> English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.

Which is odd, because it's harder to communicate unambiguously in English than it is in code.

> they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation

The trick with tech writing is retention!

I am a mere programmer, not any kind of UX writer.

A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path". When things went wrong, the error messages were left up to the programmers.

I discovered this when I tried to install our product on an old Mac and got this message:

Your hard disk is too small

Wait? My what is too small?

Later, on Windows, I got this popup:

You are not here

WTF?

I searched for this message and found it came from a function called CantHappen(), which was kind of like an assert(false). Something you throw into a code path just to note a place that you really know the code can never reach. Until it inevitably does.

I went on a rampage through our code, finding all these crazy messages and updating them - and when possible, fixing the code so the error messages wouldn't be needed.

My manager and his manager, to their credit, knew how bad our messages were, and they helped me pull together a little team with a writer and translators to fix these up. And we did. Our messages got a lot better, easier to understand and more helpful.

All because our Mac installer told me my hard disk was too small.

One simple example is slavic languages where you have different forms of plural depending on the number.

Not the parent, but you use a translation format like `translations("INVITE_USER", {gender_of_host, num_guests})`

Then you will have an algorithm that knows to translate based on some rules - like the ICU messages format - https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/mes...

In the link there's an example of how such rules look like (they'll be different for each language)

Making it plural doesn't always mean "replace one word by another".

The right thing to do it:

add_one = "Add one thing" add_multiple = "Add {n} things"

Then you'll provide the full sentence for each language. Of course some languages will need more cases, like slavic language where it's 1, 2-4, 5+, so depending on the languages you need to support you need to put more than 2 strings.

pluralization is much MUCH more complex in many languages than in English: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/47/supplemental/language...

it can largely be turned into six categories of behavior, with tons of languages choosing different boundaries for those categories. ios/osx and android have tools for this, and probably others (I'm just personally familiar with these).

and even English isn't even that simple in the way many treat it - you don't pluralize sentences, parts of sentences change in contrast to each other (a car drives vs cars drive). so e.g. widely used APIs like https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize are blatantly misleading merely by existing, and it leads to mistakes in many (most?) languages, and also English, even though the authors of the API speak English.

For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.

Russian having singular, few (2-4), and plural (5+) forms is one from the top of my head. I can't remember any specific examples from non-cryllic ones but remember we having to duplicate a lot of translation keys to make them more context specific.

Not the parent commenter, but -- days of week in Polish are a nice example, IMO.

`Środa` means `Wednesday`, but depending on the grammatical case it's going to be translated either to `środa` or `środę` (or five more, but somewhat less likely to appear in UI [1]).

- Next <Wednesday> is 2018-01-03. = Najbliższa <środa> przypada na 2018-01-03.

- This event happens on <Wednesday>. = To zdarzenie ma miejsce w <środę>.

If you mix the variants, it's going to sound very off (but it will be understandable, so there's that).

What's more, days of week have different genders, which affects qualifiers:

- <this> Wednesday = <ta> środa (Wednesday is a "she")

- <this> Monday = <ten> poniedziałek (Monday is a "he")

... together with the grammatical cases affecting the qualifiers:

- <This> Wednesday is crazy. = <Ta> środa jest szalona.

- <This> Thursday is crazy. = <Ten> czwartek jest szalony.

- I'm busy <this> Wednesday. = Jestem zajęty w <tę> środę.

- I'm busy <this> Thursday. = Jestem zajęty w <ten> czwartek.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C5%9Broda