> Let the user change it if needed (and remember that choice with a cookie or URL param)
As a reminder, such a cookie would not require a cookie banner.
https://commission.europa.eu/resources/europa-web-guide/desi...
Don't guess my language
221–230 of 392 posts
Re: Don't guess my language
#222Seems 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.
I don’t buy that argument. Sometimes if you buy the movie you have more audio choices, on the same platform.
If you buy the Blu-ray, you likely have tons of languages not present in the streamed video.
Re: Don't guess my language
#223> If you want to use GeoIP, fine — but only for currency, shipping, legal stuff
Possibly not even then. Shipping should depend on the address it's shipped to, not the IP. Currency, I prefer in your original currency. I don't want you to convert currency for me, because my bank does it cheaper.
And of course geoIP can be wrong because of VPNs. Only use it when other methods like user preference and `Accept-Language` or similar have failed, and make it easy for the user to correct your wrong assumptions.
Re: Don't guess my language
#224So much this. I also hate the implicit assumption that everyone understands just one language that's baked into this kind of design. I can comfortably read in four languages, and naturally prefer the original language to (typically) bad localization. So your guess at what language I would prefer based on my IP is virtually guaranteed to be wrong. Seriously, just look at what languages I'm already telling you work for me. There's no reason to assume I'm not smart enough to correctly configure my browser's language settings.
It gets even worse with YouTube and their awful AI dubbing that's always on by default. So now for solidly half the videos I watch, I need to (1) open it, (2) click through the settings to turn off the AI dubbing, and then (3) rewind back to the beginning and start over. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it's incredibly annoying.
Re: Don't guess my language
#225My 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.
My worst experience was that after arriving in a new country the Play store didn't show local apps because my Google account was assigned to the old country. And changing the country wasn't easy and meant abandoning the old country and it's apps. Since I travel a bit back and forth I ended up buying a second phone and creating an account for the new country.
You solve it the best way to fit your case I guess. On android I created a set of alternative accounts that each belong to a different country.
All accounts can be active at the same time on the same phone, there is a dropdown to switch in the Store app, and that works even with a work profile on the side. I've yet to see real downsides, except for course remembering which account is on which country and manually switching.
Re: Don't guess my language
#226Kinda great to annoy me as a web-scraper using a mobile IP in the Philippines
Re: Don't guess my language
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 le…
Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault.
Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?
Re: Don't guess my language
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 le…
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Re: Don't guess my language
#229Not 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…
Funny. The Wikipedia home page has a "Language" button. Like that, in plain English. And it is translated to the language you switch to.
Re: Don't guess my language
#230Earlier 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?
> Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career.
(Speculating, of course.)