It’s just a small bug, but it’s causing a smile, especially among British Windows Insider testers. When localizing the dialog boxes in current preview builds of Windows 11, Microsoft incorrectly translated a known format for compressed files.

Charging…

Microsoft has traditionally struggled with translating dialog boxes and other Windows content into a variety of languages. Of course, this mammoth task doesn’t always run without bugs, so even in language variants potentially used by many millions of people, bigger and smaller bugs can still be found.

The latest Insider builds provide a curious example, where the input displayed in the revised context menu for combining multiple files into a ZIP archive was translated incorrectly. However, this bug only affects the “Canary” and “Dev” channel builds of Windows 11 releases, which use the localized “en-GB” version, i.e. the UK release.

Instead of ZIP files, we now speak of “zip code” files, that is, zip code files. The background is, of course, that in the US the postal code is commonly known as the postal code, whereas in Britain the postal code has always been talked about. After Windows Central’s English blogger Zac Bowden about the bug had attracted attentiona Microsoft employee confirmed its existence and indicated that the developers are already working on a fix behind the scenes.

Apparently, the bug has been around for a while, because contrary to what the Microsoft employee claims, the issue with “zip files” doesn’t just affect Windows 11 Insider builds from the “Canary” channel. Since it’s now also included in the less frequently released builds of the “Dev” channel, it’s probably been a bit longer since the introduction. Regardless, the bug generated a lot of conversation on Twitter, with many users sharing their favorite translation mishaps of the past few years.

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