Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 392 posts

Re: Don't guess my language

#261

Post by soulofmischief »

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.

When serving that many languages, a search bar is paramount.

Re: Don't guess my language

#262

Post by tuetuopay »

danhau wrote: post #249
bunderbunder wrote: post #224

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…

YouTube‘s AI dubbing is truly awful. It took me 5 minutes to realize the audio I was hearing was coming from the video itself, and not some random ad in a different tab. 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.

It's especially painful since they don't translate all subtitles.

I'm french, but my browsers are configured for English. Some (but not all!) english titles are translated to french, and some french titles are translated to english. This actually caused me to miss a few uploads from channels I'm subscribed to, as the language of the title is part of my mind-filtering for those channels.

Re: Don't guess my language

#263

Post by netsharc »

gus_massa wrote: post #171
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…

99% agree, but there is a problem on mobile, to switch from Spanish to English when I click the glass to search for alternatives. I have to type "Ing" (that are the first letters of "Inglés") while it shows "English" in the list of matches. It would be better if I can type both "Ing" or "Eng".

It's even more amusing when the displayed list looks like it's sorted randomly, but in reality it's sorted alphabetically in a different language to the display language..

e.g.

    Nederlands
    English
    Français
    Deutsch
    Espagnol
(but if sorted in English: Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish)

Re: Don't guess my language

#264

Post by magicalhippo »

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…

A related issue that has me fuming is when, after arriving at a page of interest from a search engine, a modal popup forces me to select the country I'm from, and then promptly redirects me to the homepage of the regional website.

Some have a X button to close said dialog, but many don't which is really aggravating.

Re: Don't guess my language

#265

Post by tuetuopay »

Can we also stop tying e-commerce languages to the commercial zones?

Yes, I want my HPE or Dell or FS.com website to be in English but still get the French catalog and warehouses and VAT. Especially for tech, where the lingua franca of english goes so deep that most people don't bother to translate technical terms to their native language. Heck, I don't know most of those in french!

Re: Don't guess my language

#266

Post by psychoslave »

nis251413 wrote: post #137
euazOn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

If I recall correctly, the default propose a first list that push items which are guessed most likely what the user expect, then a list more complete, and in any case let you filter by typing. I think it also can change the way it behave if you are connected and tweaked your preferences in the matter for your account.

Re: Don't guess my language

#268

Post by projektfu »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #206

Whenever 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.

For a while, AliExpress was locked on Arabic for me when using my phone and Chrome and I couldn't tell why. I ended up using a different browser. It was set for sale in the US, but choosing Arabic.

I've since changed my setup. Now it offers two language choices, English or Español, and defaults to English.

Re: Don't guess my language

#269

Post by projektfu »

jiehong wrote: post #237
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…

Maps is so annoying for that: I travel to France, Italy and Germany on the road, and language is set to English on the phone, so it tries to pronounce everything the English way, and I can’t understand anything. I wish I could set a "read location/road names in local language" setting.

I remember a period where local city names were getting auto-translated. Christmas, Brazil. Holy Sunday, DR.
Post reply on HN