8 ms·

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone et

A bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make a decision, even though on OS level there's more fine grained locale settings.

leshenka 3y ago
Your browser doesn't give away this information. It's inconvenient in cases like yours but on the other hand it would be yet another signal in browser fingerprinting
- avereveard 3y ago
  Browsers always send the accept language you configured. It drives me nuts, most sites are geolocating me instead and serving me Spanish content. My browser is always sending accept language, and it's most often ignored than not, even frommthe big old web players (Google and Wikipedia to name a few)
  - codeflo 3y ago
    This used to work back in the old days, but more and more sites decides to ignore this a few years ago. The reasoning is that the percentage of users with misconfigured browsers (who don't know how to fix this and also don't know how to click a "change language" button on the website) is bigger than the percentage of users who intentionally use a language that's different from their geolocated one. So the ad-revenue maximizing choice is to ignore the user's configuration.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      That’s why I like travelling: I’ll get all my web content in English (the language I do know) and the ads in a language I don’t know (perfect).
      - yread 3y ago
        It used to work on Facebook to just change your location to a weird country and you would get their advertisements. Or none if there weren't any like for North Korea. Then I got banned on Airbnb (where I used Facebook login) because they thought I'm from North Korea and they would break sanctions by renting me a bnb...
josalhor 3y ago
I can select English UK and that seems to work pretty well.
- mort96 3y ago
  That's my solution in some places too. I generally want US spellings of words (especially in anything related to programming!) so "en_US language, Norwegian units/time/etc, but US number format" is my preferred set-up, but "UK everything" is an alright approximation of that for software which doesn't have that much specificity.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    Try Canadian English: en_CA. That might be an even closer approximation of what you want. (They still spell some words the British way, but a lot the American way).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
arka2147483647 3y ago
It really is incredible how many translated apps/websites talk like a drunken finn, when i set language to finnish. Only the things made by native finns seem to have good Finnish on them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperman1 3y ago
  It's the same in Dutch. In the past, Microsoft had very good translations, but even they seem detoriating. Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet. Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language. There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    GPT-4 is actually quite good with languages. You can even get it to do some local Dutch dialects. We use it (via the code gpt plugin) for helping us with localization files for apps. We just give it whole chunks of localization files (mozilla fluent) and task it with translating those while preserving the id structure. Aside from minor formatting issues, I've not caught it making any mistakes. I doubt we'll be working with external contractors for localizations again. It's also really good at doing things like synonyms. We used this to improve our icon search by letting it come up with comma separated lists of alternatives for each icon name. Worked really well too. And it can do fictional languages. We did a pirate speak localization a few weeks ago for international pirate day. Just for giggles but it works.
- matsemann 3y ago
  I think the problem stems from translators being sent a bunch of strings with little context. At least even when we hired professionals it could sometimes be a bit wonky, especially with shorter texts. For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..
ginko 3y ago
IMO the worst is that cal starts weeks on Sundays for some weird reason.
- brucedawson 3y ago
  Blame the bible. God created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh, which was Saturday. The real question is why the weekend was defined as straddling the last and first days of the week. Weird.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  As long as the boundary doesn’t happen in the middle of the work week, I find it completely arbitrary whether the official first day is Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Why’s it any more weird to start on one or the other?
  - matsemann 3y ago
    It just "feels wrong". Like, why is the weekend split in half? Doesn't map to my mental model of the world (which of course is influenced by how I'm used to seeing calendars). Related, but a few years ago the Norwegian broadcaster NRK asked people how the visualize a year. https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually-looks-like/ https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... (English version) Quite interesting how different people are. Mostly it's a clock of sorts. To me however it's more of a sine wave, where each year is one phase (summer on bottom), but it's kinda fractally so if I zoom in it got bumps for the months, smaller bumps on there again for the weeks etc.
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      That is interesting. I don’t really have a mental visualization for the concept of “year” at all. If I had to try I guess I’d just imagine a calendar (twelve month-pages). I wonder if visualizing a year as a circle is a particularly Norwegian thing, or if I’m the odd one out anywhere… Back to the subject of which day the week begins: I’d say the fact that the week begins on Sunday doesn’t have much of a meaning in US culture, if any. If I say “next week” at work, it clearly means “the next M-F period”. If I wanted to refer to Saturday and Sunday I’d say “this weekend”. So if what I normally mean by a week begins on Monday and ends on Friday, you have to slot the weekend on one of those ends, and it feels slightly wrong whichever way you do it. So, the only practical, concrete way in which “the week starts on Sunday” means anything to Americans is that we are used to seeing calendars printed with Sunday on the left, and Saturday on the right. I continue to maintain that this is arbitrary! But it does make me really confused when I have to use a calendar widget in an interface that wasn’t localized, and starts with a day other than Sunday, so I get your frustration.
reddalo 3y ago
I'm Italian and I have the same problem. You just have to set the system to English (UK) and all your problems will be fixed :)
- bjackman 3y ago
  Perhaps not all of your problems! I have my phone in en-gb and live in Switzerland. When I travel to the US it starts showing me temperatures in farenheit When I travel to the US/UK I _do_ actually want to start seeing distances in miles (I'm "bilingual" with m/km, it's useful to think in distances that locals understand and that match signage). So "just use my home locale's units all the time" wouldn't work (especially for speeds!). So yeah I guess localization is indeed hard! Honestly I've now just started trying to learn Farenheit! 90 is hot, 70 is nice, 50 is cold, 30 is ice.
- MayeulC 3y ago
  I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the "C" locale seems to default to metric units and a 24-hours date format.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  Except now the web browser will offer to translate every Italian website you visit.
  - reddalo 3y ago
    You can easily prevent that by choosing "Never translate Italian"
odiroot 3y ago
I usually set my system to English / Ireland. I get English but with normal units and € as a default currency.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  Many software also have a "English/Belgium", "English/Germany", or "English/Europe" locale. A fun trick is that if you install Windows 11 with the "English/Europe" locale, it doesn't install a lot of the bloatware because it's not defined for that location.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  I think en_IE is a rather undersold/underpromoted "international/european english" locale that more people should know about!
  - wink 3y ago
    I was recently recommended English (Canadian) for that reason but I've not yet managed to get Google Maps on my mobile to show me km instead of miles, no matter what setting. (It's not the account, because a desktop browser on a Windows with en_US and accept-language en/US will show km with English text). It is indeed infuriating.
Foobar8568 3y ago
You don't know the pain until you move to Switzerland. Geolocalisation to German websites or language, numerical format is a mess (sometimes thousand separators are either ' or space, huge mess in excel), cloud Saas providers believe only fr-FR or de-DE exists. Just awful...
- alpaca128 3y ago
  MS Visio refused to run in anything other than English on a PC I used because Windows was set to a specific flavor of German which Visio didn't have in its language list. As far as I could tell there was no way to change the program's language other than changing the OS language and reinstalling Visio. Now Firefox added stupid popups offering translating websites written in my native language because the OS is set to English. And they didn't see a need to create a checkbox for that outside of about:config (Mozilla, if you want to get rid of me you can just say so instead of spamming me with popups)
  - meithecatte 3y ago
    Pretty sure you can just click the dotted menu button on that popup and select "do not translate from $LANG".
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      But it still shows an icon on every non-english page despite me disabling the entire feature. Like back then with the unremovable Pocket button. What's the point of the program letting me unclutter the UI with the "customize toolbar" feature when it's constantly blocked for Mozilla's annoying feature of the month?
porbelm 3y ago
Hello, fellow mountain ape. I get Norwegian text in /some/ apps on the Mac even though Norwegian is 2nd in "preferred languages." I guess some use "Region" to decide instead of the logical setting. And setting the region to something else will cock up in other interesting ways by showing wrong units instead of the wrong language. Even the keyboard on my MBP is physically US ANSI, because if you've ever coded more than a hundred lines using brackets on an ISO keyboard you know why. I managed to get everything right in KDE on my PC though, by some weird way of using "Danish (UK)" or whatever it's called in some specific settings -- I don't even remember how or why but everything worked just right. Sorting, decimal point, app languages, everything. Could never replicate it though.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Yeah, one additional thing is that for Norwegian apps, I want the Norwegian version and not the English one. It's hard to get right, I guess. But what I generally want could be summarized as "give me the original version of the app if in Norwegian, if not give me the English version".
Jenda_ 3y ago
Same here, > However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. but also sensible sorting. I'm currently mixing en_DK, en_IE, en_US, C and cs_CZ (my native language) locales for various LC_*, but it's still not perfect and some apps (such as Thunderbird) ignore this anyway and others (Slack) have only one language setting, so I can select either US with 12-hour time or UK with UK spelling. Does anyone have a solution? Should a write a new locale?

leshenka 3y ago

Your browser doesn't give away this information. It's inconvenient in cases like yours but on the other hand it would be yet another signal in browser fingerprinting

avereveard 3y ago
Browsers always send the accept language you configured. It drives me nuts, most sites are geolocating me instead and serving me Spanish content. My browser is always sending accept language, and it's most often ignored than not, even frommthe big old web players (Google and Wikipedia to name a few)
- codeflo 3y ago
  This used to work back in the old days, but more and more sites decides to ignore this a few years ago. The reasoning is that the percentage of users with misconfigured browsers (who don't know how to fix this and also don't know how to click a "change language" button on the website) is bigger than the percentage of users who intentionally use a language that's different from their geolocated one. So the ad-revenue maximizing choice is to ignore the user's configuration.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    That’s why I like travelling: I’ll get all my web content in English (the language I do know) and the ads in a language I don’t know (perfect).
    - yread 3y ago
      It used to work on Facebook to just change your location to a weird country and you would get their advertisements. Or none if there weren't any like for North Korea. Then I got banned on Airbnb (where I used Facebook login) because they thought I'm from North Korea and they would break sanctions by renting me a bnb...

josalhor 3y ago

I can select English UK and that seems to work pretty well.

mort96 3y ago
That's my solution in some places too. I generally want US spellings of words (especially in anything related to programming!) so "en_US language, Norwegian units/time/etc, but US number format" is my preferred set-up, but "UK everything" is an alright approximation of that for software which doesn't have that much specificity.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Try Canadian English: en_CA. That might be an even closer approximation of what you want. (They still spell some words the British way, but a lot the American way).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

arka2147483647 3y ago

It really is incredible how many translated apps/websites talk like a drunken finn, when i set language to finnish. Only the things made by native finns seem to have good Finnish on them.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hyperman1 3y ago
It's the same in Dutch. In the past, Microsoft had very good translations, but even they seem detoriating. Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet. Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language. There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  GPT-4 is actually quite good with languages. You can even get it to do some local Dutch dialects. We use it (via the code gpt plugin) for helping us with localization files for apps. We just give it whole chunks of localization files (mozilla fluent) and task it with translating those while preserving the id structure. Aside from minor formatting issues, I've not caught it making any mistakes. I doubt we'll be working with external contractors for localizations again. It's also really good at doing things like synonyms. We used this to improve our icon search by letting it come up with comma separated lists of alternatives for each icon name. Worked really well too. And it can do fictional languages. We did a pirate speak localization a few weeks ago for international pirate day. Just for giggles but it works.
matsemann 3y ago
I think the problem stems from translators being sent a bunch of strings with little context. At least even when we hired professionals it could sometimes be a bit wonky, especially with shorter texts. For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..

ginko 3y ago

IMO the worst is that cal starts weeks on Sundays for some weird reason.

brucedawson 3y ago
Blame the bible. God created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh, which was Saturday. The real question is why the weekend was defined as straddling the last and first days of the week. Weird.
School-Cotton 3y ago
As long as the boundary doesn’t happen in the middle of the work week, I find it completely arbitrary whether the official first day is Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Why’s it any more weird to start on one or the other?
- matsemann 3y ago
  It just "feels wrong". Like, why is the weekend split in half? Doesn't map to my mental model of the world (which of course is influenced by how I'm used to seeing calendars). Related, but a few years ago the Norwegian broadcaster NRK asked people how the visualize a year. https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually-looks-like/ https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... (English version) Quite interesting how different people are. Mostly it's a clock of sorts. To me however it's more of a sine wave, where each year is one phase (summer on bottom), but it's kinda fractally so if I zoom in it got bumps for the months, smaller bumps on there again for the weeks etc.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    That is interesting. I don’t really have a mental visualization for the concept of “year” at all. If I had to try I guess I’d just imagine a calendar (twelve month-pages). I wonder if visualizing a year as a circle is a particularly Norwegian thing, or if I’m the odd one out anywhere… Back to the subject of which day the week begins: I’d say the fact that the week begins on Sunday doesn’t have much of a meaning in US culture, if any. If I say “next week” at work, it clearly means “the next M-F period”. If I wanted to refer to Saturday and Sunday I’d say “this weekend”. So if what I normally mean by a week begins on Monday and ends on Friday, you have to slot the weekend on one of those ends, and it feels slightly wrong whichever way you do it. So, the only practical, concrete way in which “the week starts on Sunday” means anything to Americans is that we are used to seeing calendars printed with Sunday on the left, and Saturday on the right. I continue to maintain that this is arbitrary! But it does make me really confused when I have to use a calendar widget in an interface that wasn’t localized, and starts with a day other than Sunday, so I get your frustration.

reddalo 3y ago

I'm Italian and I have the same problem. You just have to set the system to English (UK) and all your problems will be fixed :)

bjackman 3y ago
Perhaps not all of your problems! I have my phone in en-gb and live in Switzerland. When I travel to the US it starts showing me temperatures in farenheit When I travel to the US/UK I _do_ actually want to start seeing distances in miles (I'm "bilingual" with m/km, it's useful to think in distances that locals understand and that match signage). So "just use my home locale's units all the time" wouldn't work (especially for speeds!). So yeah I guess localization is indeed hard! Honestly I've now just started trying to learn Farenheit! 90 is hot, 70 is nice, 50 is cold, 30 is ice.
MayeulC 3y ago
I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the "C" locale seems to default to metric units and a 24-hours date format.
alpaca128 3y ago
Except now the web browser will offer to translate every Italian website you visit.
- reddalo 3y ago
  You can easily prevent that by choosing "Never translate Italian"

odiroot 3y ago

I usually set my system to English / Ireland. I get English but with normal units and € as a default currency.

benhurmarcel 3y ago
Many software also have a "English/Belgium", "English/Germany", or "English/Europe" locale. A fun trick is that if you install Windows 11 with the "English/Europe" locale, it doesn't install a lot of the bloatware because it's not defined for that location.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
I think en_IE is a rather undersold/underpromoted "international/european english" locale that more people should know about!
- wink 3y ago
  I was recently recommended English (Canadian) for that reason but I've not yet managed to get Google Maps on my mobile to show me km instead of miles, no matter what setting. (It's not the account, because a desktop browser on a Windows with en_US and accept-language en/US will show km with English text). It is indeed infuriating.

Foobar8568 3y ago

You don't know the pain until you move to Switzerland. Geolocalisation to German websites or language, numerical format is a mess (sometimes thousand separators are either ' or space, huge mess in excel), cloud Saas providers believe only fr-FR or de-DE exists. Just awful...

alpaca128 3y ago
MS Visio refused to run in anything other than English on a PC I used because Windows was set to a specific flavor of German which Visio didn't have in its language list. As far as I could tell there was no way to change the program's language other than changing the OS language and reinstalling Visio. Now Firefox added stupid popups offering translating websites written in my native language because the OS is set to English. And they didn't see a need to create a checkbox for that outside of about:config (Mozilla, if you want to get rid of me you can just say so instead of spamming me with popups)
- meithecatte 3y ago
  Pretty sure you can just click the dotted menu button on that popup and select "do not translate from $LANG".
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    But it still shows an icon on every non-english page despite me disabling the entire feature. Like back then with the unremovable Pocket button. What's the point of the program letting me unclutter the UI with the "customize toolbar" feature when it's constantly blocked for Mozilla's annoying feature of the month?

porbelm 3y ago

Hello, fellow mountain ape. I get Norwegian text in /some/ apps on the Mac even though Norwegian is 2nd in "preferred languages." I guess some use "Region" to decide instead of the logical setting. And setting the region to something else will cock up in other interesting ways by showing wrong units instead of the wrong language. Even the keyboard on my MBP is physically US ANSI, because if you've ever coded more than a hundred lines using brackets on an ISO keyboard you know why. I managed to get everything right in KDE on my PC though, by some weird way of using "Danish (UK)" or whatever it's called in some specific settings -- I don't even remember how or why but everything worked just right. Sorting, decimal point, app languages, everything. Could never replicate it though.

matsemann 3y ago
Yeah, one additional thing is that for Norwegian apps, I want the Norwegian version and not the English one. It's hard to get right, I guess. But what I generally want could be summarized as "give me the original version of the app if in Norwegian, if not give me the English version".

Jenda_ 3y ago

Same here, > However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. but also sensible sorting. I'm currently mixing en_DK, en_IE, en_US, C and cs_CZ (my native language) locales for various LC_*, but it's still not perfect and some apps (such as Thunderbird) ignore this anyway and others (Slack) have only one language setting, so I can select either US with 12-hour time or UK with UK spelling. Does anyone have a solution? Should a write a new locale?