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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#281

Post by bawolff »

tlb wrote: post #188
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…

There are two levels of this. If I get some other European language, I can generally figure out which is their word for English and it's not a big deal to switch. But if it gives me a script I don't know, like Bengali or something, it's a problem. Perhaps every "choose language" menu should include English and Chinese in non-localized form, as an escape hatch, since almost every web users can recognize enough of them…

True, but how often do you want to select a language you can't read?

Re: Don't guess my language

#282

Post by bluGill »

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…

I even have Spanish set in Google as one of my known languages and it still auto translates everything to English. I'm not fluent in Spanish, but one of the well known good ways to get there is to consume native content, but YouTube makes that hard.

Re: Don't guess my language

#284

Post by bluGill »

bmn__ wrote: post #204
vintermann wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

The channel I'm interested in would be of great interest to English speakers. There are only a few people brave/stupid enough to travel to dangerous places (Ukraine near the front) to do a documentary. I cannot blame the author for turning on the translate, it likely overall expands his reach and is a good thing for those who are not interested in his native language. However I'm trying to learn his native language and getting dropped to English out of my control is not helpful to me.

Re: Don't guess my language

#285

Post by scotty79 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #225
scotty79 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 swi…

Thank you. I may try the same when the time comes to ditch the old phone.

Re: Don't guess my language

#286

Post by vikingerik »

adastra22 wrote: post #255
bmn__ wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sort rules are different in different locales.

It's a circular dependency: how do you sort and list the locales or languages for someone to pick one, when by definition you don't know their locale yet?

You have to either make some best-guess approximation (IP geo, browser headers, etc) or use a locale-invariant sort, both of which will be wrong in some cases.

Re: Don't guess my language

#287

Post by rcarmo »

As a bilingual Portuguese/English speaker who essentially spends most of his waking hours working in English but switching back when I leave my home office, I have been very much annoyed by this since the dial-up days.

Infuriatingly, there was a train of thought at one time that used website analytics as a justification for either setting the default language of a site or trusting an external third-party like IP addresses databases (often just relying on the free, unmaintained stuff that broke after 3 months as the Internet expanded).

Then came the browser geolocation prompts, etc. -- and most people, lacking a basic understanding of how HTTP works, preferred chunks of JavaScript they could "see" to HTTP header information they didn't understand, to the point where that got codified as "best practice".

It also doesn't help that most CMS frameworks completely fail to make use of that information and pass it down the stack, or that people have turned to doing SPAs (which _can_ just use navigator.language, but just do a search in any framework's source code and see how often that is used).

Re: Don't guess my language

#288

Post by rcarmo »

VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #199

Here I am losing my mind. My phone’s set to Portuguese (EU), I live in the US, and somehow I get ads in German and Spanish, and news exclusively for Portugal. No ties to Germany at all. Just lost in some algorithm’s fever dream.

Hey, at least you're not living in Portugal and getting US news like me...

Re: Don't guess my language

#289

Post by bluGill »

plastic3169 wrote: post #62
lblume wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What incentives does Google have to improve UX in this way? I absolutely agree that it should be the case, but the people for whom it matters are (1) completely insignificant wrt to the whole user base and (2) mostly care about tracking and try to circumvent it.

There are 700+ million people living in Europe. The countries are tiny, most have bunch of official languages. The fix would be to use users selected language and not to flip flop it based on location. IP based location guessing doesn’t work even down to right country in here.

That is not an incentive. There is nothing in to for Google.

It is of course useful for those 700+million, but they are not customers of Google, they users/the product. So long as you won't go elsewhere (in mass) you don't matter.

Re: Don't guess my language

#290

Post by bmn__ »

clan wrote: post #248
bmn__ wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what you're saying: Please complain through proper channels and hope they accept your input? 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…

What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Youtube, with the effect of slashing recommendations for the videos of the channel owner at large and his earnings. That's not nice, we should be considerate of the consequence of our actions. Does this make sense, do you understand this perspective?

This behaviour rankles me, I think is on the same level as the misuse of the feature "report this as spam (to some upstream entity/3rd party)" for e-mail messages that are not actually spam.

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