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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#341

Post by agapon »

swiftcoder wrote: post #3

Yeah, this is has become of pet peeve of mine since moving to Spain. US sites that automatically redirect me to their Spanish site (which often doesn't have the actual article the original link pointed to!)

I agree that it's most stupid and most annoying kind of localizing. I search for some specific product (or other information), get a link to an English version of the page (and perhaps the only one). But when I follow the link I get redirected to my language version of the site, most often its portal page. Sometimes because the language specific site does not have a page for the thing I searched, but most often because the site is lazy. And then I have to search again but using the site tools instead of my search engine of choice.

Re: Don't guess my language

#342

Post by vintermann »

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 vast majority of videos are not translated into borked machine-Norwegian, so if this isn't something you opt in to, it's something everyone opts out of (I doubt it).

> 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.

No it isn't, because I see what kinds of channels do this, over and over again. They're very clearly publishers who don't care that they make something objectively worse as long as the algorithm rewards them for it.

> If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.

Ha, as if they ever read that. Probably more Google employees will read this comment than will ever read any of my (many) "please stop translating things without asking, I know where to find machine translation if I need it, doing it without asking that means I have to translate back from broken Norwegian into English in order to understand what the hell you were trying to say" feedback reports.

Re: Don't guess my language

#343

Post by vintermann »

bmn__ wrote: post #290
clan wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Yout…

Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm.

I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me more machine-translated videos.

Re: Don't guess my language

#344

Post by burnt-resistor »

This reminds me of AliExpress that constantly corrupt its language (but not country) preference by randomly serving me a foreign language not in my Accept-Language list.

Language determination should be, by decreasing order of preference:

1. URL param (temporary override)

2. Cookie (optional, set by a flag image list drop-down conflating country with language)

3. Accept-Language (prefix) (optional)

4. GeoIP (guessing at conflating language with country by demographics as a starting point)

Country, by decreasing order of preference (for pricing, shipping, legal, regional content):

1. URL param (temporary override)

2. Cookie (optional, set by a shipping address or preferred region preference)

3. Location (optional)

4. Accept-Language (suffix) (optional)

5. GeoIP (guessing at current location as the desired country of interest)

Note: It's important to make a default guess at the statistically most likely possibility to reduce the burden on the most users, but not prevent users in the US from using the site's French i18n.

Re: Don't guess my language

#345

Post by carlosjobim »

nottorp wrote: post #12

Don't guess what currency I want to pay in either by the way. Your payment provider's automatic conversion is most likely more predatory than my bank's so I don't want to use it. And even if you guess my location right, how do you know I want a badly/machine translated web site?

> Your payment provider's automatic conversion is most likely more predatory than my bank's so I don't want to use it.

As of a few days ago, Stripe is forcing all their partners to offer their customers the predatory currency conversion. There is no way to opt out, except switching to another payment provider with their own problems.

Re: Don't guess my language

#346

Post by thaumasiotes »

matvore wrote: post #327
thaumasiotes wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dictionary lookup is done first by radical and second by stroke count. Collation is not. Stroke count is first. For example, I have a book of 成语 stories that gives its table of contents in non-alphabetical order. (Since nobody understands the traditional ordering, I also have several such books that put their table of contents in alphabetical order.) Here is the collation order in the book: 一 七 八 入 九 人 口 千 小 三 亡 大 不…

The Wikipedia sort for the languages is as I stated above, with Literary Chinese and Japanese between Wu Chinese and Yue Chinese. I explained why it was sorted that way, because radical is considered first. You could not explain why Japanese appeared between Wu and Yue because you insisted and continue to insist that radicals are not used. I didn't say sorting is never done by stroke count alone. But I have seen radi…

> You could not explain why Japanese appeared between Wu and Yue because you insisted and continue to insist that radicals are not used.

I can't explain that because it's part of a different logical group, with its name written in a different script.† This puts it parallel to the Chinese options and to Korean.

> The Wikipedia sort for the languages is as I stated above

I took you to be describing the sort order for characters, not for wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't obey that order either. You can check the page for Jiangsu, where all of the languages mentioned so far appear before the "Latin alphabet" style languages, but 閩南語 and 閩東語 appear after them.

† I also can't explain why wikipedia seems to have chosen 吴语 but 粵語, 客家語, and 贛語. Jiangsu is on the mainland... and so are Jiangxi and Guangdong.

Re: Don't guess my language

#347

Post by drtgh »

bmn__ wrote: post #317
drtgh wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This parameter, at first glance, appears to be used as numeric weights for automatic translations served by default, what turns browsing very uncomfortable (wrong translations, distorted texts). Ie. Google, Youtube, Reddit. Automatic translations should never be served by default, but only be loaded if the user requests it. The classical "do you want translate".

It was and still is used for manually translated text, among other things. Does this help you get the full picture?

I don't need help, I'm criticising the use of the automatic translations served by default, and that are being used the weights of this parameter to do it.

The full picture? The weights seem to be more useful for fingerprinting and perhaps for server SEO than to help the users. Users who in the end will have to give the same weight to all the languages, or rewrite the outgoing headers, in order to be able to browse the Internet.

Re: Don't guess my language

#348

Post by gus_massa »

elric wrote: post #320
gus_massa wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't understand why you would want to select Inglés instead of English? You want to selecf English, or Español, or Nederlands, or Deutsch, or whatever language. If makes no sense for it to be translated.

Only in a very few weird corner cases. If it's an article about a city in Germany, I may like to see the article in German and use autotranslation to read t in English or Spanish.

Sometimes the article in the local language has more info. I had that problem in comments about places or events in Argentina. Sometimes the English article has less info than the Spanish article, so I made a link to the autotranslation.

Re: Don't guess my language

#349

Post by anigbrowl »

jiehong wrote: post #222
netsharc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'll get regional languages. I would be astonished if a blu-ray of a non-Japanese film bought in Europe had a Japanese soundtrack.

Re: Don't guess my language

#350

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #346
matvore wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia sort for the languages is as I stated above, with Literary Chinese and Japanese between Wu Chinese and Yue Chinese. I explained why it was sorted that way, because radical is considered first. You could not explain why Japanese appeared between Wu and Yue because you insisted and continue to insist that radicals are not used. I didn't say sorting is never done by stroke count alone. But I have seen radi…

> You could not explain why Japanese appeared between Wu and Yue because you insisted and continue to insist that radicals are not used. I can't explain that because it's part of a different logical group, with its name written in a different script.† This puts it parallel to the Chinese options and to Korean. > The Wikipedia sort for the languages is as I stated above I took you to be describing the sort order for c…

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