{"id":2308,"date":"2010-03-24T05:37:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T13:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=2308"},"modified":"2013-07-31T22:07:45","modified_gmt":"2013-08-01T05:07:45","slug":"aw-snap-in-every-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/aw-snap-in-every-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Aw, Snap In Every Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m strangely fascinated by inappropriate, colloquial error messages<\/a>. Some software teams insist on smuggling them in despite what the user interface guidelines say about clear, useful error messages. Such is the case with the Google Chrome web browser<\/a> and its “Aw, Snap” error message when a page crashes.<\/p>\n


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\n<\/center><\/p>\n

I had been seeing this message with inordinate frequency (3 guesses why<\/a>) when I started to wonder how this translates into some of the other 50 languages that Chrome supports. I switched my environment’s language to ‘fr’ and saw what appeared to be Francophonic squealing:<\/p>\n


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\n<\/center><\/p>\n

My goodness, did they really task their translation team with finding a culturally accurate yet wince-inducing exclamation phrase for this screen in every supported language? Probably not, considering the en_US and en_GB phrases are the same (I’m assuming the phrase in question is an American expression but it could very well have crossed the pond by now). If it seems like I’m putting a lot of thought into this, imagine how much consideration various Google committees had to exert; Google is famous for not making moves unless the data says it’s okay (e.g., testing 41 shades of blue<\/a>). I guess from that perspective, the translation team is lucky they didn’t get stuck with translating “Oh no this web page di’n’t<\/em> just crash on you!”<\/p>\n

While I’m fairly certain that “Aie aie aie” is not a literal translation for “aw, snap”, the following languages do feature literal translations (at least according to Google Translate): Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Korean, Slovenian, and Portuguese (Brazilian, while pt_PT translates to “Ah, balls!”). A number of other languages (like German, Spanish, and Croatian) feature translations that quite clearly seem to be “Oh no!”. Turkish’s exclamation is simply “Error” which might be the most appropriate of the bunch. Vietnamese’s phrase translates to “Sorry”, which is also reasonable.<\/p>\n

In yet another in a long series of useless exercises, I have assembled a gallery of all the Google Chrome translations for “Aw, snap”. See what your favorite language uses for the message and whether in makes any sense (alphabetical by language code):<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
(am) Amharic
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(ar) Arabic
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(bg) Bulgarian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(bn) Bengali
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(ca) Catalan
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(cs) Czech
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(da) Danish
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(de) German
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(el) Greek
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(en) English (both GB & US)
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(es) Spanish
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(et) Estonian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(fil) Filipino
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(fi) Finnish
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(fr) French
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(gu) Gujarati
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(he) Hebrew
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(hi) Hindi
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(hr) Croatian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(hu) Hungarian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(id) Indonesian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(it) Italian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(ja) Japanese
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(kn) Kannada
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(ko) Korean
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(lt) Lithuanian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(lv) Latvian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(ml) Malayalam
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(mr) Marathi
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(nb) Norwegian Bokm\u00e5l
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(nl) Dutch
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(or) Oriya
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(pl) Polish
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(pt_BR) Portuguese (Brazil)
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(pt_PT) Portuguese (Portugal)
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(ro) Romanian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(ru) Russian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(sk) Slovak
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(sl) Slovenian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(sr) Serbian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(sv) Swedish
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(sw) Swahili
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(ta) Tamil
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(te) Telugu
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(th) Thai
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(tr) Turkish
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(uk) Ukrainian
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(vi) Vietnamese
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(zh_CN) Simplified Chinese
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n
(zh_TW) Traditional Chinese
\n
<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you say “Aw, Snap” in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t