3 ms·

I hate how automatic translations are treated on the web as if they were respectable translations, provided by professionals! I can read three languages, and I

by pif 3y ago

I hate how automatic translations are treated on the web as if they were respectable translations, provided by professionals! I can read three languages, and I'd like my browser to pick the "main" version of a page if it happens to be in any of those three languages, and only resort to translated ones if necessary. But there is no way to get this behaviour! And I'd like so much for google to serve me Wikipedia pages in Italian or French if the subject concerns Italy or France, and only resort to English as a fallback, but no way, again! If I set my main language to something other than English, I'll always get poorly translated MSDN documentation, and ugly web surfing in general. As such, I'm stuck with poorly translated youtube video titles, and English Wikipedia when searching about a monument in my hometown.

yorwba 3y ago
In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough to get the behavior you want, but of course that requires every single server to implement support, so in practice many sites will keep redirecting you to a different version based on IP geolocation. But <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="..."/> tags are pretty common for SEO, so maybe an extension could parse those to check whether you would prefer one of the other versions.
- pif 3y ago
  > In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough No, it is not enough, because there is no way to tell: "Pick the source in my 3rd language rather than the translation in my 1st language".
  - Hackbraten 3y ago
    I use the Accept-Language per site add-on [1] for this. It allows me to map top-level domains to preferred languages. Most of the time, this has worked well for me on sites which respect the header. For example, `.de` sites tend to be originally written in German, so I map the `*.de` pattern to the German language. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...
  - samus 3y ago
    The browser UI is missing. There might be extensions that scratch that itch.
- iggldiggl 3y ago
  > In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough to get the behavior you want… I don't think so. Accept-language doesn't allow you to differentiate between high quality and low quality content in the same language. With accept-language you could say that you prefer Italian or French over English where available, but that means you might also be served a crappy Italian/French machine translation on occasion, even though in that case you'd have preferred the English text. (Microsoft for example seems to honour the accept-language header when looking at its documentation pages, but unfortunately that means that by default I get served the German page, which quite likely feels somewhat off due to having been machine-translated.)
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    There’s the Q factor in the Accept-Language header that allows you to indicate your preference for the quality level of the translation. In practice, however, it is difficult to obtain such a quantification. Further, if you could quantify the translation, you can also just improve them instead.
    - iggldiggl 3y ago
      > There’s the Q factor in the Accept-Language header that allows you to indicate your preference for the quality level of the translation. ??? The q factor is just for ordering the language preferences from top to bottom (i.e. it doesn't matter whether I write "de,en;q=0.8" or "en;q=0.8,de" because both of them mean that I prefer German over English because German is implicitly q=1.0 and en is explicitly only q=0.8) and doesn't say anything about the quality of the content.
      - yorwba 3y ago
        They're called quality values because they're intended to negotiate the tradeoff between different ways to serve the same content in different formats of varying quality, e.g. highly compressed JPEG with artifacts vs lossless PNG. Applying this to Accept-Language, "de,en;q=0.8" means "I prefer German content unless it's less than 80% as good as the English alternative." Of course in practice servers tend to treat all content they have as quality 1 and all content they don't have as quality 0 and then the lovingly crafted fractional quality values collapse to a simple ordered list. ("We serve what we have and you eat what you get.")
kridsdale1 3y ago
The web, like all software, is designed mostly for well off white American men who live in Northern California. They don’t tend to even speak Spanish. Multi linguals face UX issues most professionals in the space are completely ignorant of.
Mathnerd314 3y ago
There are extensions that let you set per-site scripting policies (NoScript) and per-site cookie policies (Cookie AutoDelete, others) but I took a quick look on the Firefox add-on site and there aren't any extensions that let you set a per-site browser locale, only ones for quickly switching it globally.
- djsavvy 3y ago
  I haven’t used it myself, but someone elsewhere in the comments linked this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...
numpad0 3y ago
I kind of wonder what it is that giving false impression to NA English speakers, that machine translations is something that works or something less worse than humans, when it isn't quite. By wonder, I don't necessarily mean it as in euphemism for "it is infuriating to me that X is Y" wonder: I've seen translation horror stories that, there allegedly are weird dogmatically motivated English translators that constantly abuse their power to just use foreign content as vehicles for their agendas, while original authors being unable to proofread themselves or chalking up noted oddities to their own skill issues until all is too late. That kind of weird translation is not a typical experience for me relying translations to my primary language, and I suspect nor it is to most various non-English language speakers, but especially the recent wide and big push on MT as well as high praises on GPT translations seems to roughly in line with that abusive translator horror stories. And here I wonder; is _that_ it, or am I overthinking it?
- pjc50 3y ago
  > there allegedly are weird dogmatically motivated English translators that constantly abuse their power to just use foreign content as vehicles for their agendas, while original authors being unable to proofread themselves or chalking up noted oddities to their own skill issues until all is too late. I've seen references to this as well, but I've not seen a source that isn't themselves trying to stir up some sort of drama or bait a particular fandom. Could you elaborate? I suspect the underlying phenomenon is simply English monolingualism - educated people around the world are generally expected to understand at least one second language, which is usually English due to the Internet and Hollywood. So they're familiar with being able to read both sides of a translation and judge it. While the monoglots simply regard the production of a piece of text they can't read by a machine as job done.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Not GP, but an example that comes to mind is the trend of Victorian-era (British) translators bowdlerizing texts to align them with typical Victorian values and writing quirks. Although obviously not machine translated in those days :P
kivle 3y ago
I would suggest that companies should stop machine translating any language that's actually present in the Accept-Language header. If my Accept-Language header is "no-nb, en-us, en-gb" it means that I have declared that I _know_ all these languages, but if you have a high quality version of Norwegian I'd prefer it. Do not try to be "helpful" by forcing a machine translation from English to Norwegian on me. However if there is a useful review in French, providing it machine translated is perfectly fine. All Google products are notorious for this. Google Play, Google Maps Reviews etc. will be poorly translated into Norwegian, instead of being left as is.

by pif 3y ago

yorwba 3y ago

In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough to get the behavior you want, but of course that requires every single server to implement support, so in practice many sites will keep redirecting you to a different version based on IP geolocation. But <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="..."/> tags are pretty common for SEO, so maybe an extension could parse those to check whether you would prefer one of the other versions.

pif 3y ago
> In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough No, it is not enough, because there is no way to tell: "Pick the source in my 3rd language rather than the translation in my 1st language".
- Hackbraten 3y ago
  I use the Accept-Language per site add-on [1] for this. It allows me to map top-level domains to preferred languages. Most of the time, this has worked well for me on sites which respect the header. For example, `.de` sites tend to be originally written in German, so I map the `*.de` pattern to the German language. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...
- samus 3y ago
  The browser UI is missing. There might be extensions that scratch that itch.
iggldiggl 3y ago
> In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough to get the behavior you want… I don't think so. Accept-language doesn't allow you to differentiate between high quality and low quality content in the same language. With accept-language you could say that you prefer Italian or French over English where available, but that means you might also be served a crappy Italian/French machine translation on occasion, even though in that case you'd have preferred the English text. (Microsoft for example seems to honour the accept-language header when looking at its documentation pages, but unfortunately that means that by default I get served the German page, which quite likely feels somewhat off due to having been machine-translated.)
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  There’s the Q factor in the Accept-Language header that allows you to indicate your preference for the quality level of the translation. In practice, however, it is difficult to obtain such a quantification. Further, if you could quantify the translation, you can also just improve them instead.
  - iggldiggl 3y ago
    > There’s the Q factor in the Accept-Language header that allows you to indicate your preference for the quality level of the translation. ??? The q factor is just for ordering the language preferences from top to bottom (i.e. it doesn't matter whether I write "de,en;q=0.8" or "en;q=0.8,de" because both of them mean that I prefer German over English because German is implicitly q=1.0 and en is explicitly only q=0.8) and doesn't say anything about the quality of the content.
    - yorwba 3y ago
      They're called quality values because they're intended to negotiate the tradeoff between different ways to serve the same content in different formats of varying quality, e.g. highly compressed JPEG with artifacts vs lossless PNG. Applying this to Accept-Language, "de,en;q=0.8" means "I prefer German content unless it's less than 80% as good as the English alternative." Of course in practice servers tend to treat all content they have as quality 1 and all content they don't have as quality 0 and then the lovingly crafted fractional quality values collapse to a simple ordered list. ("We serve what we have and you eat what you get.")

kridsdale1 3y ago

The web, like all software, is designed mostly for well off white American men who live in Northern California. They don’t tend to even speak Spanish. Multi linguals face UX issues most professionals in the space are completely ignorant of.

Mathnerd314 3y ago

There are extensions that let you set per-site scripting policies (NoScript) and per-site cookie policies (Cookie AutoDelete, others) but I took a quick look on the Firefox add-on site and there aren't any extensions that let you set a per-site browser locale, only ones for quickly switching it globally.

djsavvy 3y ago
I haven’t used it myself, but someone elsewhere in the comments linked this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...

numpad0 3y ago

I kind of wonder what it is that giving false impression to NA English speakers, that machine translations is something that works or something less worse than humans, when it isn't quite. By wonder, I don't necessarily mean it as in euphemism for "it is infuriating to me that X is Y" wonder: I've seen translation horror stories that, there allegedly are weird dogmatically motivated English translators that constantly abuse their power to just use foreign content as vehicles for their agendas, while original authors being unable to proofread themselves or chalking up noted oddities to their own skill issues until all is too late. That kind of weird translation is not a typical experience for me relying translations to my primary language, and I suspect nor it is to most various non-English language speakers, but especially the recent wide and big push on MT as well as high praises on GPT translations seems to roughly in line with that abusive translator horror stories. And here I wonder; is _that_ it, or am I overthinking it?

pjc50 3y ago
> there allegedly are weird dogmatically motivated English translators that constantly abuse their power to just use foreign content as vehicles for their agendas, while original authors being unable to proofread themselves or chalking up noted oddities to their own skill issues until all is too late. I've seen references to this as well, but I've not seen a source that isn't themselves trying to stir up some sort of drama or bait a particular fandom. Could you elaborate? I suspect the underlying phenomenon is simply English monolingualism - educated people around the world are generally expected to understand at least one second language, which is usually English due to the Internet and Hollywood. So they're familiar with being able to read both sides of a translation and judge it. While the monoglots simply regard the production of a piece of text they can't read by a machine as job done.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Not GP, but an example that comes to mind is the trend of Victorian-era (British) translators bowdlerizing texts to align them with typical Victorian values and writing quirks. Although obviously not machine translated in those days :P

kivle 3y ago

I would suggest that companies should stop machine translating any language that's actually present in the Accept-Language header. If my Accept-Language header is "no-nb, en-us, en-gb" it means that I have declared that I _know_ all these languages, but if you have a high quality version of Norwegian I'd prefer it. Do not try to be "helpful" by forcing a machine translation from English to Norwegian on me. However if there is a useful review in French, providing it machine translated is perfectly fine. All Google products are notorious for this. Google Play, Google Maps Reviews etc. will be poorly translated into Norwegian, instead of being left as is.