and when doing that I noticed as well that my NL version always needed the UI tweaked, because UI-elements would not line up anymore, or the last characters of text would disappear from buttons, that sort of thing. So that’s definitely something to keep in mind as well.

Ultimately of course it remains Safe’s decision: If you see a benefit, don’t let me stop you. I won’t use it though, and as I said before, I’d feel it would be a waste of time. I’ve worked for 2 large US software companies before, and one of them clearly stated that there would never be a Dutch version, simply because the Dutch market (compared with the rest of the world) was too small, so it wouldn’t give enough of an ROI. Which was more than 20 years ago, so that might be different these days, I don’t know.

​@vaniaatsafe 

As an English speaker working in Germany I see the German version of FME often (provided by Conterra). I write all my documentation for the tools I create in English - But for many who use the German FME it’s not as helpful, but I’m not going to write two versions of doc, especially if I’m using screen shots. 

In saying that no one has complained about my documentation being in English (only that there isn’t enough documentation 😅).

I think if Safe were able to offer an easy way to switch the language (ideally without needing to restart workbench) I think it would be excellent. If there way a way to also add your own custom language packs then it would be really quite straight forward to just add your own or (as a partner) create one for your country which you could just sell. 

documentation is all online and tools are getting better to auto translate. Personally I think these tools are good enough in many cases. For sure official translations of the Doc would be really nice but it just isn’t scalable unless you’re using these tools anyway.