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Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons a

by elric 1y ago

Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons and the list of languages to the current language .... which is beyond fucking stupid and defeats the purpose. Wikipedia does this right. The button to switch languages is clear, using a universal multilanguage icon, and a list of languages (using the name of the language in that same language) in alphabetical order, with the most likely candidates on the top (presumably based on geoip). E.g. an English Wikipedia page will present me with the following language suggestions: Suggested languages Deutsch Français Nederlands When you assume a language, you make an ass of you and of me. Don't be an ass. Be like Wikipedia.

e-topy 1y ago
And it even remembers what you chose last time and pushes it to the top. That is UX. Being actually helpful and not fucking annoying.
- whstl 1y ago
  Oh nice! I never noticed that "Suggested languages" shows languages I previously selected. But additionally, I like how it's not simply "pushing to the top", it does shows a previously selected language on the top, but it still keeps it duplicate in the list below, in case the user is going by muscle memory. To me this is the best way. Either make it VERY OBVIOUS that you're removing the item from the bottom of the list (which wouldn't be possible here), or don't remove it at all. If I had a cent for each time a SaaS made my life harder by trying to "help me" I would be CEO of every SaaS I use.
CGamesPlay 1y ago
> in alphabetical order Well, it's in an order, but I don't know about alphabetical. I clicked on today's English featured article and looked at the languages: "中文", "Italiano" are "suggested", then the remainder are grouped by geographic region, and aren't particularly alphabetical. They appear to be in groups which are still not alphabetical. Europe seems to have a Cyrillic group but "Қазақша" is shown after "Українська" which isn't accurate in Kazakh and probably also unexpected for anybody who isn't familiar with the letter Қ (Қ isn't a letter in Russian, this is probably why this happens). The Chinese languages don't seem to be in stroke order (no expert here), although Korean is below them (because of course, K for Korean alphabetizes after C for Chinese). Anyways, no hate for Wikipedia; they do a great job of localizing. Just a bit of nuance/pedantry about how you can't "alphabetize" language names in their own language.
- euazOn 1y ago
  Yes, that’s confusing and probably hard to find a good balance. Someone speaking Greek or Czech may expect to find their language around E (Ελληνικά) or C (Čeština), but nope, on Wiki it’s all the way after Z.
  - af78 1y ago
    I guess the default (when no language is specified) is Unicode order: U+005A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z U+010C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON U+0395 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
  - nis251413 1y ago
    Don’t special characters always go after the Latin alphabet? I think this is pretty common, and fairly expected behaviour. Of course nothing is perfect but I feel like the way Wikipedia handles it is consistent.
    - makapuf 1y ago
      Well in my language "é" is absolutely not special, and should definitively be placed near "e" (to the point that uppercase é is often written E instead of É)
    - e-topy 1y ago
      Not in the Czech alphabet: a, á, b, c, č, d, ď, e, é, ě, ... Also, we regard 'Ch' as its own letter. So yeah, try sorting alphabetically. I'll wait.
      - bmn__ 1y ago
        perl -E'Unicode::Collate::Locale->new(locale => 'cs')->sort … … …' works. Test cases at https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?action=view&id=900 https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?action=view&id=900
        mulmen 1y ago
TheJoeMan 1y ago
I can give a perfect bad example: the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic. This is the Google support article: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 telling me the buttons to press in English. Also, I don't know/speak Amharic, and so at the time had no idea what language it was, and the iPhone translate doesn't even recognize this Ethiopian language. Bit of a pickle that could have easily been mitigated by a universal multilanguage icon.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic Was this about 6 weeks ago?
  - TheJoeMan 1y ago
    Yes, actually. Is there an article about it? After updating to iOS 18.4, Amharic was appended to the end of the list of preferred languages in the iPhone Settings app. However, what's interesting is it was ranked below English, and apps are supposed to use the languages list in order, but perhaps Youtube is alphabetically sorting the list?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Yes, actually. Is there an article about it? Not that I know of. It just happened to me, too, around then. I thought it had to do with my pet fascination with the Ethiopian civil war and GERD.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  You can set the language individually per app in the iOS settings. But I thought it defaulted to your global setting.
- distances 1y ago
  Or the ChatGPT app which can be baffling. My phone language is English, I've set ChatGPT app specifically to English in the app settings, I ask my questions in English, and every now and then it still decides to answer in German.
derf_ 1y ago
My favorite is the sites who do parse Accept-Languages, but then pick the last one in the list instead of the first. I have mine in rough order of my competence in them, which gets me my least-competent language on some sites even when my most-competent is supported. I get a kick out of it when I see it, because you can understand how it happens. "Well, at least you tried."
- bmn__ 1y ago
  It is wrong to blame the server here. For better results in content-negotiation, a user-agent should allow you to assign numeric weights instead of just a list (implying the same level of preference). Example: Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3 If you already send something similar to this, and the server gets it wrong, then this is an outright bug, the software or its operator is out of compliance with HTTP.
  - drtgh 1y ago
    This parameter, at first glance, appears to be used as numeric weights for automatic translations served by default, what turns browsing very uncomfortable (wrong translations, distorted texts). Ie. Google, Youtube, Reddit. Automatic translations should never be served by default, but only be loaded if the user requests it. The classical "do you want translate".
    - bmn__ 1y ago
      It was and still is used for manually translated text, among other things. Does this help you get the full picture?
      - drtgh 1y ago
        I don't need help, I'm criticising the use of the automatic translations served by default, and that are being used the weights of this parameter to do it. The full picture? The weights seem to be more useful for fingerprinting and perhaps for server SEO than to help the users. Users who in the end will have to give the same weight to all the languages, or rewrite the outgoing headers, in order to be able to browse the Internet.
gus_massa 1y ago
99% agree, but there is a problem on mobile, to switch from Spanish to English when I click the glass to search for alternatives. I have to type "Ing" (that are the first letters of "Inglés") while it shows "English" in the list of matches. It would be better if I can type both "Ing" or "Eng".
- netsharc 1y ago
  It's even more amusing when the displayed list looks like it's sorted randomly, but in reality it's sorted alphabetically in a different language to the display language.. e.g. Nederlands English Français Deutsch Espagnol (but if sorted in English: Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish)
- elric 1y ago
  I don't understand why you would want to select Inglés instead of English? You want to selecf English, or Español, or Nederlands, or Deutsch, or whatever language. If makes no sense for it to be translated.
  - gus_massa 1y ago
    Only in a very few weird corner cases. If it's an article about a city in Germany, I may like to see the article in German and use autotranslation to read t in English or Spanish. Sometimes the article in the local language has more info. I had that problem in comments about places or events in Argentina. Sometimes the English article has less info than the Spanish article, so I made a link to the autotranslation.
tlb 1y ago
There are two levels of this. If I get some other European language, I can generally figure out which is their word for English and it's not a big deal to switch. But if it gives me a script I don't know, like Bengali or something, it's a problem. Perhaps every "choose language" menu should include English and Chinese in non-localized form, as an escape hatch, since almost every web users can recognize enough of them to navigate a menu to find their actual language.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Just include languages in their own script only. Why would a user need to select a language from that menu for which they DON’T know the target script? Showing Bengali in Bengali script is exactly what you want.
- bawolff 1y ago
  True, but how often do you want to select a language you can't read?
dalmo3 1y ago
Funny. The Wikipedia home page has a "Language" button. Like that, in plain English. And it is translated to the language you switch to.
magicalhippo 1y ago
A related issue that has me fuming is when, after arriving at a page of interest from a search engine, a modal popup forces me to select the country I'm from, and then promptly redirects me to the homepage of the regional website. Some have a X button to close said dialog, but many don't which is really aggravating.
- wudu 1y ago
  Google does this. I want to check out the new device they just released - "sorry, this product is not available in your country". I just wanted to read the specs, not buy.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Products don’t get to be informed about the factory in which they are made, or which shop they are to be sold.
- numpad0 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/869/ https://xkcd.com/869/
  - uselesswords 1y ago
    https://bbc.co.uk https://bbc.co.uk sends me to https://bbc.com https://bbc.com in the states and it is just infuriating
lxgr 1y ago
Ironically, given TFA, it seems to be primarily using the user's IP: > How does Universal Language Selector determine which languages I may understand > ULS queries a service that determines your originating country based on your IP address. This is inaccurate in some cases. Based on the country code, most often spoken languages are suggested for you. (from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ#How_does_Universal_Language_Selector_determine_which_languages_I_may_understand https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/F...)
Nemo_bis 1y ago
Indeed. Wikimedia wikis' language selection feature relies on Unicode CLDR language-territory data. This is very complex to maintain (and there are still many mistakes to fix), because reliable data is expensive to collect. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ#language-territory https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/F...

by elric 1y ago

e-topy 1y ago

And it even remembers what you chose last time and pushes it to the top. That is UX. Being actually helpful and not fucking annoying.

whstl 1y ago
Oh nice! I never noticed that "Suggested languages" shows languages I previously selected. But additionally, I like how it's not simply "pushing to the top", it does shows a previously selected language on the top, but it still keeps it duplicate in the list below, in case the user is going by muscle memory. To me this is the best way. Either make it VERY OBVIOUS that you're removing the item from the bottom of the list (which wouldn't be possible here), or don't remove it at all. If I had a cent for each time a SaaS made my life harder by trying to "help me" I would be CEO of every SaaS I use.

CGamesPlay 1y ago

> in alphabetical order Well, it's in an order, but I don't know about alphabetical. I clicked on today's English featured article and looked at the languages: "中文", "Italiano" are "suggested", then the remainder are grouped by geographic region, and aren't particularly alphabetical. They appear to be in groups which are still not alphabetical. Europe seems to have a Cyrillic group but "Қазақша" is shown after "Українська" which isn't accurate in Kazakh and probably also unexpected for anybody who isn't familiar with the letter Қ (Қ isn't a letter in Russian, this is probably why this happens). The Chinese languages don't seem to be in stroke order (no expert here), although Korean is below them (because of course, K for Korean alphabetizes after C for Chinese). Anyways, no hate for Wikipedia; they do a great job of localizing. Just a bit of nuance/pedantry about how you can't "alphabetize" language names in their own language.

euazOn 1y ago
Yes, that’s confusing and probably hard to find a good balance. Someone speaking Greek or Czech may expect to find their language around E (Ελληνικά) or C (Čeština), but nope, on Wiki it’s all the way after Z.
- af78 1y ago
  I guess the default (when no language is specified) is Unicode order: U+005A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z U+010C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON U+0395 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
- nis251413 1y ago
  Don’t special characters always go after the Latin alphabet? I think this is pretty common, and fairly expected behaviour. Of course nothing is perfect but I feel like the way Wikipedia handles it is consistent.
  - makapuf 1y ago
    Well in my language "é" is absolutely not special, and should definitively be placed near "e" (to the point that uppercase é is often written E instead of É)
  - e-topy 1y ago
    Not in the Czech alphabet: a, á, b, c, č, d, ď, e, é, ě, ... Also, we regard 'Ch' as its own letter. So yeah, try sorting alphabetically. I'll wait.
    - bmn__ 1y ago
      perl -E'Unicode::Collate::Locale->new(locale => 'cs')->sort … … …' works. Test cases at https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?action=view&id=900 https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?action=view&id=900
      - mulmen 1y ago

TheJoeMan 1y ago

I can give a perfect bad example: the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic. This is the Google support article: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/87604 telling me the buttons to press in English. Also, I don't know/speak Amharic, and so at the time had no idea what language it was, and the iPhone translate doesn't even recognize this Ethiopian language. Bit of a pickle that could have easily been mitigated by a universal multilanguage icon.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> the Youtube app on my iPhone somehow determined to change to Amharic Was this about 6 weeks ago?
- TheJoeMan 1y ago
  Yes, actually. Is there an article about it? After updating to iOS 18.4, Amharic was appended to the end of the list of preferred languages in the iPhone Settings app. However, what's interesting is it was ranked below English, and apps are supposed to use the languages list in order, but perhaps Youtube is alphabetically sorting the list?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Yes, actually. Is there an article about it? Not that I know of. It just happened to me, too, around then. I thought it had to do with my pet fascination with the Ethiopian civil war and GERD.
hombre_fatal 1y ago
You can set the language individually per app in the iOS settings. But I thought it defaulted to your global setting.
distances 1y ago
Or the ChatGPT app which can be baffling. My phone language is English, I've set ChatGPT app specifically to English in the app settings, I ask my questions in English, and every now and then it still decides to answer in German.

derf_ 1y ago

My favorite is the sites who do parse Accept-Languages, but then pick the last one in the list instead of the first. I have mine in rough order of my competence in them, which gets me my least-competent language on some sites even when my most-competent is supported. I get a kick out of it when I see it, because you can understand how it happens. "Well, at least you tried."

bmn__ 1y ago
It is wrong to blame the server here. For better results in content-negotiation, a user-agent should allow you to assign numeric weights instead of just a list (implying the same level of preference). Example: Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3 If you already send something similar to this, and the server gets it wrong, then this is an outright bug, the software or its operator is out of compliance with HTTP.
- drtgh 1y ago
  This parameter, at first glance, appears to be used as numeric weights for automatic translations served by default, what turns browsing very uncomfortable (wrong translations, distorted texts). Ie. Google, Youtube, Reddit. Automatic translations should never be served by default, but only be loaded if the user requests it. The classical "do you want translate".
  - bmn__ 1y ago
    It was and still is used for manually translated text, among other things. Does this help you get the full picture?
    - drtgh 1y ago
      I don't need help, I'm criticising the use of the automatic translations served by default, and that are being used the weights of this parameter to do it. The full picture? The weights seem to be more useful for fingerprinting and perhaps for server SEO than to help the users. Users who in the end will have to give the same weight to all the languages, or rewrite the outgoing headers, in order to be able to browse the Internet.

gus_massa 1y ago

99% agree, but there is a problem on mobile, to switch from Spanish to English when I click the glass to search for alternatives. I have to type "Ing" (that are the first letters of "Inglés") while it shows "English" in the list of matches. It would be better if I can type both "Ing" or "Eng".

netsharc 1y ago
It's even more amusing when the displayed list looks like it's sorted randomly, but in reality it's sorted alphabetically in a different language to the display language.. e.g. Nederlands English Français Deutsch Espagnol (but if sorted in English: Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish)
elric 1y ago
I don't understand why you would want to select Inglés instead of English? You want to selecf English, or Español, or Nederlands, or Deutsch, or whatever language. If makes no sense for it to be translated.
- gus_massa 1y ago
  Only in a very few weird corner cases. If it's an article about a city in Germany, I may like to see the article in German and use autotranslation to read t in English or Spanish. Sometimes the article in the local language has more info. I had that problem in comments about places or events in Argentina. Sometimes the English article has less info than the Spanish article, so I made a link to the autotranslation.

tlb 1y ago

There are two levels of this. If I get some other European language, I can generally figure out which is their word for English and it's not a big deal to switch. But if it gives me a script I don't know, like Bengali or something, it's a problem. Perhaps every "choose language" menu should include English and Chinese in non-localized form, as an escape hatch, since almost every web users can recognize enough of them to navigate a menu to find their actual language.

adastra22 1y ago
Just include languages in their own script only. Why would a user need to select a language from that menu for which they DON’T know the target script? Showing Bengali in Bengali script is exactly what you want.
bawolff 1y ago
True, but how often do you want to select a language you can't read?

dalmo3 1y ago

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

magicalhippo 1y ago

A related issue that has me fuming is when, after arriving at a page of interest from a search engine, a modal popup forces me to select the country I'm from, and then promptly redirects me to the homepage of the regional website. Some have a X button to close said dialog, but many don't which is really aggravating.

wudu 1y ago
Google does this. I want to check out the new device they just released - "sorry, this product is not available in your country". I just wanted to read the specs, not buy.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Products don’t get to be informed about the factory in which they are made, or which shop they are to be sold.
numpad0 1y ago
https://xkcd.com/869/ https://xkcd.com/869/
- uselesswords 1y ago
  https://bbc.co.uk https://bbc.co.uk sends me to https://bbc.com https://bbc.com in the states and it is just infuriating

lxgr 1y ago

Ironically, given TFA, it seems to be primarily using the user's IP: > How does Universal Language Selector determine which languages I may understand > ULS queries a service that determines your originating country based on your IP address. This is inaccurate in some cases. Based on the country code, most often spoken languages are suggested for you. (from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ#How_does_Universal_Language_Selector_determine_which_languages_I_may_understand https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/F...)

Nemo_bis 1y ago

Indeed. Wikimedia wikis' language selection feature relies on Unicode CLDR language-territory data. This is very complex to maintain (and there are still many mistakes to fix), because reliable data is expensive to collect. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ#language-territory https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/F...