[HN Gopher] Why does Google use location for language rather tha...
___________________________________________________________________
Why does Google use location for language rather than browser
settings?
Author : smallerfish
Score : 375 points
Date : 2022-03-11 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smaller.fish)
(TXT) w3m dump (smaller.fish)
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Having moved country twice I used to get very upset by this. Now
| though, I have just given up on google. They seem to have no
| interest (and no incentive, for lack of un-buy-out-able
| competition) to improve this. I mean, apart from the occasional
| vacation, how much of their userbase are really changing location
| regularly, right? And do those people have any real choice to opt
| out of using the shitty product anyhow?
|
| They still regularly show me map search results relevant to my
| place from 8 years ago. They still randomly switch me to this or
| that language based on VPN usage or such. Feels like a big middle
| finger that they haven't even attempted to solve this over the
| last 10 years or so since I first started noticing this.
|
| At least for search, I have recently switched to Kagi (based on a
| recommendation from here on HN) and haven't looked back. It's
| been... *checks mails* Oh, since new year's. Longer than any of
| my DuckDuckGo streaks.
|
| I honestly didn't expect this to stick, but once Kagi goes out of
| beta I think I'd subscribe if the price point is right. It's so
| refreshing to get good search results with no BS. And if
| something bad creeps in (which happened _once_ so far, a
| StackOverflow SEO site) I can just block that page from ever
| showing up in my results again.
|
| So yeah, I use gmail & calendar for work on a separate account,
| and youtube privately. Apart from that, I avoid their products.
| Most of my apps on android are from f-droid, I open the play
| store a couple of times a year. It's just not worth the hassle,
| and that doesn't even get into the whole privacy & market
| dominance behaviour.
| openfuture wrote:
| Yeah. Everyone knows better than you what you want. Even the
| dumb robots.
| jbj wrote:
| Same annoyance since I remember learning about the internet, and
| realizing the language for computers with the least friction is
| US english.
|
| One thing I found extremely bizare is that `wget` on my work
| computer gives status and error messages in my local language.
|
| I have no clue how it ended up like this, but I am suspecting it
| is due to the usage of a local mirror of macports.
| rjmunro wrote:
| I think there are 2 valid reasons:
|
| 1. Sometimes for legal or practical reasons other than language,
| the site needs to be different in different places, e.g. terms
| and conditions, cookie popups, prices legally required to include
| tax etc. These have to be based on the users location.
|
| 2. Users don't set their browser language correctly. The options
| to change are hidden where no one looks and hard to understand -
| you an allow multiple languages and set a preferred order for
| them. I think this was common years ago, but is probably no so
| much the case now - it will default to the system language.
| hericium wrote:
| When I'm abroad, visible under another country's IP address and
| my system's language is set to English, neither should be used to
| assign the language. What should be used is locale. Some users
| may have operating systems in language different to their own but
| probably more users have proper keyboard language set in their
| OS.
|
| Using IP address to assign the language is the dumbest choice
| possible but using OS language is not much better.
| justinmayer wrote:
| I met one-on-one with Google's senior leadership in 2000 to talk
| about their internationalization efforts. This was very early in
| their trajectory, so I even sat down with Larry Page and chatted
| with him for half an hour.
|
| A year or two later I'm in Tokyo and talk to a new Google product
| manager based there. I tell her it is insane that Google serves
| me Japanese pages on my English-configured PowerBook just because
| I am in Japan. It doesn't matter that I read Japanese just
| fine... Making this determination purely based on my IP address
| is madness, I tell her.
|
| Over two decades later, nothing has changed. Each year I spend
| several months abroad, and this is one of the most infuriating
| experiences I encounter. Google is the offender that frustrates
| me the most, but they are far from the only company to engage in
| this abhorrent practice. I am tempted to create an
| Internationalization Wall of Shame just to embarrass the
| companies that do this. (Not that I expect them to care.)
|
| Why do they do this? My theory has always been that in any given
| country, there are _far_ more native speakers with misconfigured
| computing environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks
| like me. So it's merely a numbers game: I may be frustrated, but
| at least Google and other companies aren't losing business when
| folks with misconfigured computers close the tab because they got
| a page served to them in, say, English instead of their native
| language.
|
| I can't say for certain whether this is the actual reason for
| this behavior. What I _can_ say, however, is that I absolutely
| loathe this practice and actively avoid doing business with any
| company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages specific to
| that locale. If this frustrates you as well, be sure to vote with
| your feet!
| lazide wrote:
| Having been involving in some internal projects and done the
| data analysis (not in Search, other areas), your guess is
| correct - far more people get (clearly) wrong results if you
| serve what the browser is asking for due to mis configuration.
| It's easy to tell due to differences in various conversion
| metrics and huge increases in clicks to language change
| buttons.
|
| It drove me crazy too before I saw the data. Geo-IP, while not
| awesome for exactly the scenario you are describing, is more
| predictable since it gives a set of baseline language/settings
| that are 'right' based on norms in the area, and people know
| how to navigate out of generally if they're not the 'baseline'
| user there. (An English speaker in Japan pretty quickly needs
| to know how to switch languages or learn Japanese or they
| aren't going to be able to even navigate the subway/buy tickets
| for instance!)
|
| Many of the browser based settings get people stuck, especially
| since most large websites do the same geoip thing now.
|
| It does make it awkward for folks not doing 'the norm' in their
| area, or who have an IP improperly categorized, but
| statistically they aren't as common and they figure out how to
| handle it usually.
| sn41 wrote:
| Google and other internationalisation efforts are absolutely a
| mess in India. India has many states based on languages - 22
| listed languages - essentially each state has its own language
| and its own script, except in the Hindi belt.
|
| Its not fun to be a North Indian to work in the South or vice
| versa- you may often be served a page in a script you cannot
| decipher fast enough or read at all.
| ascar wrote:
| In general I totally agree with your sentiment. As you seem
| quite knowledgeable in the subject I want to nitpick your
| choice of words in your closing statement.
|
| > any company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages
| specific to that locale
|
| A company should serve you content based on your geographic
| location. That's exactly what "localization" is for. E.g. the
| content should be adapted to local regulations and law whenever
| necessary and it makes total sense to do that based on the
| visitors physical location and geo-IP is often the best
| approximator you have for that. What should be adapted to
| user's choice is language.
| justinmayer wrote:
| I firmly disagree with all of the above. If a site absolutely
| needs to know where I am in that moment, they can ask me, and
| _I_ will decide where I am for the purposes of that
| particular site.
|
| To pick one of a myriad of examples, I often buy software,
| books, etc. via the web. I don't need sites to assume I want
| to pay in Euro just because my IP address in that moment
| happens to be associated with a European IP address block.
| Paying with my home currency is often much easier. I should
| not be forced to use a VPN just to avoid this silliness.
|
| I understand where you are coming from, but using IP
| addresses to determine what "locale" to use is simply not a
| good practice, and not just for language determination.
| ascar wrote:
| Well, your example will be in many cases against the law.
| Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries
| catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to
| choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an
| Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of
| women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are
| many more examples like that and the applicable law is
| usually based on your physical location at that point in
| time (i.e. the jurisdiction you are in). While I agree IP
| isn't the best choice, it is often the best available and
| letting the user just choose these things is in many
| instances simply illegal.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries
| catalogue I want to watch.
|
| That has nothing to with the choice of language. Unless
| you're using some antique HTTP server that doesn't
| support it, use Accept-Language.
|
| If you have reasons for filtering content based on
| geographic location, and you absolutely can't trust the
| user to tell you, perhaps you shouldn't be serving
| content over HTTP; the IP address is a poor proxy for
| geographic location. It's perfectly posible to buy an IP
| block in one country, and have it routed to another.
|
| > In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve
| images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images).
|
| If you're running your HTTP server in a Moslem[0]
| country, perhaps you shouldn't be serving those images to
| anyone. But if not, then it's your user's responsibility
| to comply with local law.
|
| If the diversity of content that the internet brings is
| unacceptable to some nation, they can either try to do
| without the internet (good luck with that!), or try some
| kind of filtering regime like the Chinese have set up.
|
| > the applicable law is usually based on your physical
| location at that point in time
|
| "Your", i.e. the site user's location. But if you're
| geared-up to charge VAT in the first place, then you're
| able to handle things like delivery addresses in EU
| countries. At any rate, if your site visitor fails to pay
| VAT on purchases, it's the user that has committed VAT
| fraud, not the server operator. So operators should
| simply ask users where they are, for those purposes.
|
| [0] Not all Moslems are Arabs, and not all Arabs are
| Moslems.
| kps wrote:
| My ISP covers two jurisdictions with different primary
| languages. IP geolocation often places me in the wrong
| one.
| zmb_ wrote:
| The VPN exit point for the big tech company I work in Europe
| for seems to be in Poland for whatever reason. I had to switch
| to duckduckgo to not be served search results in Polish all the
| time.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| Indeed, I once read a story that said there are a lot of
| misconfigured computers specifically in Japan, so that's why
| they ignore `Accept-Language` if it's set to English. But yes,
| this is incredibly frustrating for power users like me who are
| fluent in English and prefer not to deal with half-baked
| translations.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Businesses usually put out their SEA ads in only the local
| language. All the people who have their device language set to
| one different from the current country's language won't see
| those ads. I could see that being a reason.
| xenomachina wrote:
| I worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I
| asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers
| defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-
| Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to
| location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as
| much, but there you have it.)
|
| Note that other values for Accept-Language are _not_ ignored. I
| haven 't tried it myself, but I've heard some people say that
| setting their language to en-GB or en-CA works well.
|
| You can also use &hl=en-US, which always takes precedence.
| justinmayer wrote:
| Thank you for effectively confirming what I long suspected.
| Much appreciated.
| withinboredom wrote:
| en-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Well, try living in a country with two or more official
| languages. What you get is basically a random language. Anyone
| in those places suffers from such bad design choices.
| jwr wrote:
| Yes, I also find this infuriating. The list of languages I
| speak is sent with every request, in the Accept-Language
| header. And ignored.
|
| My suspicion is that people who actually write code related to
| this only speak a single language and only use sites in a
| single country.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I just hate that google makes me more ignorant that I want to
| be. I speak multiple languages. Nothing fancy, just related
| ones. I want google to search in all the languages I use and
| know, and not arbitrarily filter my internet into a location-
| specific bubble.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think this is the answer ('misconfigured' local machines).
| For mobile phones at least, my understanding is that many
| bilingual people will set their phone up as American English
| because they believe the phone experience will be better, but
| then search primarily in their native language (like Hindi for
| example). Having location trump the language settings here
| makes more sense- however it should be configurable for logged
| in users. If it's not that's madness.
| bhrgunatha wrote:
| I wrote a script for ViolentMonkey to force "hl=en" to appear
| in the query string for all google services which has been the
| most reliable way for me to overcome the problem.
|
| It doesn't work for some services though but aside from signing
| in to google there's nothing else I can do.
|
| I suspect they'll shut that down at some point too.
| darkerside wrote:
| You know exactly how to get to Google in English though, don't
| you? A new person picking up a misconfigured laptop seems much
| more likely to get lost than a temporary visitor to another
| country.
| justinmayer wrote:
| That's not the point. People should not be forced to switch
| from one language to another, multiple times, _for every site
| they visit_ , when in a country that speaks a different
| language than the one for which their computer is configured.
| toast0 wrote:
| Your justification works for both sides.
|
| You shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times
| when you're in a country that speaks (well, writes, really)
| a different language than your computer is configured for.
| You would like the web to respect your configuration.
|
| On the otherhand, the general public shouldn't have to
| change this setting multiple times when they're in a
| country that writes a different language than their
| computers are configured for. They would like the web to
| respect their location. Even though they imported a
| computer configured for English and don't know how to (or
| don't want to) configure the language options for the whole
| computer or the browser.
|
| If language settings were easily and often set, they'd be
| respected more; but if there's a good chance people are
| more likely to want a local language than what the computer
| thinks they want, then ignoring the preferences is the
| right thing for most users. Even if it's infuriating for
| those it missed. When I had the fortune of working on
| multi-language sites, I would try to have each site have
| their own urls, but some places insisted on one url,
| multiple languages. Trying to make a reasonable initial
| language decision and then a language picker with a cookie
| was the best I could do.
| criddell wrote:
| Google is built entirely upon the idea that they know their
| users and can therefore serve effective advertisements to
| them. The idea that they don't know what language their user
| wants seems absurd.
| darkerside wrote:
| The fact that they don't know what every single new visitor
| to their site wants before they even get there is absurd?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| silvestrov wrote:
| Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers
| will always be configured to the local language and any other
| setup is a "misconfiguration".
|
| In real life a large number of corporations (and developers)
| have their computers configured with English as this is the
| main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much
| easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched
| many language translations are).
|
| These users will still want Google to return results in their
| native language.
|
| There is a much much larger number of users like this than
| travellers from USA.
|
| One thing that bothers me a lot with US websites is that they
| always assume English language means 12-hour clock.
|
| Apple has learned the above over time: it is much easier today
| to get a Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks.
| silvestrov wrote:
| The problem with monolingual is the thought that there is One
| True Language.
|
| It isn't so. I write half my emails in one email, the other
| half in another. Often emails will have sections in one
| language (e.g. quote from another email) and other sections
| in a different language.
|
| Spelling tools must be able to detect language automatically
| to be of any value and be able to handle multiple languages
| within a single sentence!
| Semaphor wrote:
| I use LanguageTool [0] as an extension, it never has issues
| detecting if I'm currently writing in English or German. I
| sadly have yet to find a solution that works as well on my
| Android.
|
| [0]: https://languagetool.org/
| mcv wrote:
| I've managed to set my phone to accept and suggest both in
| English and Dutch. Works reasonably well.
| areoform wrote:
| They should give people the option at the top, and repeat it
| as necessary. They shouldn't just assume.
|
| That's the most annoying thing. When I travel, I still want
| to see stuff in imperial units, and Google just switches to
| Metric and stays stuck that way.
| Symbiote wrote:
| "The local language" is already a problem. There are
| countries where there are multiple local/national languages!
| What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium?
|
| > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks
|
| The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour
| clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it,
| little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably
| annoy Americans as much as mixed-endian dates annoy me.
| piyh wrote:
| 2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected
| ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.
| FabHK wrote:
| 2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no
| ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical
| sort coincides with chronological sort.
|
| https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
| fsckboy wrote:
| i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11
|
| it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front
| of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in
| context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be
| picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates
| in English anyway
|
| time of day can be appended without messing with the
| collation (usually i put a space)
| onpensionsterm wrote:
| >"march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway
|
| I think every time this topic comes up I come across
| someone with this misconception - usually from a country
| that celebrates the 4th of July.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| So I agree with your point that the way dates are said
| varies. But your example isn't very good. That's just the
| name of the holiday, and should not be used to infer
| anything else.
| davidgay wrote:
| Nth of month (with month sometimes elided) is most
| definitely standard English.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. In the UK, for example,
| 2/2 is "the second of February", not "February second".
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I understand the point entirely. I said I agree with it.
|
| But at the same time, "Fourth of July" should not be used
| to infer anything about how Americans say dates. It
| doesn't help prove that both orders are used for dates.
|
| In the real world, some people say day-month and some say
| month-day, and the holiday is called "Fourth of July". In
| a counterfactual world where everyone switched to month-
| day, the holiday would still be called "Fourth of July".
| So you can't use "Fourth of July" to demonstrate what
| people actually use for dates.
| drusepth wrote:
| "The 4th of July" is the name of a holiday that happens
| on July 4th, a day after July 3rd and a day before July
| 5th.
| fsckboy wrote:
| i just looked up, the "American" confusion: we got our
| date order from the English long ago. Then the English
| changed their date order. That must have been most
| confusing
|
| And month/day is not as confusing as day/month (widely
| used in Europe) since it doesn't correspond to how we say
| dates.
|
| moving the year first then using the American MM/DD is
| the least confusing way to do it
| kichimi wrote:
| July 2nd
|
| July 3rd
|
| 4th of July
|
| July 5th ...
|
| Also my experience is that only Americans say the month
| first. Today is the 11th of March.
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| Definitely not. Tons of non-english languages say month
| first.
| dr4g0n wrote:
| It doesn't correspond to how _you_ say dates; I would
| write 11/03 for the date, and say "the eleventh of
| March", so it's internally consistent.
|
| Not trying to argue one way or the other, just adding
| some extra context.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I
| don't speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city
| / area. I speak French. And I don't want results in French,
| I want results in English.
|
| Google thinks they known better - they do not.
| kolinko wrote:
| If you're logged into a Google account, you can change
| the language in settings. (I'm in Poland, and I force
| Google to be in english this way)
| thih9 wrote:
| The original article mentions that, as well as some
| shortcomings of this method.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| It's not just Google, all of them, Switzerland /German by
| default including the information to switch language
| every where
| laurent92 wrote:
| The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality,
| tech articles are dumbed down, tutorials in French lose
| nuance, and, well, good luck finding Hacker News in
| French. It was a revolution for me when I gained access
| to the English web, it's the origin of the documents! I
| want results in English because the quality is higher in
| English!
| yodsanklai wrote:
| >The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality
|
| It depends. It is definitely the case for tech but not
| for everything. For philosophy, science, movie reviews,
| cooking, and of course anything related to French
| culture, there's a lot of high quality content.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Aw man, Google UK's search "tools" feature doesn't
| understand UK nor ISO date formats. Such a strange choice
| to make.
| Blahah wrote:
| Works fine with the `before:` and `after:` filters for me
| mcv wrote:
| > These users will still want Google to return results in
| their native language.
|
| Says who? This is a baseless assumption.
|
| Just listen to the settings that specify what language the
| user wants. That's what it's for. And the browser should ask
| the OS or the user for their language preference. And if IT-
| support wants one language for the interface in order to
| facilitate support, they can still set the other language for
| browser preference.
|
| Just ignoring all settings and making blind assumptions will
| guarantee you will be wrong many times.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > Says who?
|
| The browser setting that every browser sends to any server
| it requests data from. Usually this defaults to the system
| language, but you can add more languages with a priority.
| Mine is English (prio 1), German (prio 2), yet I for some
| reason get tons of spanish content as I am going back and
| fourth between countries these days just based on
| Geolocation.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I think you're indirectly agreeing with the parent (and
| great-grandparent); both are saying "Google (and others)
| shouldn't just use the IP; use the browser's language
| setting, and if that hasn't been set, the OS setting",
| which you also seem to be agreeing with.
|
| The only one differing is the grandparent, which was
| asserting first that users might think showing anything
| other than the local language is an error, and then
| asserting that users want their native language, and so
| I'm not really certain what they're asserting since those
| two are not always the same (maybe that the first is the
| reason Google does it, the second is asserting the
| preferred behavior, which is nearly agreement, in that
| the latter is doable via OS or browser preferences).
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Google has literally billions of users. There are people
| who are worse at using computers than anyone you've ever
| met.
|
| I'm as irritated as anyone when something doesn't cater to
| "power users". But if we're trying to understand the reason
| behind the decision instead of just venting, then it's
| instructive to consider just how computer-illiterate the
| non-power-user is for a product as massive as Google
| Search, and how annoying characteristics may be a
| consequence of trying to satisfy both you and them.
| unreal37 wrote:
| It's a setting that you can't change. You can't override
| it. You can't say "yes I'm really really really sure I
| want Google to always be in English."
|
| It's beyond nuts. And "catering to the computer
| illiterate" can't be the explanation.
| netsharc wrote:
| At least for google.com, you can use google.com/ncr to
| get it[1] in English (just tested in incognito mode from
| a non-English location).
|
| [1] it = the front page. No guarantees that it'll work
| for other parts or other Google sites like Google
| Maps[2]. I remember noticing years ago that even with the
| /ncr, when the front page had a doodle, mousing over it
| still showed the tooltip in the local language. Billions
| of dollars, and can't even program a website.
|
| [2] Yeah it still gives me my local currency for hotels
| in Google Maps. I live in country A, I was visiting
| country B, and I needed to find a hotel in my home
| country A. I was logged in. Google knows my address and
| that my account is tied to Country A (because... Play
| Store region locking for content, blah blah), but it
| still showed me the hotel prices for the country I live
| in and was looking for hotels in, in the foreign currency
| of the place I was currently sitting at. Fuck you very
| much, Google!
| dagw wrote:
| _you can use google.com /ncr to get it[1] in English_
|
| I just tried, and while the page is in English, the top
| search results it returned are localized results to the
| country I happen to live in.
| mcv wrote:
| This isn't about power users. This will affect anyone who
| finds themselves in a country with a different language.
| Migrants, expats, refugees, people on vacation, people
| living in a country with multiple official languages;
| there are a lot of people for whom Google's way of
| handling this will give bad results. And it gives bad
| results in a way the user can't fix. If Google listened
| to the language settings, the user would have some
| control over it.
| yongjik wrote:
| > Just listen to the settings that specify what language
| the user wants. That's what it's for.
|
| In case you haven't noticed: Users lie. All the time. Every
| day.
|
| If Google found that "just listening to the settings in the
| HTTP request header" helped more users than it hurt, Google
| would have switched to using it a long time ago. The web is
| a messy place - sometimes you can't even trust a website to
| report its own encoding correctly.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| ...but chances are you are logged into Gmail which should
| know better... its just embarrassing honestly.
| onion2k wrote:
| _These users will still want Google to return results in
| their native language._
|
| There are several layers available to Google though -
|
| - They could use the system language setting
|
| - They could use the browser's language setting
|
| - They could use the user's Google account setting if the
| user is logged in
|
| Corporations could set the system language, or the browser
| language, and it could still be overridden by the user in
| their Google account if they wanted to do that. Instead
| though, Google chooses to geolocate the user's IP address and
| use that which works for _no one_.
| vezycash wrote:
| > "The local language" is already a problem. There are
| countries where there are multiple local/national languages!
|
| I have this issue with Microsoft. The national language in my
| country is English. However, Microsoft's store defaults to a
| local language that I don't speak every single time. My IP is
| also not from a part of the country that speaks that language
| either.
| quitit wrote:
| Unfortunately the problem exists in both directions. I run my
| setup entirely in English and Google will still try to
| squeeze in the local non-english language.
|
| Confusingly Google will also write some sentences half in
| english and half in the local language. E.g. "Google is also
| available in: <insert foreign language here>" (rather than
| the full sentence being in the foreign language.
|
| It's the kind of attention to detail that I've become
| accustomed to from them
| jobigoud wrote:
| > E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign
| language here>"
|
| This specific one might be on purpose to avoid translating
| language names. If you land in page entirely in Chinese but
| you see the word "English" in Latin characters under a
| link, you can click it to escape. But if it's itself in
| Chinese you'll never find it. I do the same in
| applications, have a menu for languages but don't translate
| language names, if you change language by mistake you can
| always find your way back.
| quitit wrote:
| While I used this example, which one could explain as
| intentional for various reasons. There are myriad other
| examples where there are dual languages being interwoven
| across google properties. Including minutia in one
| language, but the body content in another.
| Facebook/Meta's properties are the worst for this however
| and will intermingle languages frequently despite being
| an account-based service (literally ignoring the user's
| preferences in favour of IP-based guess work.)
|
| Back to Google - Algorithmically there are likely
| straightforward reasons for why this is happening.
| Clearly the contents of the pages are composed from a
| mixture of sources, for reasons unknown these sources may
| not be able to detect or receive the localisation
| settings of the end user. Recent changes to privacy
| protections and cookie limitations may also be a
| contributor to these issues. Including the obvious:
| getting ads in the wrong language.
| verve_rat wrote:
| The whole sentence "This page in English" or "This page
| in Mandarin" should be in English or Mandrin
| respectively.
|
| Compare "Rirgwyd rkrgru dlwhgi ro English" to "This page
| in English". Which is better for people that only read
| English?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They're pretty close.
|
| And when a page _is_ in the correct language, I would
| prefer not to have entire sentences in a different
| language.
| mkishi wrote:
| That's okay, but when I go out of my way to actively set the
| language in a service's settings, shouldn't that be honored
| over an assumed local-by-default? Because that's what I do
| with Google (individually on Search and YouTube), and it
| somehow forgets it quite frequently.
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| But they already have a solution for this. They have a domain
| with the local country TLD for people who want that language.
| Why do they keep fucking with people accessing the english
| domain?
| liotier wrote:
| French native speaker here. UX consistency, shared Internet
| culture, habits from the early 90's and error messages I can
| actually find on the Web are the reasons why I always set my
| computing to the english language.
|
| I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour
| clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.
|
| On the French-language mandatory corporate Windows laptop,
| Excel formulas are translated in French - so when searching
| for recipes on the web I have to translate them !
|
| I enjoy sites such as Thomann.de which have separate settings
| for language, country and units of measurement.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I just have a custom locale for any UNIX-like systems I
| use. American English, UTF-8, 24-hour time, RFC-3339 dates,
| SI units, '.' decimal point, '_' thousands separator. I
| call it en_ENG, for the fictional land of Engineeristan.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Mind to share your LC_ settings?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| An explanation of all the valid fields can be found at
| [1]. Copy an existing locale, modify it to suit your
| needs. Don't forget to escape all characters as Unicode
| if you want it to support unicode. Compile & install as
| normal with localedef, add to
| `/var/lib/locales/supported.d`, run locale-gen, set the
| various `LC_` variables you want to use in `~/.profile`
| or `/etc/envionment` or whatever.
|
| This[2] askubuntu answer goes into more detail.
|
| [1] https://lh.2xlibre.net/locale/en_US/ [2]
| https://askubuntu.com/a/162714
| toolslive wrote:
| Tip:Pretend to be Irish. You get English, but you also get
| SI and euro.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| > Tip:Pretend to be Irish
|
| Best tip I've seen all day!
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24
| hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.
|
| I do the same. There is usually a locale available with
| that, look for English (Ireland), English (Europe), English
| (Denmark), or English (Germany).
| miskin wrote:
| This IP based personalisation is such a pain especially if you
| work remotely and need to use VPN to connect to company network
| that happens to be based in different country. Worst thing is
| that Google knows very well who am I (due to me being logged in
| to GMail), knows what language I use, but still serves me
| completely wrong results only because my IP is suddenly from
| different country.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Trying to guess the user's language is ok as long as the user
| has some way to override your guess.
|
| DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change
| between your local language and English. That's great, because
| depending on the search you want, it may be better done on
| either language.
|
| The Microsoft site uses your language header on their .Net
| documentation. That is very bad because no matter what your
| browser says you prefer, the only document with any reasonable
| quality is the English one. There is a language switcher that
| takes some 20 seconds to use (hurrah, javascript!) and they
| don't bother to save for your next access. That makes the site
| barely usable instead of completely useless.
|
| What I don't get is, with the amount of information Google
| makes sure to collect about me, how does it not know that I
| prefer results not on my main language and verbatim search
| terms? That is even after I tell them that on their settings.
| debugnik wrote:
| > There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to
| use
|
| They've finally added back the "Read in English" button they
| removed years ago for some dumb reason when they migrated the
| .NET docs to a new domain.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change
| between your local language and English. That's great,
| because depending on the search you want, it may be better
| done on either language.
|
| DDG also has local and global search that you can switch,
| without switching the language of the site (so if I do a
| search with !ddgde I get German results but the DDG interface
| is still in English). Kagi does the same thing with !reg (for
| regional)
| richardfey wrote:
| > Google is the most prominent offender. If I'm signed in to my
| browser profile in Chrome, the search engine is served in
| English. No problem. The moment I try to access it from
| incognito, or Firefox, however, I get the Spanish language
| version of Google.
|
| What if it's a dark pattern to have more people signed in?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > My theory has always been that in any given country, there
| are far more native speakers with misconfigured computing
| environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks like me.
|
| But then why doesn't Google just make it easier to set that
| setting? Honestly, when I'm in another country, I don't get too
| upset that Google results are in another language, I just get
| upset that I can't seem to find a simple way to change it.
|
| Even then I'm probably giving Google too much of a pass,
| because they know _everything about me_. This happens even when
| I 'm logged into Chrome. If they're able to target hyper-
| personalized ads to me, surely they know I'm an English speaker
| even when I'm in Mexico.
| justinmayer wrote:
| Google's answer to this problem is, "Just log in! Then we
| will always know what language you prefer." So Google doesn't
| make it easier to change that setting because they want you
| to be logged in all the time so they can track you better.
| ivirshup wrote:
| Logging in does not completley solve this with google. A
| number of pages languages are still IP based.
| i80and wrote:
| I had a fascinating issue with Google.
|
| I am a monolingual English speaker. I visited Iceland, and
| as happens, Google started serving UIs in Icelandic even
| while I was logged in.
|
| What was interesting was this continued for weeks after
| returning to my home country. There was no setting I could
| find to go back to English; I got good at the specific
| Icelandic keywords I needed to navigate the UI. Then
| without any ceremony, things suddenly reverted back to
| English.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Back in the mid-2000s, I remember there being 3 different
| language settings in your Google account, the one on the
| security page completely ignoring whatever language
| settings you had and always using geo-ip instead. And I
| couldn't even figure out why there were 3 different
| settings for language.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I had a similar experience with (enterprise paid)
| Outlook365 Webmail (but in Italian, which I do not read).
| It persisted for several days and then went away before I
| bothered to chase it down.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Logging in doesn't solve it.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| It doesn't always work. When I'm in Spain, with my Google
| account configured to use English, Youtube search returns
| videos in Spanish (even though the Youtube interface is
| displayed in English).
| RF_Savage wrote:
| At least it's not as bad as Aliexpress.
|
| They have randomly served me the page in Russian, Turkish,
| Spanish, Portugese, Thai, German and Romanian. The only good
| thing is that the menu to change back to english is less hidden
| nowdays.
|
| Yet to see it in my native Finnish. And all these without a VPN
| and from a domestic consumer ISP connection.
| enedil wrote:
| I can tell you, that I saw my native Polish, and I wish I
| didn't. The automatic translation is so bad, that I
| automatically rush to switch to English.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Aliexpress also doesn't allow me to use my normal email, I
| think they have a whitelist of known email provider domains
| or something like that. It's a pretty atrocious website all
| around.
| oblio wrote:
| > Romanian
|
| They figured out that "la naiba" is better than "perkele" :-p
| catchclose8919 wrote:
| I thought Aliexpress was just trying to subtly say "FU, we're
| the new dominant culture now" to western Europeans by
| randomly switching to Chinese like 25% of the time...
|
| Guess they just have one of the buggiest locale detections in
| the world :)))
|
| EDIT+: ...or maybe too many Chinese users leave their
| proxy/VPN on when using their site too
| xmodem wrote:
| Can I add a category for your wall of shame? Services that
| couple language and location, so that even though they have
| done the work of having an English localization, it's not
| available in my location.
|
| Financial services and airlines are the worst offenders. SAS,
| Degiro, Amazon off the top of my head all do this.
|
| Degiro has the added bonus of totally breaking under Google
| Translate so I went to the trouble of using a browser extension
| to rewrite the request for their localisation strings file to
| fetch the English version. I'm sure there are some legal
| disclaimers that are missing here and there but it works fine.
| usrusr wrote:
| The ad market for lang=x, location=y must be abysmally small,
| even for tourist destinations. When you pretend that you didn't
| notice that the user is not a local you can still bill the
| impression and most importantly the occasional accidental click
| as a "mission accomplished".
| Someone wrote:
| The fraction of site visitors who are tourists may be low,
| but I expect it to be a segment with relatively more money
| that also is in the mood to spend on certain things. Looks
| like an audience google can charge more for.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's a mistake a lot of companies make. They are so proud of
| their ability to lookup a country from an ip address that they
| forget that there are hundreds of millions of migrants living
| on this planet who probably speak something else. Not to
| mention tourists, business travelers, etc. I'm a non German
| living in Germany, I have to deal with this all the time. It's
| a combination of corporate stupidity, rookie & clueless product
| management, and just indifference. It's wrong every time. No
| buts. No ifs. No exceptions.
|
| Use browser and OS settings, always. Anything else is a mistake
| that will cost you users and business.
| overkalix wrote:
| There are also plenty of countries with multiple official
| languages.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| Well configured web sites in such countries usually offer a
| choice of (major) languages on the landing page.
|
| See https://www.apple.com/ch/ (you can also type apple.ch)
| for an example.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| It gives me a choice to choose between French and German.
| Where's Italian?
|
| Apple is rarely a good example of giving user a choice.
| alexdumitru wrote:
| And they're wrong. I'm in Romania, but I use everything in
| English. Google is mostly in English, but sometimes decides
| to switch back to Romanian. Pretty decent , right? Until it
| decides to switch to Hungarian or German for whatever reason,
| two languages I have nothing do to with.
| ouid wrote:
| I mean, what's actually stupid here is that there isn't _any_
| way to configure this properly. It 's wild that the default
| behavior is the only behavior. I'm not even sure I believe it.
| [deleted]
| luizfelberti wrote:
| I don't even care that much about the IP vs System Language
| part of it tbh, what REALLY pisses me off is that despite
| having configured my _Google Account_ to only show me english
| results, it will serve me Portuguese search results just
| because I live in Brazil.
|
| That is truly maddening
| sokz wrote:
| I have faced the problem in steroids in India, where there are
| 22 scheduled languages. While I can read 3 local languages, one
| cannot be expected to know every single language in the general
| area. Keeping my computers in English doesn't help, changing
| the languages to the one that I can actually read doesn't help.
| It is sad that Google has harvested enough data about me to
| make a highly accurate profile of mine but can't be arsed to
| make usage of their products a little convenient for me by just
| respecting my language settings.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > My theory has always been that in any given country, there
| are far more native speakers with misconfigured computing
| environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks like me.
| So it's merely a numbers game: I may be frustrated, but at
| least Google and other companies aren't losing business when
| folks with misconfigured computers close the tab because they
| got a page served to them in, say, English instead of their
| native language.
|
| If you're right and they're following a numbers-game, Google's
| reasoning could only make the tiniest bit of sense if they were
| a disruptive minor player facing stiff competition. As it
| stands though, however frustrated a native speaker with a
| misconfigured browser may become, they're not going to flock to
| an alternative service. Plus, I would argue that a user that is
| not technically competent enough to change their own browser's
| language preference is the user least likely to even know where
| to look for alternatives to Google's services.
|
| This is all the worst considering that a user whose browser is
| configured for the wrong language only needs to change their
| settings once. However, a user who happens to physically be in
| the wrong place for their language does not have the luxury of
| fixing the problem, short of using a VPN or travelling to a
| location that Google has decided speaks their language.
| itronitron wrote:
| I think they do this to force people to login to their Google
| account (in order to change the language setting.)
| unreal37 wrote:
| This is currently affecting me. Google serves me results in
| Portuguese. The results are poor for me, because I can't read the
| language. The suggested websites are in Portuguese. And there's
| no way around this?
|
| It's crazy!
| rjtavares wrote:
| This is especially annoying for Portuguese people. Because most
| Portuguese speakers are Brazilian, sometimes websites default to
| Brazilian pages or trends.
|
| Twitter is becoming almost unusable with their suggested topics -
| I know they're awful for most people, but for me they don't even
| get the country right...
| naoqj wrote:
| As a Spaniard I am really tired of American companies that
| think that Mexican localisation for apps or websites is
| acceptable.
|
| Not to mention as you said many sites such as Twitter think I
| care about what happens in South America because I speak the
| same language.
| etchalon wrote:
| This is super non-interesting.
|
| But every jurisdiction has unique laws, company policies, release
| schedules, etc.
|
| So, for every jurisdiction, you have unique official text.
|
| The unique official text will always be available in the majority
| languages of the jurisdiction. The people who work in the
| jurisdiction speak it, and write in it, and can easily generate
| it.
|
| Non-majority languages require translators. Hiring people.
| Workflows. Approvals, etc.
|
| So it's easier to go off location, because then I know you're
| reading the right official text, and if you can't read the
| official text in the native language, it's on you to translate.
|
| This gets harder the bigger the company, especially in cases
| where the "company" is a bunch of independent subsidiaries.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| My personal papercut is with YouTube.
|
| It doesn't care that:
|
| - my browser is in English
|
| - that I'm logged in and with English as my language
|
| - that my region is set to the U.S.
|
| - that I only used English keywords on the search box
|
| It still gives me Portuguese results as my geo ip is in Brazil.
|
| It's infuriating.
| Nitrolo wrote:
| I'm Italian, but I live in Germany and my language is set to
| English on all my devices and software.
|
| I haven't lived in Italy for about a decade, but I created my
| Google account when I was still in Italy. To this day YouTube
| will randomly switch to Italian and machine-translate some (but
| not all!) titles and descriptions of YouTube videos.
|
| I've manually changed the language setting back to English a
| dozen times and tried to nuke any reference to Italy from my
| profile but Google keeps thinking "This poor user must have
| accidentally switched language and not know how to go back! Let
| me help and serve him half translated websites" every two
| months or so.
| dan_hawkins wrote:
| Same for me here in Denmark for google and gmail - I don't
| f***g speak Danish!
| m_st wrote:
| So the Googlers in Zurich Switzerland should get a Swiss
| German version. I'm sure they'd fix that soon enough.
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder if they don't have some VPN anyway so that the
| exit IP is something completely different to the region. Or
| if the Google searches even see the Internet, or if they
| stay within the "intranet".
| Symbiote wrote:
| The "fix" was probably to add an exception to the IP range
| of the Swiss office...
| cpp_frog wrote:
| Same, but with Spanish. My first language is Spanish but 99% of
| the media I consume is in English. Each time I log into YouTube
| my location is set to Chile and language to Spanish. Each time
| I change them to US and English. I've even sent complaints but
| nothing ever happens.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| If that helps, even if your location and language was set
| correctly, you'd still get local results in Youtube.
|
| My Youtube account is configured to use English, with a
| location in France. It still returns videos in Spanish when
| I'm in Spain. The UI is in English, but the search results in
| Spanish.
| aeyes wrote:
| That doesn't happen to me, I can open YouTube in incognito
| mode and the UI is in English. I'm not using a VPN. So it
| surely has to be your browser or OS settings.
|
| google.com on the other hand is Spanish.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Youtube has a specific setting under the rightmost menu (under
| the avatar) to change country and language. It used to work
| great, you could have multiple browsers/containers set for
| different languages. This is very interesting to get the news
| or trending pages from another country. But lately it's been
| buggy and constantly switch back to some IP-based guess.
| ggregoire wrote:
| Same with Google Images. All the results are from local sources
| although I have selected Language: English and Region: United
| States in the settings. This is indeed infuriating.
|
| By the way, I just went to https://www.google.com/preferences
| and the page is totally broken (Google Chrome with disabled
| ublock/privacybadger), when I click on Languages or Appearance
| or Region: Show more (at the bottom), nothing happens.
| "Uncaught ReferenceError: google is not defined" in the
| console.
| theginger wrote:
| This article isn't looking at both sides. I am in an English
| speaking country and Google absolutely does honour my accept
| language header, eg is set to French I get french. I suspect that
| a non English speaker with an English language configured device
| in a non English speaking country is sufficiently more common
| than the other way round that they choose to make an exception
| and ignore en accept-language headers
| mdesimone2 wrote:
| Another one that pains me is Google Flight currency. It's always
| on the currency of the country I am. I have manually selected USD
| countless times and it always goes away.
| nelgaard wrote:
| At least if you use Tor Browser, you will learn a few words in
| just about every language.
| enriquto wrote:
| This is extremely annoying and wrong in so many ways. Especially
| in countries that use multiple, say, _conflicting_ languages, and
| Google 's choices come off as culturally very insensitive, even
| offensive. It is so infuriating.
| m_st wrote:
| It's like a well known friend reporting that Pornhub translates
| porn video titles to silly German titles, even though his system
| and browser run in English.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| This always baffled me. Although English is not my native
| language I strongly dislike UIs being in any language but
| English. Every settings on my PCs says use English, all the apps
| are English versions, yet every time I find myself in another
| country Google uses its language to speak to me. I'm not sure I
| will even find how to switch the language to anything readable
| once I land in e.g. Japan or Armenia...
| amacneil wrote:
| I have not had a chance to test this yet, but apparently setting
| your locale to en-CA (rather than en-US) solves the problem,
| since Google no longer assumes you're using default language
| settings.
|
| Anyone have success with this?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I've had this problem with Steam and GOG. If you have a Dutch
| bank card, but you're only a few kilometers over in Germany: good
| luck buying any games.
| pelorat wrote:
| They do it because they want you to always be logged in to your
| Google account. If you're logged in you can simply change your
| language settings there.
| egberts1 wrote:
| because ... Google is anti-ethnocentric (as opposed to anti-
| ethnicentric)
| Smithalicious wrote:
| I'm currently in France and I've resorted to just using
| duckduckgo.
|
| It's the same class of accessibility error as tying shipping
| address to website language, which I still see all the time,
| too.[0]
|
| When will we learn that people don't necessarily speak the native
| language of the place they reside? This isn't even uncommon,
| there's expats and tourists and foreign students and business
| travelers abound.
|
| [0] Framework required me to use the French language website to
| ship to France, for instance. My forum post suggesting this be
| changed got unceremoniously merged into some megathread and
| ignored.
| aww_dang wrote:
| The regionalized search results for Google and YouTube are
| probably the biggest annoyance. Even after setting the language
| options correctly in the respective services, I still get content
| suggested which has no relevance to me.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| For several years, my google pixel phones were returning a
| strange mixture of Arabic results.
|
| At the time, I was living in Texas, but I had taken some Arabic
| classes in college earlier that year, so I would often google
| sentences to see if they were grammatically correct.
|
| Then, I contacted google support at least five times and they
| were never able to figure it out. Even on another pixel, I was
| STILL getting Arabic results.
|
| After another year, I finally changed to Apple, and my google
| results are normal again.
| dandare wrote:
| Spotify does this as well. I hate it. No, I do not speak the
| local language, stop!
| elif wrote:
| aside: designers, please never do this mouseover fill the window
| js... this is painful
| garyclarke27 wrote:
| Many sites are so infuriating regarding language settings Tesla
| Website is one of the worst for this. I live in Portugal but
| speak English Tesla insists on serving up Portuguese and wont
| even let me select US or UK site.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Well, I got banned from google ads for using an American credit
| card because they auto set my language to japan and charged in
| Yen.
|
| Absolutely ridiculous, and now there's seemingly no recourse.
| rsstack wrote:
| Whenever I'm traveling abroad I set my phone & laptop default
| search engine to DuckDuckGo. The worse search results (sorry, but
| yes) are at least in English...
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| DuckDuckGo has also been guilty of this, even when I disable
| the prominent "regional results" toggle. I am in France but
| have everything set to en_US, and on some searches of rare
| technical keywords it will still mix in "Visit France" tourist
| websites, often within the first page.
|
| Ridiculous example: searching for "HID2HCI" (a bluetooth thing)
| returns as first result a business website from the French
| Alps. The second result is the English Wikipedia page for "Ile-
| de-France" -- just why?? It doesn't matter which country I set
| in the "region filter" or whether I disable it entirely. And
| these "regional" results seem to be very random in that they
| will change and move up/down when I repeat the same search.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Google goes further than that. If you go for a holiday in
| Thailand, you'll get all your search results dated with the
| Buddhist calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar.
|
| Nice work, world's best and brightest.
| onpensionsterm wrote:
| >Nice work, world's best and brightest.
|
| I would be delighted to see the uproar if being bilingual+
| became a FAANG requirement.
|
| 10000 guys who can implement a trie but only 100 who can
| communicate with more than 1/5th of their customers.
| yen223 wrote:
| I've been on holiday to Thailand, and Google most definitely
| did not use the buddhist calendar for my search results
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Behavior is different if you're logged in and depending on
| your settings I think.
| petepete wrote:
| There's just so many things at play it's really difficult
| to know what to blame.
|
| When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it
| tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice.
|
| When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it
| says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that
| for a year. Can't get any support.
|
| So I just don't use Assistant for anything.
| tzot wrote:
| > When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone
| it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice.
|
| > When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones
| it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like
| that for a year. Can't get any support.
|
| Maybe Google's own analytics suggest that very few people
| in Manchester use Bluetooth gadgets, ergo you are in
| Liverpool.
|
| Or (more seriously even if as unlikely perhaps) maybe you
| have a duplicate Bluetooth MAC address, the other one
| located in Liverpool. Do you have Bluetooth turned on
| when not using your headphones? Does the answer depend on
| Bluetooth being on?
| umeshunni wrote:
| I have a weirder one.
|
| I have two Google home devices, one I bought when I lived
| in SF and another that I bought after I moved down to the
| suburbs.
|
| The one I bought when in SF is still stuck thinking it's
| in SF, no matter where I change the settings. So, I get
| SF weather, SF traffic and all that depending on which
| Google Home happens to answer my questions.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| It might be a function of how long you stay there. Usually
| when I visit Thailand, I stay for a couple of months.
| Likewise when I stay in Ukraine, the adverts I'm presented
| with on both YouTube and Instagram switch mostly to
| Ukrainian. Or Serbian when I'm in Serbia, or Turkish when I'm
| in Turkey, _etc_.
| lennoff wrote:
| Because of the company VPN, I usually teleport to Israel, and I
| have absolutely no idea how to change the language on a right-to-
| left layout with a Hebrew alphabet...
| someelephant wrote:
| google flights using your profile language preference but then
| listing all flights in local currency :(
| brodo wrote:
| If you search for an english book title on Amazon.de it gets
| auto-translated to german. I first saw this a couple of weeks ago
| and it was super confusing. Chances are the search results will
| be nonsense or empty.
| bjoli wrote:
| And why can't I disable CCs on youtube for any foreign language.
|
| Google already knows what languages I speak, yet for German and
| English I always get shitty auto-generated captions.
|
| I have disabled every setting they have, yet if I am logged in
| (which I am because I use yt premium) I get CCs.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Assuming that your user speaks the common language of their
| current location is as rude as any other kind of stereotyping.
| bakhy wrote:
| Just BTW on the Netflix subtitles issue - I live in Germany, but
| I'm not German and generally prefer original audio on everything,
| typically with English subtitles. And some movies and series on
| Netflix will really only offer German subtitles, or, even worse,
| only German audio. No option to choose original.
|
| All movies that have such limited audio/subtitle options, when I
| play them, start with a title card of a German distributor, so I
| would believe Netflix on that one.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Off-topic, but wtf is wrong with images on this site? For some
| reason i had javascript enabled in my Tor Browser (safer mode) so
| whenever i hover an image it starts to fill the whole screen...
| which is inconvenient because images are already almost filling
| my screen so it's REALLY HARD to scroll away from them to read
| the text.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Fair enough, I'll fix it. It's actually a CSS thing. In some of
| my travel articles it's nice to be able to see the images in
| full resolution, but the blog template I'm using squeezes them
| all to the column width. I'll add a click to zoom instead when
| I get a chance.
| Arnt wrote:
| This doesn't even consider the possibility that location might be
| a more accurate indication of what language(s) the human user
| knows/prefers language than the browser setting is.
|
| Which it may or may not be. But I'm shocked by the headline, "Why
| does Google get internationalization wrong?" that just presume
| that Google hasn't collected data on this. After all, Google is
| famous for data collected and data-driven decisions. Remember
| that "41 shades of blue" story?
| 0x006A wrote:
| Its more like they fucked it up with some AI driven A/B testing
| and think they are doing the right thing but actually its just
| all broken now.
|
| They used to have /ncr (no country redirect) - open that in
| incognito mode and you have to accept some TOS in a language
| based on some idea of where the IP is.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > After all, Google is famous for data collected and data-
| driven decisions. Remember that "41 shades of blue" story?
|
| Data (metrics really) isn't the end all be all, and in
| particular the decisions resulting from the data is not bound
| to be good.
|
| As you say, Google is famous for data-driven decisions, and for
| instance android couldn't become the top rated smartphone OS.
| Their shopping property couldn't overcome competition despite
| unfair positioning, their social network couldn't survive
| despite all the effort put in it.
|
| Looking at all their failures, why should we assume that here
| they made the best choice, when at an individual level we see
| it as deeply wrong ?
| Arnt wrote:
| At an individual level, we should IMNSHO moderate our hubris
| and at least consider the possibility that other people are
| right, and that includes people at Google. Data isn't bound
| to be good, but it's not bound to be bad either.
|
| Posting "why Google is wrong" is (still IMNSHO) an overdose
| of hubris, and because of that hubris it's wrong even if
| Google happens to be wrong in the matter at hand.
| scbrg wrote:
| They are - _objectively_ - wrong. There 's a spec, and
| they're violating it.
|
| This gets even more absurd given that they most likely
| produce the user agent as well, so they can't really blame
| "it's too hard for users to configure the user agent". Put
| the effin' language selector in the toolbar if configured
| language doesn't match your wildly inaccurate guesses then.
| toast0 wrote:
| > They are - objectively - wrong. There's a spec, and
| they're violating it.
|
| Not following a spec only implies they're objectively
| wrong if the spec is objectively correct. I don't think
| the Accept-Language spec is objectively correct; for me,
| it's not even subjectively correct. Following it or not
| is a choice, and neither is wrong.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There's a point that hasn't been much raised in the other
| threads because of its obviousness: they're the wildly
| dominant search engine, paying ungodly amounts of money to
| stay so, and forcing itself wherever it can (remember the
| lawsuits around the search bar in android...)
|
| For them to decide some portion of users are not worth the
| hassle and should have a degraded experience, because
| overall it serves Google better (revenue ? engagement ?)
| doesn't make them 'right' in my book. Feels more like
| 'assholes'.
|
| If your argument was that for a vast majority of user the
| current behavior might be better, so as a whole it is the
| "right" choice, this has a taste of trolley problem. Except
| there's more than two paths here, and having settings that
| work properly would make everyone happy for instance. It's
| not hubris to say that Google isn't delivering on that
| part, making the overall situation "wrong".
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Another option is that companies (mostly Google) have different
| offerings in different countries. In Germany, for example, they
| need to apply NetzDG filtering and I assume it's similar for
| countries all around the world. So my assumption is they don't
| redirect you for the language, they redirect you to the (slightly
| different) service for your current location, which happens to be
| in the local language.
| zamadatix wrote:
| On these regionalized pages you can still change the language.
| jakub_g wrote:
| The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more
| terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office
| tools like Excel is _bound to the organization_!
|
| I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel
| in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific
| ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir").
|
| I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS
| profile, Office profile etc., not important.
|
| (FWIW native Windows Excel didn't have this issue, so I sticked
| with native Excel).
|
| ---
|
| Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from
| Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around
| in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly
| distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of
| websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.
| [deleted]
| tuvan wrote:
| Google sheets also does this and even uses regional formatting
| standards. I can't copy values between programs because some
| are using ',' for decimals and some are using '.' its VERY
| annoying
| mcv wrote:
| Maybe we need a locale-neutral separator for these things.
| Then we'll have three conflicting options.
|
| I always get this wrong in calculators. I type , where I
| should have typed . or vice versa, and get a completely wrong
| result.
| [deleted]
| traspler wrote:
| I am Swiss German and living in Switzerland (German speaking
| part) and I had the weirdest issue for a couple of years:
| Swiss, the airline, always gave me french boarding passes. But
| all my settings were either set to English or German. The
| bizarre part was that if I booked for multiple people they
| would all get english ones except for me. Similar things
| sometimes happen for other services. Sometimes Switzerland
| means French for some services and all my settings on any level
| do not help.
| leejo wrote:
| > I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC
| either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between
| Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a
| result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and
| sometimes in German. Imagine this.
|
| Sometimes my IP resolves close enough to the Rostigraben[^1]
| that I will get sites in German despite having my browser set
| to English (GB) and OS set to French.
|
| [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostigraben
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| For me the worst is that these settings sometimes reset after
| background updates... I don't know how many times I've tried to
| do a simple aggregation or something in Excel and was flustered
| by why it didn't work, only to finally figure out that my
| skripting language was set to german instead of English... Yes,
| the actual commands are also language specific.
| gefhfffh wrote:
| And docs.microsoft.com pulls the language unchangably from the
| location: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/feedback/issues/462
|
| It's so annoying. There is an option to change the language,
| however I have to change it every time I search for something,
| because the language doesn't get saved
| lultimouomo wrote:
| > language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the
| organization!
|
| Maybe this is due to the fact that Excel documents break if you
| change language, as function names are localized?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on
| that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also
| get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally
| a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must
| interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable
| or other shenanigans.
| kuschku wrote:
| In Germanic countries, it's common to write numbers like
| 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just
| on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is
| now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ;
| instead of , as separator
|
| Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is
| universal.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I don't really care about what kind of punctuation Germanic
| countries are using, which I am not using, avoiding
| ambiguity in the first place.
|
| My software, including my browser, and my operating system
| is usually set to English, and I expect spreadsheet (data!)
| applications to not interpret whatever they want (based on
| IP address or location of companies or whatever), but
| actually interpret according to a standard. It is
| ridiculous for a spreadsheet application reading CSV (C! as
| in Comma!) to interpret the comma as a visual number
| decoration, instead of according to format, as a separator
| of cells.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| It's bound to the version of office you buy. IIRC there are
| some hacks which let you change it.
| m_st wrote:
| Swiss German here. Je suis bilingue. My OS is set to English
| with a Swiss German keyboard layout. This works fine
| everywhere. Except: The Microsoft Store app just keeps on
| running in French with English content. No German to be found.
| It looks damn silly.
| kedikedi wrote:
| I think this explains why my old computer was so confused
| about languages. The windows apps were in Finnish, system
| settings etc. were in English. Then some parts of Google
| stuff were in Turkish, some in Finnish, and some others were
| in English. Every now and then some random app would appear
| and surprise me in Turkish. It was truly impossible to tell
| what language would appear after each click.
|
| It was originally running windows 7 with English as the
| system language. Some software were installed while I was in
| Turkey, some (including windows 10 upgrade) were installed
| after I moved to Finland. Now I'm learning that my computer
| couldn't handle this gracefully :)
| traspler wrote:
| Hey, I had the same issue and variations of it (french
| category titles, german content and english menus). Also
| Swiss German with English setup. I actually managed to solve
| it with some unintuitive language settings.
|
| // Edit:
|
| Okay so the issue can be resolved as follows (Windows 10):
| Windows Settings -> Time & Language -> Language -> Preferred
| Languages -> Order it so that "English (United States)" is at
| the top
|
| I previsouly had "English (Switzerland)" at the top. This
| order influences the "Apps & websites" setting at the top
| there.
|
| With "English (Switzerland)" my section headings in the Store
| were French, e.g. "Films et TV" but with "English (United
| States)" at the top I get "Movies & TV". Of course the
| section headings, callouts, etc. otherwise are still a
| mixture of your MS Store region (German in my case) and the
| Windows display language (English in my case).
|
| Why "English (Switzerland)" would result in French... I don't
| know.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from
| Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved
| around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting
| slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets
| all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German.
| Imagine this.
|
| Yep that's a super fun one in all multilingual or small
| countries (where you might be geoloc'd in a separate linguistic
| community, or a country with a rather different culture).
| southerntofu wrote:
| > ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir").
|
| Just nitpicking, but "g" stands for "gras", a literal
| translation of "bold" in the context of typography.
|
| > I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC
| either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between
| Swiss regions
|
| And that's why assigning users to specific
| services/servers/translations depending on IP is the worst kind
| of evil. Please let us choose the language consciously in a
| menu, or respect our browser settings: whatever our shit ISPs
| are doing behind the scenes should not impact our browsing, and
| no, IP addresses don't have a "country" and the simple fact
| that you need to use 3rd party databases (geoIP etc) is proof
| of that and just how stupid the whole concept is.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > no, IP addresses don't have a "country"
|
| But, but, IP ranges have a "country" field in the RIPE
| database!
|
| [Just pointing out it's a mostly-right (aka subtly-wrong)
| solution that seems like a really good and straightforward
| idea at first (sufficiently ignorant) glance.]
| occamrazor wrote:
| Nitpicking your nitpick: "gras" means "fat" and, only in a
| typographical context, "bold".
| Naga wrote:
| This is very annoying for me too! I am North American, but work
| for a European company, and my Windows and Office locale
| settings are all screwed up, and consistency reset themselves
| whenever I try to fix it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The beauty of AD user profiles.
| m_st wrote:
| Regarding Excel: Watch out with multi language setups! I was
| working with an English iPhone, an English Windows PC and a
| Swiss German Mac on an Excel file stored on One Drive. Editing
| sometimes in Excel and sometimes in Excel Online.
|
| Result: Broken data due to SUM/SUMME/etc formulas, broken phone
| number recognition and (worst) broken dates.
|
| What a mess!
| ProblemFactory wrote:
| And broken CSV files.
|
| In some European locales Excel switches from
| importing/exporting Comma Separated Values to Semicolon
| Separated Values with comma acting as the decimal point.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the
| organization!
|
| That doesn't seem to always be the case.
|
| I work in France, all my IPs are identified as being from
| France, the company is purely French and doesn't use English at
| all, yet all my Office applications are in English. I'm using
| Firefox on Linux, in English.
|
| The only one exception is Teams, because for some reason
| spelling is tied to the UI interface, so I chose for it to be
| in French, but the default was for it to be in English.
| lukaesch wrote:
| The challenge for international platforms/websites are the
| legal/business requirements per region and it boils down to costs
| to streamline translations.
|
| Organizations split responsibilities by countries/regions. Local
| experts get hired to optimize content for their target markets.
| The back and forth between local subsidiaries/experts with
| centralized product development teams is more complex, slower and
| expensive. So you would rather create dedicated customer facing
| sites per region that are maintained by local teams who take care
| of location-specific differences (Netflix filtering, Google
| search results, etc.)
|
| The bigger the org gets the harder a streamlined multi-language
| (often also multi-currency) business model gets and hence
| companies opt to geo-location instead of using header lang.
|
| Probably, there are more points, but that's what I have learned
| after building an international m-commerce platform that serves
| users in the EU, US and Mexico
| mtz_federico wrote:
| I believe that the best way to handle it is to show the page in
| the user's computer language and show a pop-up in the language of
| the country asking the user if they want to switch to the local
| language.
|
| Of course, an important detail is putting the "stay in <browser
| language>" button in the browser language.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| A trick-ish that I've learned is to use Irish locale where
| possible (en-ie) , because that's a combination of English and
| Metric (the only sane international combination not to go wrong).
|
| Of course this still breaks when software tries location sniffing
| and puts me $elsewhere.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Which language Google uses is different from product to product.
| In Google forms, they use the language set in the Google account
| (neither location, nor browser language), which is frustrating,
| because as a designer of a survey you have no way to control the
| language the UI elements in your survey.
| mcswell wrote:
| "Because we're Google, we know better than you."
| jewel wrote:
| A workaround: To force search results in English when not signed
| in, go to https://www.google.com/en. This adds a hl=en parameter
| to your queries. You can change the search provider URL in the
| browser to add the hl parameter.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| The irony is that I clicked that URL on my iPhone, signed in to
| Safari with everything set to US/English. About half the
| entries below the search bar(they now add news below) are in
| Spanish.
|
| My current location is Unknown if I scroll all the way to the
| bottom. Probably Google unsure of what to make of my whole
| house VPN where the desktop browsers use a fake location
| extension to automatically say yes to location requests but
| provide them with a static location in SoCal that matches the
| area of my IP block, but whenever I use google apps on my
| devices, they end up with GPS coordinates that place me deep
| within Mexico.
| kozak wrote:
| This "Hey, you are from Ukraine, let us switch you to the Russian
| language" behavior I see in some places literally causes me PTSD.
| I got pissed off this way by Adobe just yesterday. Please don't
| do it people. I don't have the Russian language configured on any
| of my devices and in any of my accounts (and never had), they do
| it purely by location.
| itvision wrote:
| This has been my pet peeve for ages.
|
| Google ignores the Accept-Language header on pretty much all of
| its websites and uses your location instead.
|
| And I fucking hate them for that.
| lukaesch wrote:
| The challenge for international platforms/websites are the
| legal/business requirements per region and it boils down to costs
| to streamline translations.
|
| Organizations split responsibilities by countries/regions. Local
| experts get hired to optimize content for their target markets.
| The back and forth between local subsidiaries/experts with
| centralized product development teams is more complex, slower and
| expensive. So you would rather create dedicated customer facing
| sites per region that are maintained by local teams who take care
| of location-specific differences (Netflix filtering, Google
| search results, etc.)
|
| The bigger the org gets the harder a streamlined multi-language
| (often also multi-currency) business model gets and hence
| companies opt to geo-location instead of using header lang.
|
| Probably, there are more points, but that's what I have learned
| after building an international m-commerce platform that serves
| users in the EU, US and Mexico.
|
| It is not a tech issue.
| pxue wrote:
| Been traveling in Mexico/Latin Am since the pandemic and this is
| so much more painful than I expected. I work on multiple projects
| as a consultant and so I often create a new browser profile for
| new clients (keep sessions, sign-ins etc separate). Every time i
| boot up a new profile, everything gets switched to Spanish,
| mexican results.
|
| Please Google, stahp.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I really wish you could specify the search language or
| internationalisation.
|
| Sometimes I search in English, French, Italian, Czech or
| Ukrainian, I also split time between Canada, France and Czech
| Republic, can read all these languages well enough to want
| contextual results for each, but inevitably I still get results
| focused only on my actual location which is slightly
| infuriating...
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| The only answer to the question is because google make more money
| if you sign in and share location data.
|
| There's no other logical reason a rough guess about where you
| might be in the world is a better method for determining your
| language needs than the specific request from the browser.
| richardfey wrote:
| eBay is another big offender, you need to change your physical
| address or the TLD.
| minusf wrote:
| firefox had localized installers that also set the accept
| language headers correctly, dont know about chrome. using the
| geolocation data is good for the majority of the users i guess,
| although it ignores a lot of nuance about mixed populations.
|
| back then when i was still a google product, it was very very
| frustrating while backpacking around the world. `hl=en` or some
| such parameter was the "fix".
| emptyparadise wrote:
| google.com/ncr (no country redirect) was the panacea until
| Google broke it.
| currysausage wrote:
| Nowadays it's https://www.google.com/?gl=us&hl=en (US region,
| English language). Works for /maps too.
|
| If that still redirects you to a local version for some
| reason, append &gws_rd=cr (which AFAIK tells Google Web
| Server that a country redirect already happened and that no
| further country redirect should be triggered).
|
| Youtube needs uppercase region and usually disrespects
| language if you don't append &persist_hl=1 (e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/?hl=en&gl=US&persist_hl=1). Might as
| well append &persist_gl=1 too.
|
| Not really an issue if you use bookmarks on your own devices,
| but super annoying otherwise.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This is extremely annoying, especially when you're in a country
| with high level of English proficiency and a small population. In
| that scenario, you're not going to _have_ a lot of local language
| results. Something like Wikipedia, which has decent quality in
| English, will tend to look like it was edited by high school
| students. Yet Google will force-redirect you to the local
| Wikipedia language over the vastly superior English article, even
| when searching for something in English.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Modern search engines are just so stupid trying to outsmart us.
| When was the last time running a literal search between double
| quotes produced any significant results for you? Nowadays even
| with double quotes, they more or less all return what they
| _think_ i meant depending on a plethora of criteria and not
| what i asked for.
|
| Thanks for marginalia search engine, it seems to be gaining in
| content and starts to be more and more useful lately! Though to
| be fair more *transparent* special-casing like you do for
| Wikipedia would be welcome in my humble view (eg. for technical
| documentation pointing to the reference site, etc).
| a4isms wrote:
| The usual excuse is that they are optimizing for results that
| produce clicks on paid search, rather than optimizing for
| your satisfaction with the search results.
| toxinu wrote:
| As a nomad traveler, this is the reason I stopped using Google as
| my primary search engine.
| lokar wrote:
| The reason is straight forward. They have data that shows most
| people outside the US have the setting wrong. For the .com
| (American!) domain the default is English. For each country
| specific site the default is the primary local language. You can
| change the default via a cookie.
| quitit wrote:
| Their various services are inconsistent in how they detect
| language.
|
| Some elements may appear in the language associated with the
| user's location, while others are based on the browser setting.
| It's highly inconsistent, as someone who travels frequently it's
| also pretty annoying.
|
| Facebook properties have this problem as well.
| virtualritz wrote:
| Traveling thorough Argentina in 2019 my phone showed all prices
| in Argentinian Pesos.
|
| Particularly annoying on Google Maps when looking for hotels.
| Crazy inflation made remembering an exchange rate to EUR or US$
| useless.
|
| But what's more, after I returned to Europe this stayed for a few
| months. I.e. Google Maps still showed me hotel prices in
| Argentinian Pesos - in Europe!
| jokteur wrote:
| I live in Switzerland and every website seems to think I speak
| German (I do, but this is not the point). Everything is
| configured in French on my computer, so why do you insist serving
| me content in German. Yes , I do understand that 66% of the
| country speaks Swiss German, but still, why can't the website
| respect my language preferences.
|
| The worst offender are the swiss websites (like digitec). You
| would think they at least understand the regional differences of
| Switzerland and they even have a website for each region, but
| still default on showing me the German version.
| trzeci wrote:
| Thanks for bringing that topic, for me as an expat it a major
| pain. I live in a country with rather unusual language, but I
| have only contact with English speaking people. And every service
| puts the locale of this in default - even with stating in browser
| settings what are my preferences. The worst part of this is that
| in many places I don't even know how to change local on specific
| pages manually.
|
| VPN is the only valuable option for me unfortunately.
| d3k wrote:
| This is a common thing in software too I fear. I have Firefox on
| macOS. Everything is configured for US English, but I live in
| France. When I tell Firefox to save a page (or download
| something), the dialog prompts me to "Enregistrer sous..." (i.e.:
| "Save As..."). No idea why this happens.
| YaBomm wrote:
| mihaic wrote:
| I do not work at Google, but I speculate that this is a case of
| software architecture leading the product: For fast results and
| scalability Google will just DNS-redirect you to the closest
| servers, and those servers are configured to a specific language.
|
| Sure, they could work on it, but for Google engineers cache is
| king, and for optimal performance they don't want to bother on
| personalizing that first access.
| LamboJ wrote:
| I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings
| aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside
| the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default
| configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India.
| If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the
| time, then I can see why they favour using location for language
| instead of browser settings.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly my experience.
|
| Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale
| correctly, so everyone ends up en-US.
|
| So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it
| wrong.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that
| contradicts my experience.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| My anecdotes are from two countries:
|
| 1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default
| en-US, even thought most of their work and communications
| will be in fr-CA.
|
| 2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer
| concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in
| Bulgarian would be confusing to them.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Thanks, I guess both cases make sense and in that case
| geolocation probably works better.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience both from running a site in
| Europe using the accept language header as default and from my
| anecdotal experience with friends in Asia and Europe.
|
| In general, I think using geoip is much more likely to get
| things wrong than using the accept language.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| So if that's the case then give them the en-US version? They'll
| either accept it because that's what they've explicitly
| requested, or change their system settings to match what they
| actually want.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I added Accept-Language to our web logs for a month before we
| added our first site translation.
|
| That showed us that the majority of people had a language
| matching the expectation we would have from an IP geolocation,
| so we use Accept-Language alone.
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder if they could just change the browser to hint about
| "Do you want content in your local language?". I wonder if the
| dominant browser vendor on the web would be willing to
| accommodate Google...
| dwheeler wrote:
| I agree, assuming the language based on where you happen to be
| (instead of your actual request) is completely wrong. There are
| websites that do it correctly. This website, which I maintain,
| correctly uses the browser setting:
| https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org
|
| Perhaps what would be helpful would be to modify services that
| already evaluate websites to also determine if they switch locale
| correctly. If people see that there is an error, it's more likely
| to get fixed.
| Neil44 wrote:
| It's a pain in the ass, I have a client who's WAN exits in
| Swizerland so you have to manually set everything to correct
| locale, not just Google all kinds of stuff.
| jve wrote:
| Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display
| language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT
| included in home edition? Ridiculous. Luckily there was
| "Vistalizator" where you could install language pack of choice.
|
| Anyway, after multiple OS releases like that, they finally
| dropped that nonsense starting with Windows 8.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I have one windows PC that has heritage back to 2016, was
| originally installed in Japanese, then switched to English. It
| always had a Windows 10 pro license, and there is still in 2022
| many places in the OS that only show up in Japanese. And many
| smaller and enterprise apps use region instead of language to
| set the language.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS
| display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was
| NOT included in home edition?
|
| I remember Microsoft Windows (and MS-DOS) having a _hardcoded_
| OS display language; if you installed a Brazilian edition of
| Microsoft Windows, all you got is Brazilian Portuguese, since
| the translations are hardcoded within each binary (but you
| could still change things like date format and keyboard
| layout), and if you wanted a different OS display language, you
| had to wipe and reinstall. I vaguely recall reading that this
| had changed starting with IIRC Windows Vista, which put the
| translations in separate files (instead of hardcoding them in
| the executables and DLLs).
| traspler wrote:
| The Netflix thing makes me so angry sometimes. They have the
| show, the title, description, episode titles and descriptions are
| all localized to my language of choice (English), but when I
| actually start watching I can only select French or Original Dub
| & French Sub.
| asiachick wrote:
| what's failing for me, I want result in Japanese but google
| thinks I want Chinese. I'm not in China or Japan but Chinese is
| not in my language preferences. Switching to google.co.jp didn't
| help.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| The inconsistency in how different companies and products within
| companies handle this are indeed annoying, and speak poorly for
| product management and engineering at these companies.
|
| But it's not as simple a problem as the article wants us to
| believe. Local laws often dictate different content or function
| for sites and applications served in their jurisdiction, leaving
| the product with a hard choice: if Japanese law requires that I
| get a Japanese version (from a function point of view) of a site
| when browsing from Japan, but the browser settings request French
| language, I may or may not have a French translation of the
| Japanese function to serve.
|
| I think a lot of the irregularity is just bad product management
| and engineering, but some of it is actually trying to deal with a
| hard problem.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There are definitely cases where I want "whatever is local" and
| others where "whatever my normal default is".
|
| If I'm getting driving directions in a place where the car and
| road signs are in kilometers, I probably want my directions in
| kilometers as well, even if my default is stupid-units.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Default is one thing, but why is there not an obvious and easy
| way for users to override the language chosen by Google and make
| that selection permanent? Not giving users control is a terrible
| user experience.
| metafunctor wrote:
| My vote goes to the "Org Too Big, Nobody Cares" explanation.
|
| Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance about
| how there are regions in the world with multiple official
| languages.
|
| Haven't checked this recently, but a while ago Google Maps was
| still serving street names in a random language (the first name
| in alphabetical ordering), for streets which have names in
| multiple languages.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Monopolists don't care about quality.
|
| It's slightly different from too big an organization. Big
| organizations do not care about the people they touch
| (employees, suppliers, etc). Monopolists do not care about
| their customers.
| sebastien_b wrote:
| > _Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance_
|
| Ignorance, or _arrogance_?
| indymike wrote:
| American who has been in that meeting a few times. It is
| mostly arrogant innocence... A kind of Dunning-Krueger like
| effect.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| > _Or, perhaps just the blissful America-centric ignorance
| about how there are regions in the world where there are
| multiple official languages_
|
| As a brit, I am always irked that most of what I browse is
| locked to US English, as if it's the same thing as British
| English. At least if your main language is a popular non-
| English language you get the option to switch to it.
|
| This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United
| States is always in the special top slot, and below that is
| everywhere else on the planet, like second rate-citizens. It's
| especially egregious on global sites, that serve global
| content.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where
| United States is always in the special top slot
|
| This used to be the case, but it seems to be becoming rare.
| It's really annoying actually as alphabetically United States
| is way down in the list. This is how IP geolocation should be
| used imho, bubble up the probable location(s) to the top of
| the list, but DON'T assume the geo is right without asking.
| zarzavat wrote:
| While we are complaining about this, can we all agree that
| using plain <select> for country is an anti pattern. There
| should be a fuzzy search.
|
| So many times I have to search for my country under
|
| United Kingdom
|
| UK
|
| Britain
|
| Great Britain
|
| England
|
| Only to find that it was "Great Britain" but collated in
| the B's amongst Bhutan and Belgium, etc.
| logifail wrote:
| > So many times I have to search for my country under
| [...]
|
| It's even better when you have to explain this specific
| oddity in a foreign language.
|
| Try politely explaining to a German consular official
| that they probably need to look in their system's drop-
| down box under 'V' for 'Vereinigtes* Konigreich' [UK]
| (instead of 'E' for 'England' or indeed 'G' for
| 'Grossbritannien' [GB]) as they are attempting to enter
| passport details...
|
| * 'United', in German...
| [deleted]
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| We once added internationalisation to our app. Being British
| developers, our English was British English so that's what
| was in the language picker.
|
| We had a very angry American (presumably) who accused us of
| "cultural imperialism" for having an en-GB option but no en-
| US option.
|
| Got to say I was laughing about that for quite some time.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Youtube also auto-translates video title for me, based on the
| language it assumes I can read. It's so infuriating (there's
| settings that alleviate that behavior for declared languages,
| but it's buggy as hell, and still grating...)
| kevincox wrote:
| I doubt it. I bet this actually works better for most people.
| It really sucks because you can't fix it if your computer is
| actually configured correct, but they probably ran some simple
| tests and determined that IP location is better than HTTP
| header language.
|
| I'm sure it is easy to construct an argument that this isn't
| actually better overall. That case probably does then fall into
| "Org Too Big, Nobody Cares".
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| USA-centrism _per se_ would still seem to recognise second
| languages, several state legislatures use Spanish, I think at
| least one publishes laws in Spanish & English.
|
| Part of USA even has Spanish as an official and principal
| language - Puerto Rico.
| tommypalm wrote:
| I listened to a Podcast and one of the hosts was a British guy
| living in America. He had to speak in an American accent to his
| Xbox One in order for it to understand him. It seemed the voice
| recognition was based on your location setting and not
| independently configurable.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| This triggers some PTSD with Google Maps navigation in Finland
|
| We have two official languages - Finnish and Swedish, neither
| of them big enough to warrant any Google effort for proper
| text-to-speech. Hence, the voice navigation first pronounces
| street names in Finnish, then again in Swedish, both butchered
| by applying English spelling rules, all voiced by an extremely
| robotic voice
| antematerija wrote:
| You can set language to be anything you want regardless of
| location.
|
| E.g. on mobile just scroll to bottom of fist page and pick
| different language.
|
| E.g. on desktop just go to settings and pick language.
|
| I'm pretty sure this works awesome since I've used this all my
| life.
|
| I would expect power users to look for simple solution instead of
| ranting.
|
| Who the hell are you guys if you can't find language settings!!!
| slig wrote:
| It doesn't work. That's the point.
| antematerija wrote:
| It does work. I use this my entire life.
|
| Please read my comment. I'm talking about language settings
| on Google and not browser settings.
|
| Somehow people believe that a multi trillion dollar company
| hasn't ran live experiments on this.
|
| The default settings are adapted so the probability of
| correct language for people who can't find language settings
| is maximized.
|
| Guys, please use common sense. The alternative is to believe
| that Google engineers are either not educated or don't know
| ab testing.
| tantalor wrote:
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2539428
|
| > Settings you can change...
|
| > Language
| thedougd wrote:
| Similarly, why do I encounter phone apps that ask me if I want F
| or C temps, 24 hour or 12 hour, and date formats? Use the locale,
| at least as a default. I do get the scenario where I may want to
| work in another set of units than my locale, but I find the
| locale is frequently just ignored by these apps.
| malthaus wrote:
| My fav in this regard is Amazon: I can manually set a language in
| the settings, but those get at random times overwritten by my
| browser language setting.
|
| So why have it in the first place?
| ajolly wrote:
| Amazon will occasionally randomly ignore my browser and my
| Amazon language setting forcing me to Spanish. (In Puerto Rico)
| nraynaud wrote:
| I'm so sorry for all these native English speakers missing out on
| the automatically translated pages put there to bait google and
| others. Then the "clever" ML people scour the web and use
| multilingual pages as rosetta stone to train their translation
| engine that they, of course, SEO to death.
|
| Long story short, "how do we say that word in English again" is a
| minfield on google.
| milky2028 wrote:
| I wonder if some sites are using JavaScript to handle language,
| but they don't want to use navigator.language since below IE 11
| doesn't support it. In this case, it might make sense to fall
| back to location.
| donatj wrote:
| Years ago I built a language system that parsed Accept-Lang and
| compared your preferences to what we had available. There was
| also a drop down at the bottom of the page to manually override.
|
| I thought it worked really slick, but we got complaints. The
| majority of our users were English speaking _despite_ their
| Accept-Lang preferences and expected us to serve in English. We
| switched to just default English with the dropdown there if you
| want something else. Made me a little sad.
| [deleted]
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| There is nothing worse than a site or program trying to guess my
| language by geo location. Just honor my settings.
| [deleted]
| realusername wrote:
| This thing has been broken for so long on Google, I don't think
| languages ever worked properly.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| It seems like the obvious solution here is to have another
| language that semantically means "force English" which is only
| ever sent by the browser if the user explicitly selected English
| in OS or browser settings. That way, the ambiguity between "en-
| us" meaning "default" or meaning "us English" would go away.
| Maybe even setting Accept-Language to "en-us,en-us" could mean
| that?
| netsharc wrote:
| Google makes the (sadly) dominant web browser. Why not just add
| a feature on the browser to have a huge popup (I'm kidding, it
| should be more subtle) at the next upgrade to ask the user
| "What languages do you prefer for content?".
|
| Currently, I'm guessing the browser copies the language of the
| OS at first run, and the option to change it is behind the sign
| that says "Beware of the leopard"
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| The article mentions DHL. Which is another hilarious case if you
| dig deeper: I am in Germany but my browser's language is set to
| English, like the author's. dhl.com - the international website -
| automatically assumes that I want the German translation (like in
| the author's case), but dhl.de - the local, German website -
| respects my browser setting and serves content in English! This
| is completely upside-down :)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I built an iOS app once for a Dutch audience. We used the
| device's language as the app's language, because that makes
| sense, right? It's the same with the preferred language in a
| browser, right?
|
| Wrong; we got complaints from users that their app was in English
| instead of Dutch. Even though their device was set to English or
| another unsupported language.
|
| We begrudgingly added an app specific language preference. I
| repeated this later on for a package shipping webapp where on the
| login screen (and elsewhere iirc?) you can select a language; it
| defaults to your browser's Accept-Language header, but allows the
| user to override it.
|
| Lesson learned; Accept-Language is fine for the initial language,
| and if that header is not to be trusted, maybe IP / geolocation
| based. But always offer an easy way to set the language; you may
| be dealing with someone who doesn't live in the country of origin
| on a device / browser that isn't theirs.
|
| Also remember that location, locale and language are three
| different concepts entirely.
| m_st wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat as you, Switzerland is multi language
| (German, French and Italian) and quite a few users (including
| myself) use English as system language. Luckily by now you can
| change the language of iOS applications in the settings app.
| Though guess what... no one knows or finds that setting. So
| yes, it's best to let the user decide just as you write.
| rescbr wrote:
| And then there's the technical audience: I use all my devices
| in English, as usually the translations are subpar. On the
| other hand, I expect the local apps (ie, banking, some e-gov
| app, your package shipping example, etc) to be in my native
| language, as usually, the translations are even worse due to
| the developer's budget allocated to localization. Conversely,
| when I'm travelling and need to use some local app (airline,
| rideshare, taxi, etc) I hope that it is able to at least have
| some English translation.
|
| Yeah, please offer the option to set the language to the user.
| disruptiveink wrote:
| That's exactly my approach as well. My devices are usually in
| English, as it's the "lingua franca" of the OS and the
| internet. For non country-specific applications, it's much
| harder to search for, well, any issue if your
| OS/browser/IDE/complex application is not in English.
|
| On the other hand, I want my local apps to use the local
| language, as they were developed with the native language in
| mind first for a use case that makes sense with that specific
| locale in mind, and it just doesn't make sense to be reading
| an English translation of something that you're used to see
| expressed in your local language. An English translation in
| that case is usually not only subpar but confusing if you're
| also fluent in the local language.
|
| My ideal would be to somehow state that, say, "I speak
| English and German. My preference is to have content
| displayed in what you consider the "native" language of your
| application if it's on that list, otherwise my preference is
| English, then German."
|
| In practice, no one would bother setting this up (as we see
| in the case of Accept-Language) and no one would bother
| implementing this correctly. The next best thing is just an
| application/website specific language override, which is
| easily explainable to any user.
| twhb wrote:
| Did you suggest they change their device settings? Yours was
| probably the right approach, I'm just curious whether we have
| actual data to support that people prefer this split
| configuration, and aren't just suffering under bad defaults.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| First and foremost, thanks for having a very sane approach to
| this ! This is what other apps should tend to.
|
| > We used the device's language as the app's language, because
| that makes sense, right?
|
| One of the mistake devs do all the time is assuming users use
| _one_ language. It's not the case for a very large portion of
| people around the globe.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Yepp, just look at other responses here in this thread.
| People often assume that there is a system language that is
| used in the browser; that is only partly true, browser
| settings allow to specify multiple languages with given
| priority. It is just usually the default system language,
| until you configure it. The browser might not even use the
| system language in that setting at all if you configure
| otherwise.
| Forricide wrote:
| > It's not the case for a very large portion of people around
| the globe.
|
| Yep, even people who speak one language might put their phone
| or browser into another language for learning (immersion)
| purposes but need your important (e.g. banking) application
| to be in their native language regardless.
| joshstrange wrote:
| It's frustrating that again and again I run into the same sort
| of root issue. There exists UI to configure something but it's
| either hard to find, hard to change, people want to leave that
| setting as-is but still want your webpage/app to behave
| differently, or people don't even know about it. What this
| leads to having to wrap "native"/"system" UI for almost any
| option that decent number of users might want.
|
| Dark mode is another good example of this. A lot of app
| developers weren't able to just respect the system setting,
| instead they had to add a toggle/select to their options so
| users could pick "Follow system", "Always Light", or "Always
| Dark". Same thing with language and you never please everyone.
| If you add a website/app setting to change language there will
| be some number of users who complain that your app isn't
| following system settings (even if you set your own internal
| setting initially to match the system). You can normally
| satisfy most people with a "Follow System" or "Hardcode to X
| value" but it always feels a little gross to add yet another
| level of settings. In the same way you will almost never get a
| native Push Notification (or other permission) dialog in an
| app, first they pop their custom dialog and only if you say
| "Yes"/"Enable" will they pop the system one. I understand why
| and I've implemented this multiple times but it feels like
| there has to be a better middle ground between "You can only
| show the permission dialog once" and "You can spam it over and
| over indefinitely", I always hate having to create the "It
| looks like you've disabled this notification, here is how you
| can turn it on in your device settings"-screen.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| All my devices are set to English. But my bank's app is in
| Polish (using the app-specific override), partly because their
| English translation is mediocre, but also because I'd rather
| not do something dumb with my money due to a
| mistranslation/misunderstanding/different interpretation. Same
| goes for other local experiences. eg. takeway.com -- the
| restaurant menus would likely be in Polish anyway (though I can
| see some translated ones as well).
| Xophmeister wrote:
| What happens in countries that have multiple official languages
| that can't be determined geographically? I only assume such
| places exist, or there must be places on the borders where the
| accuracy of geo-IP and the demographics aren't clear-cut.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/zHE8R
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220311170532/https://smaller.fi...
| delecti wrote:
| I recently noticed this while browsing their device store from
| Germany. I couldn't get to the US shop no matter what I tried
| changing. There's a language and locale query parameter in the
| URL, but it will forcibly redirect you back if you try to change
| it. I'm not sure what it's even there for.
| _Anima_ wrote:
| I live in the French speaking part of Belgium and have configured
| all my devices in English for the past 15+ years.
|
| Apparently Google consider that if you are geo IP located in
| Belgium with your devices in English, you _have to be_ a Dutch
| speaker. While I would agree that French speaking Belgians are in
| majority using French UIs, there are exceptions. Please respect
| my browser settings!
|
| The solution? I have to put French in my browser accepted
| languages (not necessarily first) and then Google understand I'm
| not a Dutch speaker and will stick to English.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I wonder if you could also use en_GB with the same effect
| (though if your hack is working it's probably not worth
| changing).
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Shit, where were you all these years?
| dirkf wrote:
| For me it's often the other way around... system language is
| English but where possible (e.g. browser) I indicate
| Dutch/Flemish can also be used. Still, many websites seem to
| think that they should default to their French version despite
| my settings and even geo IP putting me in the non-French
| part...
|
| I wish they would stop guessing and just listen to the hints...
| andromeduck wrote:
| How did you even figure that one out?
| stffndtz wrote:
| Exactly my thought! Imagine the time spent on this..
| Fiahil wrote:
| I live in France, speak French, but work with English as my
| primary language.
|
| So, I had to make the same settings change, otherwise google
| would keep putting French searches before English ones
| (despite the fact that I searched with English keywords).
|
| I don't remember how I found this, but it might something
| along the lines of "I'm really annoyed today, let's fix this
| NOW". When you speak 2 languages or more, and they don't
| match with your location, Google, Microsoft, and most other
| big tech companies go completely nuts. So, you get used to
| fiddling with languages settings.
|
| I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most
| Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of
| internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more
| than one language.
|
| PS: Speech recognition, autocorrect, and mobile keyboards :
| Same problem.
|
| PS2: Apple get it right most of the time.
| S0und wrote:
| This is why I think Google assistant is absolutely useless.
| Try to call someone who has a name in X language on a
| device that is set to English. You just can't. I love Big
| tech circle jerk about diversity, that somehow stops at
| skincolor, gender and sexual identity. You happens to
| bilingual? Sorry our cutting edge AI can't handle that.
|
| Google all I want is a command for assistant, for example
| "OK Google, Call *in german/dutch/French/etc* <after this
| command everything will be interpreted on the given
| language, for the rest of the voice input>. See, it's not
| that hard.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > Google all I want is a command for assistant, for
| example "OK Google, Call _in german /dutch/French/etc_
| <after this command everything will be interpreted on the
| given language, for the rest of the voice input>. See,
| it's not that hard.
|
| I had the exact same idea, it seems Google really lack
| good product design.
| tonfa wrote:
| > I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that
| most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of
| internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak
| more than one language.
|
| Funny, if anything probably 80%+ of the eng folks in Europe
| for big tech speak more than one language (everyone who's
| not from UK or Ireland).
| tonfa wrote:
| I think they discovered the trick. Default headers might be
| ignored, but anything non default (e.g. en-gb, two languages,
| etc.) is assumed to be correct.
| _Anima_ wrote:
| Came across the solution by chance, a couple of years ago.
| It's really maddening.
| m348e912 wrote:
| This should be its own submission to HN
| chrisdbanks wrote:
| For me, whichever you choose, you should make it easy for the
| user to change the language. Living in Spain as an English
| speaker I often end up on a Spanish version with no obvious way
| to change to English. That is the real sin.
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