Don't guess my language

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.

> 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 "Українська" which isn't accurate in Kazakh and probably also unexpected for anybody who isn't familiar with the letter Қ (Қ isn't a letter in Russian, this is probably why this happens). The Chinese languages don't seem to be in stroke order (no expert here), although Korean is below them (because of course, K for Korean alphabetizes after C for Chinese).

Anyways, no hate for Wikipedia; they do a great job of localizing. Just a bit of nuance/pedantry about how you can't "alphabetize" language names in their own language.

    perl -E'Unicode::Collate::Locale->new(locale => 'cs')->sort … … …'

And it even remembers what you chose last time and pushes it to the top. That is UX. Being actually helpful and not fucking annoying.

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 to navigate a menu to find their actual language.

I can give a perfect bad example: the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic. This is the Google support article: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 telling me the buttons to press in English. Also, I don't know/speak Amharic, and so at the time had no idea what language it was, and the iPhone translate doesn't even recognize this Ethiopian language. Bit of a pickle that could have easily been mitigated by a universal multilanguage icon.

My favorite is the sites who do parse Accept-Languages, but then pick the last one in the list instead of the first. I have mine in rough order of my competence in them, which gets me my least-competent language on some sites even when my most-competent is supported.

I get a kick out of it when I see it, because you can understand how it happens. "Well, at least you tried."

    Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3

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".

    Nederlands
    English
    Français
    Deutsch
    Espagnol

Funny. The Wikipedia home page has a "Language" button. Like that, in plain English. And it is translated to the language you switch to.

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.

> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations

I think it is far worse than that:

1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself.

2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past"

3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary.

I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse

Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language?

If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles. If a browser doesn't make that easy to do, that's not youtube's problem, and they're doing the best they can.

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".

My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert. Lidl is worth it, ja!

Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back.

One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch.

This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.

It's even worse for videos with "official" dubs. I have been jump scared by German and French dubs on certain videos recently, I distinctly remember MrBeast, Mark Rober and Nick DiGiovanni. I have set my language to English and my Region to US (worldwide) I don't know what gave YT the idea to preselect these dubs for me, I have seldomly even watched a video that is not English.

Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.

    -inurl:?tl=

Worse is the auto-dubbing in some channels. Which cannot be disabled. That has resulted in me stopping to watch a channel completely due to the inability to select the original language (youtube mobile website).

And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.

I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.

What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for.

Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.

While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.

Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?

Can't recommend "DeArrow" browser extension enough. YouTube is a miserable experience without it (and its sister extension SponsorBlock).

It is not just that these translations are not needed, they are often - in my case German - of a low quality, contain errors and lose information which the original language contained. And the roboter voices loses all the interesting modulations of the original voice. Even a Fireship video sounds terrible when translated.

There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...

Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey)

2 things that absolutely kill my experience,

1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke

2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring

I know what Mark Rober sound like, leave it be

So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.

By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language.

Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language.

And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)

Even reddit does that now and for some reason shows the translated version by default when I search a post through google.

Very annoying, because instead of just seeing the english post, which I'm easily able to understand, I see half-broken german...

Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?

Indeed. Catalan speakers have Spanish forced down their throat no matter if Spanish has never been associated to the Google account in any way, nor in the system or browser language preferences.

In my case, I live in the United States, but Google is determined to serve me Spanish results even for Catalan-related queries. E.g. preferring the Spanish Wikipedia. The search engine's behavior has had ups and downs over the years, but it has never been great.

This is very much a problem for my children, who don't understand Spanish, as well as for the Catalan-speaking regions of the world that are not in Spain, including Andorra.

In my experience, Gemini easily flags any Catalan content as unsafe and prevents the conversation from continuing. Even for prompts like "summarize this article". This may have improved lately, but still.

Google used to be an example in sensitivity to the world's diversity, being a responsible major player. Way back. Now, although I applaud some efforts multiple teams continue making, it is obvious this is no longer a priority.

Indeed, somehow Google is the worst offender with this.

Lately they've decided that auto translating the local language into English in Maps reviews is the wrong thing to do. They translate every other language into English but somehow since I live in this place I must speak the local language too, so I don't need that in English.

Ditto for search results. Surely you want Wikipedia in the local language! I mean you've been there for so long! You search for things in the local language, surely that's a sign of your preference and not the fact that searching for things locally requires use of the local language.

This also applies to so much other "we must make our software so smart and guess all your preferences". Google fails so consistently at this I cannot understand why they persist other than some sort of misplaced corporate self regard.

I've had this argument with a Google Developer.

He told me that for efficiency, they had different stages in the content rendering and that the main page structure didn't have your user information yet. That's rubbish IMHO because the accept language header should be readily available in that phase.

When I was in Romania for my IELTS, I could not use Google Maps. Despite my Google account specifying my preferred languages as English, Ukrainian, Russian in that order and my Accept Language header set only to English, that was not enough to not discount those preferences as a configuration error and serve me Romanian.

Using Google search, which luckily did not decide to show me "local" results to an English query like it often does home, I found a support thread suggesting I set my Accept Language to have something other than English as a second language. Lo and behold, the page decided to now respect it.

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.

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.

Sad fact: most people don’t go anywhere.

People like us are an edge case.

Yeah it's amazing that Google is the worst offender.

I think this is because half of Google live their entire career in California, so they don't know about other languages, units, time zones at all.

It's weird, because they employ SO many foreigners, bringing them to California. But somehow upon arrival they all get memory wiped about the existence of anything outside the bay area.

Other companies do this right. Google is user hostile.

No. I will NEVER navigate by bike, foot, or public transport in these strange America-only units.

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.

Netflix had a similar oddity, also in Finland: if I recall correctly there's an account language setting, and you have to set it to English to see Kim's Convenience. No need for a VPN, no need to claim you're in another country, but it's just hiding the content unless you've set the right language. Even if we're using English subs when watching content from the Finnish language UI.

> If I read an English news site that has a translated French version, it doesn't matter if I'm most proficient in French, I'll want the English version.

The solution there is not to abandon the very useful Accept-Language header, but to never offer half-baked translations. Is your website multilingual? Fine, but only offer fully translated and verified translation sets. It's OK to have your UI and your own content translated in a few languages — for a company that may make sense depending on their target clientele — but you'll have to maintain all of these and keep them in sync.

However, user content is off-limits. No automatic translations unless you only offer those under a button to be helpful (like 'Spanish detected, click to show an automatic translation into English'), but really, leave that to the user's browser.

Use Accept-Language to pick a language, and then offer me a way to switch in addition to that. That's all there is to it.

> Wikipedia does it decently well for instance.

Wikipedia doesn't do that. Each language is its own instance, where content may be ported to by translating it (or parts of it), but outside of the Mediawiki UI texts, it is not a translation of the same content. The Dutch version of the lemma 'Language' is a different article in a different language with some overlap. There is no claim made that it is the same article in Dutch. It is hosted on a different sub-domain and path on purpose.

> First, Accept-Language is an ordered list, and most daily-multilingual people don't have an absolute order of preference, and more a topical list of preferences.

Technically Accept-Language allows you to specify a "quality value"/weight for each language... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

IMO there is a lot of improvements that can be made by both the browser and websites:

Websites should probably allow users to override the browser-requested language. But browsers should also allow users to choose between "Site default", "Request system default language", "Request English", "Request Chinese", "Request Spanish", etc. on a per site basis.

Most optimally however: sites should expose a list of supported languages, maybe in the manifest.json: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... Format would be something like: `Map<iso639Code: string, Tuple<translationQuality: float, comments: string>>`

Language selection should be done on the client side, not on the server.

> Then, as an affect of the first point, users will specify their most practical language, not some actual preference.

Where does this assumption come from? Given the fact that many (most? almost all?) sites don't honor the Accept-Language header, I doubt that there's much game theory going on in users' head when deciding this configuration.

You ask, as in, whenever I visit the site without having your cookies stored, I'll get a language selector wall first?

I run into those regularly and it's always a struggle to know how to stay on the damn page I clicked on: will the "continue" button use the preselected value or will it dismiss the pop-up and continue on the current page?If the former, is the preselected value the page I'm on or a different language? Can I guess which locale I'm on to select that and dismiss the pop-up then? Can I inspect-element→delete this modal and just sidestep the whole problem? Even just a small close button is a luxury on these language walls...

95 out of 100 times, I'm fine with whatever language I clicked on, and if I want your German version for locale-adjusted shipping info or payment options or whatnot, I'll look for a language selector on the top right or, alternatively, in the page footer. If it's in one of those two places, I'd be much happier about a web without JavaScript-based pop-ups constantly

Yes! I still want to default to accept-language, but asking is key. What is your pattern for giving the user an option? I like this article in that it rejects icons, but I don’t like how they arrive at one language for multiple regions https://usersnap.com/blog/design-language-switch/

Right. You can basically hear the product team at Reddit humming star-spangled banner while conceiving this feature for themselves as monolingual people. The rest of the world can understand multiple languages just fine, thank you very much.

Yes, oh my Lord I've been getting seriously frustrated with Mongo's documentation lately. I'm not sure if it picks the language based on location or Accept-Language, never played around with it, but it's behavior is deeply rage-inducing.

I do a web search and get a list of results for the English version, open it and it automatically changes to PT-br as soon as JS loads, but then, after a few seconds, once the page is fully loaded, it jumps back to English, while keeping the /pt-br/ slug in the URL...

What the heck??

And yeah, the translation is very obviously not human made or reviewed. Furthermore, I'm PT-pt, so the differences to PT-br just make the experience even more annoying X)

Where and what browser are you thinking about when you say English is the default value?

You mean for software distributed in the US?

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.

There should be some bit about the locale being default or not. If its not a default, then respecting it would be fine. If its the default, you could try guessing.

You’re in luck!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

I wrote about it once; https://dijit.svbtle.com/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-la...

Outlook web actually respects this, which is refreshing.

Modern browsers with auto-translation features always offer the option to "Never translate X" — never translate a language the user speaks.

If websites really need translation (which they very likely do not!), this should be the norm as well.

MacOS has this feature under Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Preferred Languages. Here you can have an ordered list of languages you wish apps and websites (I _think_ only works for Safari) to use. I don't know how widespread this is in other OS'es or browsers.

This. Related: if I had a penny for every time I needed a VPN just to load the payment method selection screen (but not for the actual payment, it's not geolocked) just to be able to pay somewhere, I'd get a lot of products for free by now...

Why not let germans select iDeal and dutch users Giropay? They'll not click it if it's not useful for them. Adjusting the sort for what's most commonly used makes sense, but why actively thwart users from paying by geolocking payment methods by IP address...

OVH is awful for this. I’ve given up trying to use their site and always have to open a support ticket any time I want to give them money.

There may not be any conversion at all. I have cards able to carry balances in multiple currencies. I also have foreign bank accounts.

Billing address is not a sure way to predict currency.

yeah tailscale/wireguard/vpn usually fixes this

but then you have to -know- at which geo you want to operate.

The internet has long been broken as a global field imho

The article is not against geolocation: it is about guessing the language!

In your example, there's only one language available, and it depends on your location, and that is fine.

What is NOT fine is the general case, where several languages are available, and you have already chosen the one(s) you prefer, but the site decides to ignore your choice because reasons.

Quoted from TFA

> If you want to use GeoIP, fine — but only for currency, shipping, legal stuff, never for language

Mmm... understandable, but less trivial to implement than the OP. What you're requesting is quite a lot of localization customization. Reasonable to expect this from say, Google Sheets, but you might be out of luck with apps with smaller budgets.

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 Belgium == French, it's not only wrong, but it comes across as very condescending. It feels like they haven't outgrown the times where Dutch was suppressed in favor of French.

And why? If a company wants to use only one language for the whole country, it's better of choosing Dutch (as we indeed account for about 60% of the population). Many of those companies do have a perfectly good Dutch translation, which they use for their site when viewed from the Netherlands. Even if they don't, I much prefer English over French.

It's exactly the same problem on lots of websites if you're a french speaking belgian don't worry, you just don't notice it in that case.

Honestly, I don't even know what you're talking about – I don't have anything like that. Maybe it can be changed in the settings?

That should not be the business of the site, but of the browser. It is precisely what Accept-Language is for. The site should respect the header, allowing circumvention should be a very low accessibility priority.

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.

Fwiw, you can set (on Android at least) the language of Google Maps independently of the rest of the system. I also have my phone set to English, but maps set to Dutch because otherwise the reading out of street names can be incomprehensible compared to their proper pronunciation.

This does mean your navigation instructions are also in that language, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your fluency (but there's not really a whole lot of phrases to learn.)

I live in Ontario where major highway road signs are bilingual, e.g. “427 North/Nord”. Google has ingested these, blindly translates the French part, and tells me to take “427 North North”.

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.

Same happens for YouTube and Google, which sometimes switch to Russian or Ukrainian despite my preference for English.

Bold of you to assume Google would actually show your their most precise and accurate guess.

As someone who lives in one of those locations mentioned in the article: split out locale and language into different settings. Because they are not the same thing. This article explains that nicely. [1]

You want your users to be able to change their location (and, therefore, locale) and their language independently. The Accept-Language header could be used as a sentinel for language. Then again, I wouldn't outright rely on geoIP to set the locale which is an umbrella for regional differing variables like timezone, date formatting, currency, VAT / Taxes,...

I think it's okay to have your content served, by default, in a language that reflects either the majority of your target audience; or the culture / place you're based in. Changing the locale / language should follow a clear UI pattern e.g. a language switcher & locale switcher in the header; or a clear navigational aid pointing to a context menu. That's how Hetzner works, for instance. Another example is Deliveroo.

[1] https://translatepress.com/locale-vs-language/

Ouch. So we europeans have it easy. At least all the languages are left to right.

Then create some status bar (or even a popup if necessary) that informs the user about their Accept-Language header-IP address mismatch (in terms understandable to a non-technical user), offering the option to choose either page.

> people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it

Is this actually something that you can back up with data, or are you just guessing?

I find it hard to imagine that would be the case, considering this header generally gets populated by the user's system locale/language.