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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#131

Post by vintermann »

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'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".

Re: Don't guess my language

#132

Post by b3lvedere »

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.

While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.

Re: Don't guess my language

#133

Post by kps »

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…

I live in Ontario where major highway road signs are bilingual, e.g. “427 North/Nord”. Google has ingested these, blindly translates the French part, and tells me to take “427 North North”.

Re: Don't guess my language

#134

Post by MoreQARespect »

edarchis wrote: post #97
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.

I've had this argument with a Google Developer. He told me that for efficiency, they had different stages in the content rendering and that the main page structure didn't have your user information yet. That's rubbish IMHO because the accept language header should be readily available in that phase.

I've seen similar dysfunctions in other big orgs where a feature or bugfix would need to cross team boundaries and the outcome inhabits zones of vaguely defined responsibility.

The guy you argued with sounds like they were semi-justifying this with the typical "noogler" rose colored glasses.

Re: Don't guess my language

#135

Post by pona-a »

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.

When I was in Romania for my IELTS, I could not use Google Maps. Despite my Google account specifying my preferred languages as English, Ukrainian, Russian in that order and my Accept Language header set only to English, that was not enough to not discount those preferences as a configuration error and serve me Romanian.

Using Google search, which luckily did not decide to show me "local" results to an English query like it often does home, I found a support thread suggesting I set my Accept Language to have something other than English as a second language. Lo and behold, the page decided to now respect it.

Re: Don't guess my language

#137

Post by nis251413 »

euazOn wrote: post #130
CGamesPlay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in alphabetical order Well, it's in an order, but I don't know about alphabetical. I clicked on today's English featured article and looked at the languages: "中文", "Italiano" are "suggested", then the remainder are grouped by geographic region, and aren't particularly alphabetical. They appear to be in groups which are still not alphabetical. Europe seems to have a Cyrillic group but "Қазақша" is shown after "Украї…

Yes, that’s confusing and probably hard to find a good balance. Someone speaking Greek or Czech may expect to find their language around E (Ελληνικά) or C (Čeština), but nope, on Wiki it’s all the way after Z.

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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#138

Post by MandieD »

The most useless thing Google Maps does on my US-localized phone here in Germany: literally translates the proper names of businesses. For example, listing Stoff Bauer as "Fabric Farmer" in the results when I search for "Stoff" - the reverse of helpful (Bauer is a very common German surname, but also literally means "farmer").

Re: Don't guess my language

#139

Post by bemmu »

Seems this is a free-for-all to drop language gripes, so here's mine about Apple TV.

Have a family member who only speaks Japanese. My Apple account is in Finland. We wanted to watch The Martian together, but can't select Japanese dub even though that audio track definitely exists. They just don't show you the options not relevant to your account country, and the only way around is to change your whole Apple account to a new country.

Which you cannot do while you have an active Apple TV subscription.

End result: unable to watch Apple TV as a family.

Re: Don't guess my language

#140

Post by makeitdouble »

hnfong wrote: post #26
makeitdouble wrote: post #20

> 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.

I'd assume most WordPress based sites handling multiple locales will switch based on the Accept-Language ? Same if they let a framework handle the switch instead of a home-baked solution.

Even for auto-translated content, I wouldn't be surprised if it was off-the-shelf plugins that handle the switch.

All in all, I think it takes more effort to ignore the Accept-Language header. That won't prevent sites from tweaking it or doing their own cooking, but it kinda requires intent.

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