Adobe applications “dans” français

This got to be the most unexpected discovery while I am still getting my Adobe applications set up: a translation error.

Photoshop on the new Mac is fast, but it is still a lot of work to develop dozens of “raw” files; so I decided to install Lightroom. Since there is no need to handle CJK or ME in Lightroom, I figured that it would be nice to take advantage of this lack of language support requirements to try out running CS6 in its French interface.

So I called up Adobe Application Manager, reconfigured it in Canadian French (Français canadien) mode, and went on to install Lightroom. Just when I was about to press the Install “button,” I discovered that some hidden text just showed up beside the words “Lightroom 4.1”. I hovered my mouse cursor around, and discovered that the words that were appearing were “Dans Français.”

Which is—you will know if you know any French at all—meaningless gibberish. I was taken aback, but knowing that the source language was probably English, I realized that “Dans Français” was most likely supposed to be “In French.”

“In French,” of course, is not “Dans Français,” but “En français”. This is outright elementary.

We are forced to conclude either of two things: Either the translator screwed up and Adobe never arranged to have the Application Manager proofread, or the translator was not able to do their job right because the Application Manager was written in such a way that it cannot be correctly translated. The former would be carelessness (which is extremely dangerous since there is a license manager in the system), and the latter bad design; I don’t know which is worse.

The more interesting thing, however, is that “français” is even written with an uppercase “F”: A typographic mistake that can also be considered a spelling mistake. The spelling mistake part might be excusable, but given that this is Adobe, it is probably more embarrassing that it failed to get the typographic detail right.

There are, of course, also other more technically serious bugs related to Application Manager’s inability to correctly hande language dependencies.

I know Adobe Application Manager is just a small app, but this is also an essential app on the Creative Cloud platform. It should make Adobe look good, but it is doing just the opposite.