The new levels are very badly localized to German. As German text is one average 30% longer than English text, some levels are even cut off in mid sentence. How did you miss this in tests???
The level 1 reads “Du kannst kein Omelette machen …”. The standard spelling is “Omelett”, and the saying is not used in German at all. That is very bad form for a language learning app!
In level 14, the oven mitts become boxing gloves in German. Why?
And in level 15, it says in the German localization
Well, Memrise is actually bad with German language (I am not talking about “Memrise DE courses”).
e.g see their homepage help / faq section:
That is just really horrible German text translation.
Are those help DE texts manual (bad) translated or are they machine auto translated? They are not marked auto robot translated.
I always have to choose from the list-down box “English” at the bottom to get a clue what they are trying to talk about…
How did you miss this in tests???
Haha. You are funny!
Do you even think you (as an user) are something else than an Alpha/Beta tester?
Look at DuoLingo (US) and their relaunch of the new portal (not QC assured initially for sure), HH/SpektrumRC (again US, they code firmware for their RC transmitters, firmwares for AS3x and heli FBL receivers), etc.
They all seem to code something…do not test…and let the end user play the quality assurance/control (QC) center…
It feels like all these companies release directly from source control default/master/trunk with no multiple internal release - initial test - branch cycles ahead of their time because of marketing / manager fixed deadlines.
For Android you can at least rollback to the apk app version before from archive sites.
I would strongly encourage you to do the same with the IOS app if you can.
No, you can’t roll back to a previous version in iOS.
To be fair, the memrise guys do some testing, there is even a beta testing programme. I just cannot understand how one can release a changed GUI without having a quick manual click through…
Thanks for getting in touch and for giving very good feedback! Let me try to address all of these things:
We usually test features before releasing and thus there usually shouldn’t be strings that are too long and won’t show. In the case of Ziggy, this was a different. Due to a change in the process it was submitted directly. I apologise for this bad design and the text not showing properly.
About the Omelett: two things, 1) This is a twist to the famous English proverb “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, as our EN original copy is “you can’t make an omelette without cracking at least one egg…”. This is a pun and I’ve translated that into German: “Du kannst kein Omelett machen, ohne nicht mindestens ein Ei aufzuschlagen…”. This translation is perfectly fine German and works well in my opinion. It just means that in order to make an omelette you need at least one egg - the Ziggy egg from the image. 2) about the spelling: both, “Omelett” and “Omelette” are used in Standard German: http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Omelette and http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Omelett. These are related spelling forms.
There was a mistake in the string, which I had corrected, is >>U; Punkte bis Level >>U; still not displaying correctly? Please let me know!
About the oven mitts in level 14: the original EN copy doesn’t work for German, since it says “Learning is hot”, saying “Lernen ist heiß” in German doesn’t really work well IMHO, but it’s perfectly fine to disagree here. That’s why I went for boxing gloves, which works better.
Please let me know if you have any other questions or find mistakes.
Hi Mario, thanks for responding, much appreciated.
Re 1: I assumed as much.
Re 2: Apparently, the genus and spelling is different in German/Austrian/Swiss German de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omelett
Re 3: Yes, this bug is gone, thanks!
Re 4: How about “Lernen is cool”? But as you said, it’s a matter of opion.
I don’t envy your job as German Ambassador, we users are all language addicts (else we wouldn’t be on memrise and look therefore very closely at the wording…
Thanks,
Wolfgang
and look therefore very closely at the wording…