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Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

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Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#271

Post by kolinko »

scrollaway wrote: post #199
Symbiote wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English. Google thinks they known better - they do not.

If you're logged into a Google account, you can change the language in settings. (I'm in Poland, and I force Google to be in english this way)

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#272

Post by twhb »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40

I built an iOS app once for a Dutch audience. We used the device's language as the app's language, because that makes sense, right? It's the same with the preferred language in a browser, right? Wrong; we got complaints from users that their app was in English instead of Dutch. Even though their device was set to English or another unsupported language. We begrudgingly added an app specific language preference. I rep…

Did you suggest they change their device settings? Yours was probably the right approach, I’m just curious whether we have actual data to support that people prefer this split configuration, and aren’t just suffering under bad defaults.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#273

Post by verve_rat »

jobigoud wrote: post #191
quitit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the problem exists in both directions. I run my setup entirely in English and Google will still try to squeeze in the local non-english language. Confusingly Google will also write some sentences half in english and half in the local language. E.g. "Google is also available in: " (rather than the full sentence being in the foreign language. It's the kind of attention to detail that I've become accustome…

> E.g. "Google is also available in: " This specific one might be on purpose to avoid translating language names. If you land in page entirely in Chinese but you see the word "English" in Latin characters under a link, you can click it to escape. But if it's itself in Chinese you'll never find it. I do the same in applications, have a menu for languages but don't translate language names, if you change language by mi…

The whole sentence "This page in English" or "This page in Mandarin" should be in English or Mandrin respectively.

Compare "Rirgwyd rkrgru dlwhgi ro English" to "This page in English". Which is better for people that only read English?

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#274

Post by Blahah »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #214
Symbiote wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

Aw man, Google UK's search "tools" feature doesn't understand UK nor ISO date formats. Such a strange choice to make.

Works fine with the `before:` and `after:` filters for me

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#276

Post by traspler »

The Netflix thing makes me so angry sometimes. They have the show, the title, description, episode titles and descriptions are all localized to my language of choice (English), but when I actually start watching I can only select French or Original Dub & French Sub.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#277

Post by yongjik »

mcv wrote: post #137
silvestrov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…

> These users will still want Google to return results in their native language. Says who? This is a baseless assumption. Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for. And the browser should ask the OS or the user for their language preference. And if IT-support wants one language for the interface in order to facilitate support, they can still set the other language for…

> Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for.

In case you haven't noticed: Users lie. All the time. Every day.

If Google found that "just listening to the settings in the HTTP request header" helped more users than it hurt, Google would have switched to using it a long time ago. The web is a messy place - sometimes you can't even trust a website to report its own encoding correctly.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#278

Post by laurent92 »

scrollaway wrote: post #199
Symbiote wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English. Google thinks they known better - they do not.

The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality, tech articles are dumbed down, tutorials in French lose nuance, and, well, good luck finding Hacker News in French. It was a revolution for me when I gained access to the English web, it’s the origin of the documents! I want results in English because the quality is higher in English!

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#279

Post by umeshunni »

petepete wrote: post #74
makeitdouble wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavior is different if you’re logged in and depending on your settings I think.

There's just so many things at play it's really difficult to know what to blame. When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. So I just don't use Assistant for anything.

I have a weirder one.

I have two Google home devices, one I bought when I lived in SF and another that I bought after I moved down to the suburbs.

The one I bought when in SF is still stuck thinking it's in SF, no matter where I change the settings. So, I get SF weather, SF traffic and all that depending on which Google Home happens to answer my questions.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#280

Post by itronitron »

justinmayer wrote: post #70

I met one-on-one with Google’s senior leadership in 2000 to talk about their internationalization efforts. This was very early in their trajectory, so I even sat down with Larry Page and chatted with him for half an hour. A year or two later I’m in Tokyo and talk to a new Google product manager based there. I tell her it is insane that Google serves me Japanese pages on my English-configured PowerBook just because I…

I think they do this to force people to login to their Google account (in order to change the language setting.)
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