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jaunthieWork-related rambling follows.
I'm sure everyone out there has been frustrated (or amused, or enraged, or disgusted) by an error message from some computer program or another. Error messages are frequently unhelpful, often extremely terse, and sometimes just plain incomprehensible.
They're also freaking hard to write, much less write well.
I've spent most of the day neck-deep in rewriting error messages so that they will be useful to the end-user, or at least comprehensible (I hope). These are raw bits of short text fresh from the developers' hands, and the English contained therein is...well, variable is the kindest way to put it. Some developers are better than others when drafting errors, and I'm not just talking about their skills with written English. Most developers understand their code really, really well, and so when it comes time to write an error, they naturally assume a similar level of expertise in the reader. Naturally, there are some problems with this particular approach, which is one of the reasons I get involved in the process. Part of what I do is translation. Another part is to make sure that the text is in fact translatable into other languages, which requires a certain discipline in sentence structure, word usage, parameter placement and the like that almost *never* occurs to the developer. Not that it should, really; they've got their hands full with dealing with code. Words...well, that's my job.
But after nearly six thousand words worth of error message text, my brain is well and truly kerfutzed. Don't mind me if I wander off into the corner and babble incoherently about connections to servers and WMI providers.
*shudder*
I'm going to have to try and find some time this weekend to write something non-technical, or I might just go completely around the bend.
I'm sure everyone out there has been frustrated (or amused, or enraged, or disgusted) by an error message from some computer program or another. Error messages are frequently unhelpful, often extremely terse, and sometimes just plain incomprehensible.
They're also freaking hard to write, much less write well.
I've spent most of the day neck-deep in rewriting error messages so that they will be useful to the end-user, or at least comprehensible (I hope). These are raw bits of short text fresh from the developers' hands, and the English contained therein is...well, variable is the kindest way to put it. Some developers are better than others when drafting errors, and I'm not just talking about their skills with written English. Most developers understand their code really, really well, and so when it comes time to write an error, they naturally assume a similar level of expertise in the reader. Naturally, there are some problems with this particular approach, which is one of the reasons I get involved in the process. Part of what I do is translation. Another part is to make sure that the text is in fact translatable into other languages, which requires a certain discipline in sentence structure, word usage, parameter placement and the like that almost *never* occurs to the developer. Not that it should, really; they've got their hands full with dealing with code. Words...well, that's my job.
But after nearly six thousand words worth of error message text, my brain is well and truly kerfutzed. Don't mind me if I wander off into the corner and babble incoherently about connections to servers and WMI providers.
*shudder*
I'm going to have to try and find some time this weekend to write something non-technical, or I might just go completely around the bend.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 05:41 pm (UTC)But I'm sorry that it's you.
Any good scenes involving gratuitous violence you have to knock off?