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Don't guess my language

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Re: Don't guess my language

#191

Post by deanc »

eythian wrote: post #176
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 t…

Yes I discovered this, this weekend. As you mention, that relies on it being your native language. But it's absurd that if I'm in driving in a foreign country it would attempt to read the names of the streets in your own language's dialect.

Re: Don't guess my language

#192

Post by cubefox »

Ideally a browser should ask for languages and country when being installed, in order to correctly fill the Accept-Language field. But that doesn't happen because it would introduce friction.

Re: Don't guess my language

#193

Post by ksdnjweusdnkl21 »

hahn-kev wrote: post #184

As much as I agree Accept language should be enough, the problem is that English is the default value, so if it's default it's likely to be wrong so I understand guessing because most people don't know you can tell the browser what language you want to use. Partly to blame is also the websites that don't have other languages can't respect the header anyway. I've had plenty of users complain about localization issues…

There should be some bit about the locale being default or not. If its not a default, then respecting it would be fine. If its the default, you could try guessing.

Re: Don't guess my language

#194

Post by bmn__ »

derf_ wrote: post #168
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."

It is wrong to blame the server here. For better results in content-negotiation, a user-agent should allow you to assign numeric weights instead of just a list (implying the same level of preference). Example:

    Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3
If you already send something similar to this, and the server gets it wrong, then this is an outright bug, the software or its operator is out of compliance with HTTP.

Re: Don't guess my language

#195

Post by gus_massa »

echoangle wrote: post #91
immibis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been automatic subtitle translation for a long time.

Good point, I didn’t even think about that because I would never watch a video in a foreign language with auto-translated subtitles.

I sometime watch videos in English with the automatic subtitles. Sometimes I can't understand a few words and the subtitles help me. Most of the time I watch them without subtitles, and rewind the video a few seconds to rewatch a short part with the subtitles enabled.

Re: Don't guess my language

#196

Post by hengheng »

sph wrote: post #50
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.

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.

Leads to foreign-language posts on English-speaking small subreddits as well. I see plenty of Portugese, Spanish, Italian and German in communities that barely have enough traffic to debate in a single language.

But nobody pays to get answers, so it's alright.

Re: Don't guess my language

#197

Post by aequitas »

sph wrote: post #50
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.

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.

At least for Kagi they seem to working on solution[0]. But Reddit seems to be fighting back by translating server side so it's no longer detectable.

[0] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5212-low-quality-translated-reddi...

Re: Don't guess my language

#198

Post by mananaysiempre »

bmn__ wrote: post #162
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…

> 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 w…

Yes, the DUCET is bound to disappoint everybody (especially users of the Latin script with diacritics, as none of them agree on the sort order and everyone’s preferences are tied to the specific subset of diacritics they need), but at least it disappoints everybody more or less equally.

(Do yourself a favor, though, and use the CLDR root collation instead of the raw DUCET—they are basically the same, except, and I’m quoting the standard here[1], “the DUCET is not entirely well-formed”.)

[1] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Well_Formed_DUCET

Re: Don't guess my language

#200

Post by TheJoeMan »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #150
TheJoeMan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, actually. Is there an article about it? After updating to iOS 18.4, Amharic was appended to the end of the list of preferred languages in the iPhone Settings app. However, what's interesting is it was ranked below English, and apps are supposed to use the languages list in order, but perhaps Youtube is alphabetically sorting the list?
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