Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

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On the topic of language, a problem I have in India is that many OSs, apps and sites don't understand that both "color" and "colour" are okay in India. It's more a question of style whether you use the US or British or US spelling, and I don't want my spell-checker enforcing style. Neither is really wrong, like "colur" would be.

macOS, iOS and Android all get this wrong, insisting on "correcting" color to colour. This happens in both native and web apps. I tried to work around this by adding English (US) as a secondary language, which fixes the issue in iOS but not macOS or Android.

A couple of other related points: it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane.

Another problem with language is that many developers think of I18N as a checklist item to be ticked off. They still use American English like "way to go". Leave the Americanisms out of it, if you want your non-American users to feel welcome, as opposed to, "This isn't for you". Americans will also understand if "way to go" was replaced by "congrats" or "congratulations".

"it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults"

No, no, a thousand times NO. Location should NOT EVER be used as a basis for things like units, currency, date format etc.

_every_ computer these days has perfectly serviceable language and locale settings. These settings should be the definitive source for any application to decide how to present language/locale-dependent information to you. If an application shows you distances in miles, either:

1) The application ignores the language and locale settings altogether and always uses english/miles. 2) The application does look at the language setting but ignores the locale setting and decides that "english language" implies "distance in miles" 3) The application does the right thing, and your computer is actually set to a locale that uses miles for distance.

Note that none of these scenario's are fixed by looking at the physical location of your computer.

Why though? I understood the GP as 'use location for sane defaults' with an implied 'if there is nothing else to use'.

A website shouldn't ignore Accept-Language. But if I set up something for the first time AND it already knows something about my region/location: Sure, go ahead and use that to suggest sane defaults.

Note that the GP seems to agree that you should be able to change the settings yourself.

So, while I'm seriously pissed by the original language redirection/detection issue (German, everything is set to en, travelling quite a bit and spent a year in Israel: Thanks, Google, for a site in Hebrew), your 'NOT EVER' seems off. Whether I travel or sit at home, if I open - using the GP's example - GMaps for the first time on a brand new phone: Why shouldn't it default to the local units? I'd consider it a bug if it wouldn't do that.

You didn't even understand what you're supposedly disagreeing with.

The locale settings need to be initialised to something, right? What default value would you choose? Miles for everyone, as Google Maps seems to? Km for everyone? Better than either of those is using location to set it to whatever the customary unit is in their country. Otherwise, you're doing the wrong thing for hundreds of millions of users.

Whether this particular setting is in the phone OS or in Google Maps is irrelevant. Either way, it needs to be initialised, and it should be initialised to something sane.

The locale and language are system settings. My point is that applications and websites have no business second guessing those system settings based on location.

For the system-level settings, those are always part of the OS install process. So either an end-user building their own system, a commercial system builder or downstream provider like a phone company will have to set it to some value during installation. Location doesn't enter into it.

Location can be used to update the default, on first run. There's no reason why that has to be the same for US and Indian users. That's the point I was making all along which you haven't understood.

Second, can you give me a reference to back up your claim that Android has an API that tells you whether the user prefers km or miles? We're not talking about language or locale here (things like en-IN) but distance units.

> No, no, a thousand times NO. Location should NOT EVER be used as a basis for things like units, currency, date format etc.

I completely agree. I'm located in the U.S. and use dollars and English customary units, but I prefer German-style dates and British spelling. Displaying metres and Celsius to me because I prefer to spell 'colour' properly is stupid.

If that's what you prefer, change the settings. Saying that the majority of Americans (to use your example) should be defaulted to British spelling because of edge cases like yourself is stupid, to use your language.

And that's all my original post talks about — defaults. I never said you shouldn't be allowed to change them.

My problem is that many systems just use location — they don't let me override the defaults.

"it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane."

Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious. In Japan, the romaji/english and the native map indexes seem to be entirely disjoint (and partially incomplete) sets of data. If your language is english you can search for things by name in romaji and find them, but not find them when searching in hiragana or kanji! The opposite also occurs (searching for things that have english names is frequently problematic).

They also do terrifically irritating things like rendering map kanji at microscopic sizes, then re-rendering them smaller when you (silly user!) have zoomed the map to make them big enough to read. And the design of the trip-planner interface is so confusing as to be borderline unusable.

> Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious.

Google's handling of the language issue in general is pretty atrocious. On my iPhone which is too old for any plugins and such on Mobile Safari, I can't do an image search quickly without a modal popping up and asking if I want to switch to English or stay in Russian. (US Expat in Russia, phone is all in english) On my laptop, it doesn't even give me the option to change the language if I'm not logged into Google at the time, even though my laptop is in English as well. It's been a major point of annoyance to not have the ability to really control what languages are served to you when it seems to me that it would be a pretty conscious decision to have your computer in X language when your IP is from a country where X isn't the primary language. The reasons I've heard for using IP instead of Accept-Language just seem like exceptions to the rule rather than the more common rule, but of course I'm just an outsider looking in on this one and don't have any data to really back that.

And to have it absolutely every time on my phone (no cache clearing) is also frustrating, regardless of whether I log in or not. It's not even so much about the different expected language; I understand Russian well enough to use the site and different functions. It's getting a nag every single time I want to do a quick search for something that is frustrating and that for everything else that gets stored about my browsing habits that they can't seem to remember that the last 30 times they asked me, I switched to English because I wanted results in English.

Why a simple toggle like DuckDuckGo has isn't used is beyond me as well. The site language is english, if I want russian local results, I just toggle the region switch for Russia at the top. Or I can isolate where I want my targeted results from. It just seems like a huge oversight from Google on this one that should absolutely be something they don't falter on.

I share your frustrations. I'm a British expat living in Berlin, and before that in Bogotá, Colombia. I originally set up my Google account in the UK and used it for years in the UK.

Whilst living in Bogotá I had set all the relevant options to have all my search results etc in English. When I moved to Berlin, I was slightly disappointed that all my results came up in German by default and I again had to manually force everything to English, but I could sort-of forgive this being as I was physically in Germany, and perhaps local language is a sensible default for relevant local results etc, etc.

Then last week, I was in the US and my search results started defaulting to German! Logged in on the same google account, on the same phone. I find it frankly unbelievable that Google could infer that this would be my preference, given the history on my account.

That's interesting, because Google search is actually pretty good at the Japanese script thing.

So they have the technology to do cross-script indexing in Japanese for maps, they just don't use it?

Take a trip to Korea, after you come back hotel prices stay in Korean won on Google Maps, until you reinstall the app, pathetic...

This happened to me after a stopover in Dubai; for months all my prices were in UAE Dirhams, and only reinstalling the app fixed it. It's been this way for quite a long time as far as I can tell; I guess having a monopoly on a good map with good local business info leads to this kind of apathy.

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