Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 392 posts

Re: Don't guess my language

#171

Post by gus_massa »

elric wrote: post #63

Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons and the list of languages to the current language .... which is beyond fucking stupid and defeats the purpose. Wikipedia does this right. The button to switch languages is clear, using a universal multilanguage icon, and a list of languages (using the name of t…

99% agree, but there is a problem on mobile, to switch from Spanish to English when I click the glass to search for alternatives. I have to type "Ing" (that are the first letters of "Inglés") while it shows "English" in the list of matches. It would be better if I can type both "Ing" or "Eng".

Re: Don't guess my language

#172

Post by [deleted] »

qiine wrote: post #87
sph wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

duckduckgo seems to do it as well

[deleted]

Re: Don't guess my language

#173

Post by Vinnl »

jeroenhd wrote: post #127
Vinnl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that just specifies which languages you prefer, regardless of what the original language is. I speak Dutch and English, but have English set as my preferred language, because most of the time that multiple languages are available, that is the original language. However, sometimes I'll be visiting a Dutch site that has a (usually badly-)translated English version available, and I'd rather get the Dutch…

Isn't that what `Accept-Language: *` is for? You could probably also trick websites into serving the original language by setting a language they probably don't support (how many websites have a version available in Akkadian anyway?) but you'd need to pick something that the Google Translate widget found on many websites doesn't pick up and try to use.

No, because then it will probably serve it in the original language regardless of the languages I speak. If the original language is French, I'd still prefer to have it in English.

(To be clear, with how widespread English is, and how often Dutch sites are Dutch-only, this is a minor issue - having English, then Dutch as my preference is usually good enough.)

Re: Don't guess my language

#174

Post by Vinnl »

dijit wrote: post #84
Vinnl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that just specifies which languages you prefer, regardless of what the original language is. I speak Dutch and English, but have English set as my preferred language, because most of the time that multiple languages are available, that is the original language. However, sometimes I'll be visiting a Dutch site that has a (usually badly-)translated English version available, and I'd rather get the Dutch…

I think thats bad logic on the server side and not to do with the concept of Accept-Language though. I would think the ideal prioritisation should probably be: * Exact (en_GB) * Exact (fr_CA) * Soft (en_*) // Any variant of English you might have available * Soft (fr_*) // Any variant of French you might have available * Translated. (to first preferred) for Accept-Language: “en_GB,fr_CA”

I don't think Accept-Language supports "Translated", "Exact" or "Soft"? But yes, that would match the language setting that GGP asked for.

Re: Don't guess my language

#175

Post by joseda-hg »

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.

Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey)

2 things that absolutely kill my experience,

1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke

2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring

I know what Mark Rober sound like, leave it be

Re: Don't guess my language

#176

Post by eythian »

deanc wrote: post #42

I 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 langu…

Fwiw, you can set (on Android at least) the language of Google Maps independently of the rest of the system. I also have my phone set to English, but maps set to Dutch because otherwise the reading out of street names can be incomprehensible compared to their proper pronunciation.

This does mean your navigation instructions are also in that language, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your fluency (but there's not really a whole lot of phrases to learn.)

Re: Don't guess my language

#177

Post by lucasoshiro »

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.

> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations

I think it is far worse than that:

1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself.

2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past"

3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary.

I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse

Re: Don't guess my language

#178

Post by scotty79 »

doix wrote: post #9

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.

My worst experience was that after arriving in a new country the Play store didn't show local apps because my Google account was assigned to the old country. And changing the country wasn't easy and meant abandoning the old country and it's apps. Since I travel a bit back and forth I ended up buying a second phone and creating an account for the new country.

Re: Don't guess my language

#179

Post by littlecranky67 »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #86
troupo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think it's more a matter of "why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!" It's the idea that the user has a preference for something, and it applies always and everywhere, even when it's not applicable.

It should be absolutely clear, when i speak English and German, do not auto-translate any video title in those languages to the other. You wouldn't believe how bad the translations are, and how unwanted by me (the user). Worse when you speak a third or fourth language, and tend to watch videos. It gets messy.

Re: Don't guess my language

#180

Post by bmn__ »

e-topy wrote: post #151
nis251413 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t special characters always go after the Latin alphabet? I think this is pretty common, and fairly expected behaviour. Of course nothing is perfect but I feel like the way Wikipedia handles it is consistent.

Not in the Czech alphabet: a, á, b, c, č, d, ď, e, é, ě, ... Also, we regard 'Ch' as its own letter. So yeah, try sorting alphabetically. I'll wait.

    perl -E'Unicode::Collate::Locale->new(locale => 'cs')->sort … … …'
works. Test cases at https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?action=view&id=900
Post reply on HN