61–70 of 392 posts
The worst offender was eBay which would machine-translate listings from English to Spanish.
My biggest annoyance is with Google. They know who I am, they know I am traveling, they know my language preferences (English) and yet I still get language based on my location on certain pages. I let you track me Google, please use it for some good UX and not just advertising.
What incentives does Google have to improve UX in this way? I absolutely agree that it should be the case, but the people for whom it matters are (1) completely insignificant wrt to the whole user base and (2) mostly care about tracking and try to circumvent it.
E.g. an English Wikipedia page will present me with the following language suggestions:
Suggested languages
Deutsch
Français
Nederlands
> 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…
The solution there is not to abandon the very useful Accept-Language header, but to never offer half-baked translations. Is your website multilingual? Fine, but only offer fully translated and verified translation sets. It's OK to have your UI and your own content translated in a few languages — for a company that may make sense depending on their target clientele — but you'll have to maintain all of these and keep them in sync.
However, user content is off-limits. No automatic translations unless you only offer those under a button to be helpful (like 'Spanish detected, click to show an automatic translation into English'), but really, leave that to the user's browser.
Use Accept-Language to pick a language, and then offer me a way to switch in addition to that. That's all there is to it.
> Wikipedia does it decently well for instance.
Wikipedia doesn't do that. Each language is its own instance, where content may be ported to by translating it (or parts of it), but outside of the Mediawiki UI texts, it is not a translation of the same content. The Dutch version of the lemma 'Language' is a different article in a different language with some overlap. There is no claim made that it is the same article in Dutch. It is hosted on a different sub-domain and path on purpose.
I have told the story here before, but I built a neat little system to parse Accept-Language weighing the users priorities and using the closest thing we have on offer to the users preferences. As an example, we have a Brazilian Portuguese translation but not Portugal Portuguese, so we would offer the prior to users requesting the latter for instance unless they had a lower priority but more exact match. From my tech…
I run into those regularly and it's always a struggle to know how to stay on the damn page I clicked on: will the "continue" button use the preselected value or will it dismiss the pop-up and continue on the current page?If the former, is the preselected value the page I'm on or a different language? Can I guess which locale I'm on to select that and dismiss the pop-up then? Can I inspect-element→delete this modal and just sidestep the whole problem? Even just a small close button is a luxury on these language walls...
95 out of 100 times, I'm fine with whatever language I clicked on, and if I want your German version for locale-adjusted shipping info or payment options or whatnot, I'll look for a language selector on the top right or, alternatively, in the page footer. If it's in one of those two places, I'd be much happier about a web without JavaScript-based pop-ups constantly
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.
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.
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.
There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
> 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.
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.
I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.