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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#31

Post by Aachen »

watson wrote: post #13
vaylian wrote: post #2

I really wish for a language setting that says: If the original text is in one of the following languages, use the original text. I might not be equally fluent in all of those languages, but reading the original text is better than reading a translation most of the time.

MacOS has this feature under Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Preferred Languages. Here you can have an ordered list of languages you wish apps and websites (I _think_ only works for Safari) to use. I don't know how widespread this is in other OS'es or browsers.

This has been OS-independent since the dawn of time (see the Accept-Language header specification), but sites rarely use it

Re: Don't guess my language

#32

Post by Freak_NL »

tapia wrote: post #23

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.

Re: Don't guess my language

#33

Post by sgt »

lblume wrote: post #16
sgt wrote: post #11

And also make it easy on the site to change languages. Just because my OS is in US English, doesn't mean that I don't prefer certain sites to be in other languages when I choose to. Many of us are multilingual.

That should not be the business of the site, but of the browser. It is precisely what Accept-Language is for. The site should respect the header, allowing circumvention should be a very low accessibility priority.

The browser just looks at the system language. That may be US English, but you want to read the site in Spanish for example.

Re: Don't guess my language

#34

Post by avhception »

tapia wrote: post #23

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert. Lidl is worth it, ja!

Re: Don't guess my language

#35

Post by apples_oranges »

Freak_NL wrote: post #32
tapia wrote: post #23

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.

Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.

Re: Don't guess my language

#36

Post by fabian2k »

It's entirely ridiculous when you're abroad. Also annoying when in your home country, but the localized versions are not equivalent like e.g. programming documentation. Even in the ideal case you'd probably prefer the English original, but often they're machine-translated anyway and much worse.

Another extremely annoying thing I've noticed more often now are machine-translated versions of content in the search results. Reddit for example does this now, and it's just terrible. One of the main reasons I use non-English search terms is to get non-English results, e.g. because I'm looking for information on topics that is not globally applicable.

Re: Don't guess my language

#37

Post by littlecranky67 »

tapia wrote: post #23

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.

Re: Don't guess my language

#38

Post by cypressious »

Freak_NL wrote: post #32
tapia wrote: post #23

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.

Agreed. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-tra... to work around it.

Re: Don't guess my language

#39

Post by [deleted] »

q3k wrote: post #10
lmm wrote: post #8

> You don’t override screen resolution or color scheme with your own guess They absolutely do lol. Like it or not, people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it. Those people probably buy more too (or at least buy more that shows up in tracking, since you sound like the kind of person who disables cookies etc. too).

> people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it Is this actually something that you can back up with data, or are you just guessing? I find it hard to imagine that would be the case, considering this header generally gets populated by the user's system locale/language.

[deleted]

Re: Don't guess my language

#40

Post by hnfong »

Every couple months, Facebook's web interface glitches out and displays the geolocation-based language instead of my preferred language in parts of the UI.

I don't know how that happens. Like, do individual teams within Meta have to re-learn that users in their own system have a language preference? (Not even talking about Accept-Language, it's a Facebook user setting.)

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