Don't guess my language

> 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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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 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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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 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/

> 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.