The reverse is also a problem. If I set my accept-language as en-AU, many sites assume I’m geolocated in Australia regardless of where I actually am.
Don't guess my language
201–210 of 392 posts
Re: Don't guess my language
#202It'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…
Yes, oh my Lord I've been getting seriously frustrated with Mongo's documentation lately. I'm not sure if it picks the language based on location or Accept-Language, never played around with it, but it's behavior is deeply rage-inducing.
I do a web search and get a list of results for the English version, open it and it automatically changes to PT-br as soon as JS loads, but then, after a few seconds, once the page is fully loaded, it jumps back to English, while keeping the /pt-br/ slug in the URL...
What the heck??
And yeah, the translation is very obviously not human made or reviewed. Furthermore, I'm PT-pt, so the differences to PT-br just make the experience even more annoying X)
Re: Don't guess my language
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s English hegemony. Languages have their own sorting that they expect. You can’t impose rules to other languages. Of course at some point Unicode needs to be ordered, but you don’t get to impose technical details to people around the world because it matches with how English does it. That’s where geo-ip guessing becomes relevant. Show a list with the most likely languages at the top.
Or use the Accept-Language. Since we already know the User understands that one, it's probably a reasonable choice for which sort order they expect too.
Re: Don't guess my language
#204I 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".
What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.
If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
Re: Don't guess my language
#205As 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…
Websites can only guess the language until the user explicitly choses. Accept-Language is a good guess , but as you pointed out it often defaults to English, or it may transmit language codes the website doesn't support (It sends `es-MX`, but website only supports `es-ES`). The website still has to guess.
English is in fact my primary language. It may be the default, but I cannot set it to something else. I have explicitly chosen to leave it on the default, and would like websites to accept this.
Re: Don't guess my language
#206Whenever I've visited Aliexpress (for cheap ESP32s of course) I seem to only get served the French version of the site despite having a UK based IP, UK language flags and actually telling the site to use the GB store. Next time I visit though it will display in French again.
Re: Don't guess my language
#207Timely. I’m working on this right now for a product and have everything in place using the accept-language header and then adding a url param. I’m currently agonizing about how to let the user change their language, because I want to respect locale as well (es-MX vs es-ES for example). And I haven’t found a good UX pattern for changing language+locale. I’ll likely just implement a big list that the user can select, a…
As someone who lives in one of those locations mentioned in the article: split out locale and language into different settings. Because they are not the same thing. This article explains that nicely. [1] You want your users to be able to change their location (and, therefore, locale) and their language independently. The Accept-Language header could be used as a sentinel for language. Then again, I wouldn't outright…
Thanks for the advice! I wasn’t planning on using geoIP at all for several reasons - the main two being inaccuracies AND that I’d need to use a paid 3rd party.
Re: Don't guess my language
#208I 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.
Even reddit does that now and for some reason shows the translated version by default when I search a post through google.
Very annoying, because instead of just seeing the english post, which I'm easily able to understand, I see half-broken german...
Re: Don't guess my language
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 absolutely hate this. I have the exact same thing. Even if the technology was good, I speak both languages and want to see the original. Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
This would also be good for movies :D
I can speak german, I don't need forced subtitles for the nazis
Re: Don't guess my language
#210I worked on a project where I was responsible for implementing accessibility and multiple language support for a government adjacent site. I used Accept-Language to decide which of our supported languages to use as the default. The PM over-ruled that decision and forced a EN default.
The accessibility auditor put "use Accept-Language" into they audit report as a "red" item and then ripped the company a new one when they found out it had been initially implemented that way but then reverted.
I got another couple of weeks of contract work for this and other such stupidity.