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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

141–150 of 392 posts

Re: Don't guess my language

#141
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.

Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?

Re: Don't guess my language

#142
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.

What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for.

Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.

Re: Don't guess my language

#143
post #139

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…

My guess is there's licensing issues, i.e. the Japanese language dub isn't licensed to be played in Finland... in this case the moronity is due to copyright laws/lawyers.

Re: Don't guess my language

#144
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The language set defaults to the language set in the OS, which is usually the preferred language for most users. You have people working in IT who set their language to English for easier troubleshooting (i.e. not needing to Google error codes), but they're a small minority.

Anyone handling more than one language daily will be doing an explicit choice, and I wouldn't say they're a minority.

If your native tongue is Spanish but you live in the US for instance, the "preferred" language in your browser has IMHO a higher chance of being English. Same if you live in India probably.

Re: Don't guess my language

#145
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.

Indeed. Catalan speakers have Spanish forced down their throat no matter if Spanish has never been associated to the Google account in any way, nor in the system or browser language preferences.

In my case, I live in the United States, but Google is determined to serve me Spanish results even for Catalan-related queries. E.g. preferring the Spanish Wikipedia. The search engine's behavior has had ups and downs over the years, but it has never been great.

This is very much a problem for my children, who don't understand Spanish, as well as for the Catalan-speaking regions of the world that are not in Spain, including Andorra.

In my experience, Gemini easily flags any Catalan content as unsafe and prevents the conversation from continuing. Even for prompts like "summarize this article". This may have improved lately, but still.

Google used to be an example in sensitivity to the world's diversity, being a responsible major player. Way back. Now, although I applaud some efforts multiple teams continue making, it is obvious this is no longer a priority.

Re: Don't guess my language

#146
post #73
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…

And it even remembers what you chose last time and pushes it to the top. That is UX. Being actually helpful and not fucking annoying.

Oh nice! I never noticed that "Suggested languages" shows languages I previously selected.

But additionally, I like how it's not simply "pushing to the top", it does shows a previously selected language on the top, but it still keeps it duplicate in the list below, in case the user is going by muscle memory.

To me this is the best way.

Either make it VERY OBVIOUS that you're removing the item from the bottom of the list (which wouldn't be possible here), or don't remove it at all.

If I had a cent for each time a SaaS made my life harder by trying to "help me" I would be CEO of every SaaS I use.

Re: Don't guess my language

#147
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well in my language "é" is absolutely not special, and should definitively be placed near "e" (to the point that uppercase é is often written E instead of É)

Re: Don't guess my language

#148
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…

I can give a perfect bad example: the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic. This is the Google support article: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 telling me the buttons to press in English. Also, I don't know/speak Amharic, and so at the time had no idea what language it was, and the iPhone translate doesn't even recognize this Ethiopian language. Bit of a pickle that could have easily been mitigated by a universal multilanguage icon.

Re: Don't guess my language

#149
On a related note: whatever idiot started using keyboard language instead of system language for emoji autocompletion on certain MacOS and iOS Apps, please go die in hell somewhere... I have had this issue randomly pop up with the Telegram client I am using, and it infuriates me beyond belief. Every single setting on my machine indicates that the language I am using is English, why is the search text of emojis tied to the one setting I cannot reasonably change because it is tied to a physical property of my device and not the 4 settings I can and did change.

Re: Don't guess my language

#150
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…

I can give a perfect bad example: the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic. This is the Google support article: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 telling me the buttons to press in English. Also, I don't know/speak Amharic, and so at the time had no idea what language it was, and the iPhone translate doesn't even recognize this Ethiopian language. Bit of a pickle that could h…

> the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic

Was this about 6 weeks ago?

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