Don't guess my language • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't guess my language

#161

Post by af78 » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

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.

I guess the default (when no language is specified) is Unicode order:

U+005A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z

U+010C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON

U+0395 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON

Re: Don't guess my language

#162

Post by bmn__ » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #126

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…

> 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…

> how you can't "alphabetize" language names

Not so, this sort order has been standardised as part of Unicode for at least 28 years. To see it in action, pipe the list of languages as a text file through a conforming tool like `ucsort`. When Қ is falsely sorted after Ч, then the wrong algorithm or no algorithm at all has been used.

> because of course, K for Korean alphabetizes after C for Chinese

That's not how it works.

Re: Don't guess my language

#163

Post by pona-a » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #40

Every couple months, Facebook's web interface glitches out and displays the geolocation-based language instead of my preferred language in parts of the UI. I don't know how that happens. Like, do individual teams within Meta have to re-learn that users in their own system have a language preference? (Not even talking about Accept-Language, it's a Facebook user setting.)

Same happens for YouTube and Google, which sometimes switch to Russian or Ukrainian despite my preference for English.

Re: Don't guess my language

#164

Post by jurip » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

bemmu wrote: 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…

Netflix had a similar oddity, also in Finland: if I recall correctly there's an account language setting, and you have to set it to English to see Kim's Convenience. No need for a VPN, no need to claim you're in another country, but it's just hiding the content unless you've set the right language. Even if we're using English subs when watching content from the Finnish language UI.

Re: Don't guess my language

#165

Post by roelschroeven » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

gield wrote: post #74

This is a real pain in the ass in Belgium. Many websites assume I speak French while my native language is Dutch. Some websites only offer a French version of their Belgian storefront, even though Dutch accounts for ~60% of Belgians. I can't imagine what it's like for German-speaking Belgians. This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-sp…

This drives me nuts.

Once upon a time French was used even in the Dutch speaking parts, in government, economy, high society. That was long before the internet got popular though. We've had a long fight to get rid of French in Flanders. Dutch is the only official language in Flanders, and it's the language people speak (except expats, or migrants who haven't learned the language yet).

So when companies still assume Belgium == French, it's not only wrong, but it comes across as very condescending. It feels like they haven't outgrown the times where Dutch was suppressed in favor of French.

And why? If a company wants to use only one language for the whole country, it's better of choosing Dutch (as we indeed account for about 60% of the population). Many of those companies do have a perfectly good Dutch translation, which they use for their site when viewed from the Netherlands. Even if they don't, I much prefer English over French.

Re: Don't guess my language

#166

Post by breadmakerlc » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

I hate that this is a thing on physical products aswell. Panasonic being the latest offender by "supporting" my language. Then, when opening the safety instructions for the machine it reads grammatically correct but materially incorrect advice. Someone not following through with enough critical thinking could end up killing themselves.

Reading up on the english version it becomes clear it was machine-translated with zero persion checking on if any of it was proper.

Re: Don't guess my language

#167

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Don't guess my language

#168

Post by derf_ » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

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…

My favorite is the sites who do parse Accept-Languages, but then pick the last one in the list instead of the first. I have mine in rough order of my competence in them, which gets me my least-competent language on some sites even when my most-competent is supported.

I get a kick out of it when I see it, because you can understand how it happens. "Well, at least you tried."

Re: Don't guess my language

#169

Post by 9dev » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #36

It's entirely ridiculous when you're abroad. Also annoying when in your home country, but the localized versions are not equivalent like e.g. programming documentation. Even in the ideal case you'd probably prefer the English original, but often they're machine-translated anyway and much worse. Another extremely annoying thing I've noticed more often now are machine-translated versions of content in the search result…

Right. You can basically hear the product team at Reddit humming star-spangled banner while conceiving this feature for themselves as monolingual people. The rest of the world can understand multiple languages just fine, thank you very much.

Re: Don't guess my language

#170

Post by Zak » Mon, May 19, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

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.

> He told me that for efficiency, they [had to make a broken product]

That's called premature optimization.