Read the Error Messages, Dude.

Posted on by

Sometimes I found myself tired of answering the boring questions about the installations of the blogging tools or online applications such as WordPress or pLog. I am the one to translate such applications into Traditional Mandarin Chinese and I hope that I can share my experience and passions to help the other users who are familiar with Traditional Chinese to have their own place to write in text, to share their pictures, to express their self in any possible ways and so on, yes that is what I hope, and I intend to do so. However, my feeling of getting tired is keeping on growing stronger and stronger.

Well, the most the made me feel tired is that some of the questions are not even a question. For instance, someone asked that while he/she was installing pLog, there was an error message saying: ‘the wizard.php script has to be removed after the installation process. Please remove it first to continue.‘ In such a situation, what should he/she do? Well, what you need to do is to delete the wizard.php script as what the message said. Another one said, he/she encountered a MySQL error: ‘mysql_pconnect(): Access denied for user‘, what does that mean? Well, that just means that the username and password you input to access the database were denied, just verify your username and password and retry, that’s all. Such questions are totally not even a question, you just know the answers, and they are just in your eyes, in the error messages. If you read the error messages, you will know what’s your next step. Why don’t you just keep your eyes on the messages for a minute?

Maybe the reason is that the error messages are all in English, all the users would like to skip reading the messages, and just go to ask some one as me, to ask some one as me to teach them such English vocabularies, instead of using the resource such as free dictionaries (StarDict, Dojam, etc) or online translating service (AltaVista, SysTran, etc) that can help them to understand where the error transpired . They may prefer and are good to save their time but to waste the others’. Well, read the error messages, dude, that won’t spent too much of your time at all.

17 thoughts on “Read the Error Messages, Dude.”

  2. Well, 那更要講了, lookup the f**king word, dude.
    * 光速逃 *
    事實上有很多 native English speaker 也是不看 error message. 那跟 Error Message 撰寫技巧雖然有關係，但是跟個人心態比較有關。

  3. ZONBLE:
    你就原諒一下子.
    難怪我女兒的英文演講題目是The Challenge and Benefit of Learning English.
    其中我提供的有關的Benefit是
    My answer is THE KEY.
    With this key we can open the center of the world.
    With this key we can get the fortune of knowledge.
    With this key we can have the vision of future.
    With this key we can gain the sharing of love.
    And with this key we can open more and more doors of treasures.

  5. 很多人看到英文會有Block的狀況..
    那些英文字在瞬間被轉換成一大片”東西”..
    腦袋只接收到訊息是..喔..那些是英文..
    這樣連想都不用想..省事吧～

    X-MAN兄..在這裡也遇得到..真難得..
    RTFM和STFW還真是一體適用啊..

  7. even if error messages show where the problem is.

    if u just read lots of decumnets from google or other search engine and can’t got queer situation better.

    my be someyhing stupid will be asked….

  8. On IT stuff, there are 3 different barriers: language barrier, technical barrier, and culture barrier. To most of the users, none of them is easy to break thru.

  9. There are plenty of native speakers who have trouble with error messages. I managed to install MoveableType (after many hours of frustration) but I usually get stuck whenever there’s a problem. It’s pretty common, actually, just check out the support forums at MT and you’ll see how many people have trouble interpreting error messages. Things often seem clear or obvious when you have an expert level of knowledge on a particular subject, but it’s not necessarily so obvious to everyone else.

  10. zonble, I “del.icio.us” this article with a short English description and hopefully more blogware creators will notice the issue you mentioned.If you do mind, I can delete the bookmark upon your request.

    As a translator, I totally agree the points you made in this article.

  11. 感同身受，不過猜想使用中文來的表達您的不爽，或許更可以讓這些 Lamer 瞭解到這一切!

    READ THE ERROR MESSAGES, DUDE.

    I AM NOT WORKING FOR FREE!

  12. 這是個麻煩的問題, 另外一個問題是, 能不能切割? 一個是一般電腦使用習慣, 另一個是一般電腦的語言障礙. zonble你在處理無障礙議題時是有份自省及自身處境的觀照, 我覺得很好. 但你現在提出的這個問題, 我倒覺得你是煩了 (annoyance ) , tired不至於. 你在annoy 什麼, 是不是那種像在文社學院會弄電腦就要幫所有人弄電腦的無奈呢? 若是的話, 不如想一下調整你推plog的空間, 是否要區出來, 我想, 若將plog的討論, 想辦法移到論壇式的空間, 也許會有其他人分擔你的煩事.

    你的煩, 相信不少人能理解. 也許對有些新手來說, 你是唯一對plog的窗口, 改變這樣的印象, 也許很多人就不會只把你當客服人員使喚.

    做電腦服務業的, 就是無法跟其他服務業的一樣, 享有附帶的文化氛圍, 來與異化做區隔. 有時是這種異化 (你只問我電腦的技術問題, 就不理我了) 讓人沮喪, 而不一定是勞心勞力.

    以上純從個人經驗出發, 我也想知道你的經驗.

  13. 寫這篇不外乎就是發洩，用英文寫，或許應該可以讓一些人自動忽略這樣的發洩。說煩嘛，我最近最煩的事情是，我現在在寫的劇本寫到第三幕之後，居然一個字都擠不出來，而我也是文學院出身，做這些免錢的準客福本來就對我來說沒有什麼好處，我平時也有別的事情要做。

    我倒是覺得，語言會是比較大的問題，或許有許多Native English Speaker也不看錯誤訊息，不過就Plog個案來說，多半是看懂錯誤訊息就可以解決，就像你說Windows爛，但是Windows跳出什麼錯誤訊息，都可以在MSDN上找到，但是又遇到一個問提，MSDN全都是英文的。要說pLog論壇的話，官方本身就提供英文論壇，而我這邊遇到的安裝問題，應該在官方論壇上都找的到，而就算系統界面中文化後，pLog安裝程式還是英文的，或許可以建議一下pLog官方修改一下安裝程式的界面，不過，就算這樣，PHP本身的錯誤訊息，也還是英文的，所以如果出現的是像PHP部份的連接資料庫錯誤等狀況，還是會跳出英文訊息。

    ⋯比較起來pLog算是對其他語文的使用者相當友善了，就之前弄WordPress來說，WordPress對非英語系的使用者，可說相當不友善，在1.0就發生的雙位元語文在comments時會出現的錯誤，在1.2的nightly build當中，還是沒看到改過，Wordpress的blogring本身就拒絕非英語的blog加入，而錯誤訊息經常直接用die()解決，如果是英文的話，沒有加入說明encoding的網頁，出現錯誤訊息，還不是什麼問題，而我之前再將0.71~0.72改成中文的時候，遇到這種狀況，如果瀏覽器預設的編碼是Big5而非UTF-8，遇到這樣的頁面跳出UTF-8文字時，就是什麼訊息都看不到，所以那時候我還把每個錯誤訊息上，都加上相關的meta tags。1.0出來以後，我就沒有這個力氣了。

    寫不完，等下繼續寫。

  14. Pingback: Peter@BlueBlog

Comments are closed.