Still a lot of websites (including Google) ignore "Accept-Language" header, and show language based on my geolocated IP address. Dude, if I'm visiting Netherlands it doesn't mean I speak Dutch. At least I can guess some words cause it's Latin alphabet. But when I visited Georgia I had no idea what მიღება even sounds like.
But despite having learned the Georgian alphabet and being able to read მიღება as "migheba" I still am none the wiser since I have no idea what that means.
Today my kid bought a pokemon toy and the box was only in Japanese. I proudly deciphered
ニャスパー as "nyas'paa" but my son only recognized the name when I googled it and found the English spelling "nyasper" (we're not native English speakers so perhaps the translation would have been more obvious to some of you).
Long story short: knowing writing systems is super fun but often you need to know more about the actual language. That's especially true with languages like Arabic that don't spell out all the vowels
That's really the core of the issue. Language switching is such a common thing that it should be part of Web infrastructure itself, not the individual Website, and it sort of is. But most Websites ignore those preferences and browsers have those settings hidden so deep away that no user will even be aware of them.
Having a little icon in your browser, not the Website, to switch language would make this issue largely go away. What symbol you use in the end doesn't really matter, the issue is that every site does it a little differently.
That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the browser. But by default, the entire stack should respect the setting I configured at the top.
I'm bilingual, I prefer apps and websites to be in their original language of if it's one of the languages I speak, because that gets me the best experience.
There's nothing worse than apps that are badly translated with no easy way to switch them to English just because they decided that they should use the OS language.
Same thing (trilingual), but haven't seen such a poorly translated website to be nothing worse. Translated websites, even if poorly, are better than a language I don't speak.
Typically website translations are pretty good, when they already invested resources into translations.
The setting I have on the top has nothing to do with anything on some website. With website, I want it in original language, whatever it is, especially if I know the language at least a little.
With apps, I want to pick the translation per app, again what I have set into windows has nothing to do with what I want in app.
Me setting a windows language should not cascade to any webpage. And I never ever want the automatic AI translation.
That’s quite a rabbit hole, but I agree. I wouldn’t want things to start being machine translated to match my OS locale. But I would prefer maps.google.com not to default to Georgian just because I get IP geolocated there. It should give preference to my OS config.
I’m saying this as someone who’s bilingual and lives in a foreign country. I usually want things in my mother tongue, but I’d prefer the original language to some crappy translation.
Great idea! I guess though you'd need a new header for a website to declare what languages a page is available in, so the menu options in the browser would only show languages that are actually available? Or a new meta tag? Or maybe there is one already?
And in such cases, having a flag as a language switcher is a godsend.
Of course, with google, you are likely logged in with an account and they should know better, but most other websites you visit, you are not, so they give you the version local to where you are, as that’s usually more correct than not.
Also, the Accept-Language header supports multiple languages. I want to read everything I can in the original, rather then having everything translated, but even websites that use the language header often only consider the first entry.
> I want to read everything I can in the original, rather then having everything translated, but even websites that use the language header often only consider the first entry.
Unfortunately that's not solvable with the current system which only allows listing a preferred order of languages and that's that.
Like if I'd list English first, I risk getting English content even on pages originally written in my native language, if I put my native language first, then e.g. MSDN puts up so so-quality machine translations instead of the original English.
In theory you'd have to differentiate between at least native text, high quality translations and low quality translations. Now good luck creating an UI for that and also good luck for getting publishers to classify their websites and its contents according to such a scheme…
