Me: Visits Morroco (or pretty much any other country), has smartphone set to english.
Also me: Gets youtube ads in Berber language. Has no idea what the ad is about or why someone would pay google to show it to me.
Don't guess my language
111–120 of 392 posts
Re: Don't guess my language
#112I think this is a case where it is unfortunate that the biggest players are from the USA, because they are notoriously mono-lingual and cannot fathom what it means to know more than one language.
If they did understand, no site would ever propose you an automatic translation into your primary language over the original text written in any other of the languages you can read.
Re: Don't guess my language
#113Before we even get as far as the wrong language being chosen; The GeoIP databases are rarely even up to date so they've got you in the wrong location to begin with.
I've been on static IPs for a decade or so; my last home's static IP was regularly Geo-located to Romania, the next one to the Netherlands, and sometimes even further afield; I'm in the UK.
I started to have a heart attack just yesterday because Zenarmor on my OPNSense box was suggesting that a particular device was sending traffic to a region it has no business sending traffic to; turns out the DB is just wrong and a quick search indicated it actually (currently) belongs to the UK.
In a separate incident (also yesterday, as I then got into investigative mode), I installed Rethink on my phone, which suggested, yet again, that devices (including my phone itself) were sending traffic to places they shouldn't be; again, false alarm, turns out they were all UK IPs, one of which being my own static IP which was being wrongly attributed to another region.
If this part of locating the IP can't even universally be done correctly; why on earth is anyone even considering trying to use it to guess a person's language.
EDIT: The result of these issues, particularly with my home IPs usually manifests in certain sites displaying in languages and with currencies neither I nor my family speak/read or understand, for me I'm used to it and will look for where/how to change the language/currency, but for my wife and kids it's just confusing.
Re: Don't guess my language
#114Some sites ignore en-US because so many devices ship that as a default. The Internet becomes a bit better if you set your language to en-AU.
But yes, many ignore the selected language or units completely.
Re: Don't guess my language
#115I 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!
I thought I was the only one getting such a messy ads.
At least I know I didn't mess anything on my WebOS TV.
Re: Don't guess my language
#116My 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.
Yeah it's amazing that Google is the worst offender.
I think this is because half of Google live their entire career in California, so they don't know about other languages, units, time zones at all.
It's weird, because they employ SO many foreigners, bringing them to California. But somehow upon arrival they all get memory wiped about the existence of anything outside the bay area.
Other companies do this right. Google is user hostile.
No. I will NEVER navigate by bike, foot, or public transport in these strange America-only units.
Re: Don't guess my language
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah tailscale/wireguard/vpn usually fixes this but then you have to -know- at which geo you want to operate. The internet has long been broken as a global field imho
> yeah tailscale/wireguard/vpn usually fixes this It does not "fix" that at all, and breaks so many other things. I don't wanna see US/UK/Australian prices just because I happen to live in Spain but prefer English when browsing the web (literally same boat as parent).
sorry, yes does not fix the language stuff
i meant it fixes allowing you to pretend to be phsycally somewhere else, but as you say introduces a whole can of new problems/hurdles
idk man i just switch it on and off depending on site
Re: Don't guess my language
#118Don't guess what currency I want to pay in either by the way. Your payment provider's automatic conversion is most likely more predatory than my bank's so I don't want to use it. And even if you guess my location right, how do you know I want a badly/machine translated web site?
There may not be any conversion at all. I have cards able to carry balances in multiple currencies. I also have foreign bank accounts.
Billing address is not a sure way to predict currency.
Re: Don't guess my language
#119In Switzerland pretty much all sites have a setting for French, German, Italian and often English. It is very much a multi-language country.
It is great to be able to select individually per site. I often like to use the native French and just drop back to English if its technical language.
I do find that every site has the setting in a different place which is annoying, it would be great to be able to select it in a standard place on the browser.
The worst offenders are the single language per country sites. For example Ebay insists on only using German in Switzerland, which is rather frustrating since I only know English and French so far.
Re: Don't guess my language
#120> 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…
> If I read an English news site that has a translated French version, it doesn't matter if I'm most proficient in French, I'll want the English version. 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 t…
> never offer half-baked translations
Sadly that ship has sailed.
We can look at the reaction from smaller youtubers as auto-dub rolled out. Most are sympathetic to the quality issues but are seeing it as either a "good enough" or at least a "better than nothing" feature that helps them expand their audience with no visible cost on their side.
Or official government sites that have explicitely disclosed AI translations and didn't bother passing it through a regular translator.
This situation just won't get better. Except perhaps the day AI is actually intelligent and we have human being level translators running on cloud servers.
> Wikipedia
Yes, those are not translations, but in that specific case they also don't need to: the quality of the article will vary depending on the editor, but there's no "original" article, so nothing to translate from IMHO.