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I'm Not Japanese

sachagreif.com

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81–90 of 129 posts

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#81

Post by Tichy »

aristidb wrote: post #52

Actually, this problem also exists for native speakers in their own countries. I'm a German in Germany, yet when I'm searching for technical terms, in the overwhelming majority I want English results because they are better. (The German results are often just blog posts regurgitating what somebody else wrote in English.) It used to be that I could use www.google.de for German searches, and www.google.com/ncr for Engl…

And I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. The upside is that if I want German results, I can just go to Google - no annoying configurations, just DDG for English and Google for German. Still, I really resent this behavior by Google.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#82

Post by rickmb »

ktizo wrote: post #53
rickmb wrote: post #34

This kind of thing pisses me off regularly. Google is one of the worst offenders, completely ignoring browser language preferences. But American websites in general are awful at this. They completely ignore local diversity and sensitivities and simply assume "one country, one language", so they will for instance happily present Flemish users with French interfaces. It's fucking offensive. If I type google.com instead…

It is slightly more offensive to assume that .com + browser settings == english above the country you are originating from, if you aren't speaking english, anyway.

Really? The country I'm visiting from says nothing definitive about my language of choice. Absolutely nothing.

Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice. Setting the preferred language of my browser is an even more explicit choice.

How can honoring explicit choices be more offensive than assuming the visitor is an idiot who can't think for themselves?

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#83

Post by cientifico »

This is common. I am spanish living in Germany. If you want to change the language the only thing that works is:

- Buy a machine in the contry you want and proxy through it.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#84

Post by przemoc »

DasIch wrote: post #72
printer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Google Search: Options -> Search settings -> Languages There you can change the language(s) of your search result. I think you can mark up to 10 languages.

Google provides those settings but it seems to randomly ignore them or at least I can't discern a pattern.

It's not randomly. In work I use Iceweasel for private gmail (and Chrome for company gmail), where I have set Results per page to 100 and chose to Never show Instant results long time ago. It simply does not work!

I go to google.com, start typing and Google starts showing me some instant results and hitting Enter gives me only 10 results per page. (The same settings are respected for non-private gmail in Chrome, though.)

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#86

Post by po »

As someone who works every day at a Japanese startup that has a Japanese/English bilingual UI, can generate documents in different languages than the user, multi-currency, Japanese address formatting aware, etc.. I can say that these problems are actually quite hard to get right for most use cases. For most companies it's not worth it.

However, once the user has logged into your site as is the common case with google properties, there is no excuse for serving the page in the wrong language. For months google calendar on my iPhone here in Tokyo would be in Japanese. All of the other tabs on the mobile google site would be English but just google calendar would be Japanese locale. As far as I could tell there was no way to fix it. Then one day it was fixed. I still see this mistake all over the place with other sites.

I actually blame the rise of geo-ip and location databases for enabling the ability to geo-locate users. Something about giving developers the rope to hang themselves with…

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#87

Post by rickmb »

nandemo wrote: post #65
rickmb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices. But at least in Japan they're probably right about the language. Goo…

> Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices. You're making the completely unsupported assumption that the average internet user understands domain names. Like patio11 suggested, if a user from a Japanese IP is accessing google.com, it's likely that this address was pre-configured in some way: the search bar was set up…

Come on, most users outside the US are perfectly used to a plethora of international TLD's. It's something they are quite familiar with.

Also, they either use the English version of the OS and browser, or the one in their language, and both come with the default correct preferred language settings.

The same goes for company systems. You don't give someone who can't handle English an English language system, and the idea of setting up a system in language X but pre-configuring that in some what that English becomes the preferred browser language is a really odd edge case.

Even if such scenarios are more common, it still doesn't excuse telling people that make explicit choices to go fuck themselves, especially in multi-lingual countries where such explicit choices are common.

Japan may be relatively homogenous, but most countries in Europe are either formally multilingual or have large immigrant populations. Many thousands of people are regularly being confronted with misplaced assumptions about their preferred language.

You can't assume language from geo-IP databases, it is the most unreliable and inappropriate method imaginable, and you are 100% sure to regularly piss people off.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#88

Post by briandear »

ktizo wrote: post #50
rickmb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices. But at least in Japan they're probably right about the language. Goo…

It asked her if she wanted Japanese and she clicked yes and it gave her Japanese. What crap do you think anyone is pulling here? Also, if in Japan, I would be surprised to find google.com not to be in Japanese, and I would expect to have to perhaps make some kind of preparations for the fact that the majority of the world does not speak my language and that my electronic devices and services are not universal metatro…

Yes, but google.co.jp does just fine. The automatic country redirects are the main issue. I wouldn't go to Microsoft.com and expect it to be in Chinese any more than if I went to Baidu.cn and expected it to be in English. The country domain is the ideal way to handle regional preference, I don't need the software doing it for me. I'm not an idiot, stop treating me like one.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#89

Post by [deleted] »

ktizo wrote: post #50
rickmb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices. But at least in Japan they're probably right about the language. Goo…

It asked her if she wanted Japanese and she clicked yes and it gave her Japanese. What crap do you think anyone is pulling here? Also, if in Japan, I would be surprised to find google.com not to be in Japanese, and I would expect to have to perhaps make some kind of preparations for the fact that the majority of the world does not speak my language and that my electronic devices and services are not universal metatro…

[deleted]

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#90

Post by gbog »

There is also the inverse problem on some input interfaces. I do have to write emails, sms, weibos, HN comments in English, Chinese and French. I don't know how ios handle this issue but on you have to open a thing, tap, close, and it is not very convenient. I use Swype beta, which is actually good, but it is annoying to live in a world where monolingual is the norm.

I have no figure but I'd guess multilingual is actually the norm in many countries.

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