241–250 of 392 posts
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 B…
It happens all the god damn time that the websites render in Dutch (or I guess Flemish) instead of the set Accept Language I have (EN then FR). Google is regularly showing me results in Dutch, most online stores default to Dutch even if they have English and French versions available.
Just imagine, all the websites that correctly (for you) display in Dutch, are websites that we have to change to French. I would guess there are more Dutch-defaulting websites than French ones, but I can't know for sure.
Btw, our neighbor is huge and french speaking too, so I'm not surprised companies coming from there favor French on their site. The same way that NL companies operate in Flanders but less so in Wallonia have their default to Dutch.
Also I'd argue that companies operating in Belgium should default to asking the language instead of guessing, otherwise you'll always anger half of the population.
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perl -E'Unicode::Collate::Locale->new(locale => 'cs')->sort … … …' works. Test cases at https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?action=view&id=900
I love some perl on Monday morning but how does this work when you don’t know the locale?
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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.
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> 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?
Not that I know of. It just happened to me, too, around then. I thought it had to do with my pet fascination with the Ethiopian civil war and GERD.
A lot of websites seem to assume if you have a non-English language in it, they should use that language, even if English has the highest score, because obviously it's your "real" language and English was just a default. E.g. `en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7` is read as "we should serve the Chinese version".
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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…
Or should he just keep using the signals he gets and immediately clean up his feed?
I actually see this as a feature. YouTube recommends a lot of garbage. I suggested that they improved my feed but they implemented this signal instead. I use the exactly this method to weed out a lot of content I do not care for.
You cannot tell the 500 pound gorilla anything. I prefer my videos without subtitles. I have that set as a preference. Yet when chromecasting it is common for the subtitles to spontaneously turn on. And has done so for a long time.
English is not my first language and my first language is not widely used. Hence I am not used to dubbed movies/programming and I am used to seeing subtitles.
If a native english speaker could understand the horror show that the machine generated subtitles are. If you are used to subtitles they are extremely hard to ignore. You will then read and get the understanding (often hilariously wrong) before the audio catches up and you might end up rather confused.
I can understand an American might have a hard time watching a subbed German movie. Thats natural because it is not common. But when you grew up with subtitles it is actually effortless. Except when they are poor. Then it becomes worse because of the cognitive load of 2 languages and the effort to figure out what is correct.
Dear english only speakers: Translation is hard. A poor translation is worse that no translation as it obfuscates the message. AI is not there yet at all. Maybe impressive but often not helpful or plain and simply distorts the real message.
So 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…
I also don‘t like that video titles are shown translated. It‘s so weird when I‘m watching a video in spoken English, yet the title is in a different language.
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…
You mean for software distributed in the US?