Oh god please, this is so important!
Don't guess my language
41–50 of 392 posts
Re: Don't guess my language
#42I live in Finland where they have two native languages: Finnish & Swedish. In a lot of places you'll see both the Finnish & Swedish place name on road signs. Without getting into politics, it's a good assumption to assume that Finnish is the mother-tongue of most of the population - with some areas having Swedish as their native language but also perfectly capable of speaking Finnish fluently.
I have my phone's language set to English as a native English speaker. Google maps reads me the Swedish road signs, in English.
Re: Don't guess my language
#43I 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.
> I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley.
Exactly, it's like they've never left their own state levels of ignorance
Re: Don't guess my language
#44I 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.
There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
Re: Don't guess my language
#45> Every browser sends an Accept-Language header. It tells you what language the user prefers, not based on location, not based on IP, based on their OS or browser config. And yes, users can tweak it if they care enough. This is also a broken assumption. First, Accept-Language is an ordered list, and most daily-multilingual people don't have an absolute order of preference, and more a topical list of preferences. If I…
> Then, as an affect of the first point, users will specify their most practical language, not some actual preference. Where does this assumption come from? Given the fact that many (most? almost all?) sites don't honor the Accept-Language header, I doubt that there's much game theory going on in users' head when deciding this configuration.
They're right. Try to find a Dutch IT person with a laptop not set to English. Only a small fraction will realise you can set more than one language and put Dutch as a second, even though many struggle beyond basic reading comprehension in English. They're not picking it because they're just as good, much less better, at English compared to Dutch
We definitely pick languages that work as opposed to languages that we speak. Setting it to Dutch is just worse: UX doesn't fit, english search results wouldn't show up (way fewer results/content/info), and translations often don't make sense (imagine a button called "you shut it" on a modal window, it's a literal translation of one interpretation of the string "close it" but you'll be confused as to what that button will do)
Re: Don't guess my language
#46Also: don't guess shipping options or other stuff based on my browser's language!
My computers are all set to English even though I'm a German living in Germany, and I absolutely hate it when local business websites give me the "we don't ship abroad, sorry" just because of my browser's language settings.
Re: Don't guess my language
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think the date might be later definitely after the adoption of unicode characters.
Re: Don't guess my language
#48I 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.
> I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley.
Which has been baffling to me considering how many foreigners work at these companies.
Re: Don't guess my language
#49I 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.
There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
Thanks! This is great. Although embarrassing for YouTube.
Re: Don't guess my language
#50I 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.
Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.