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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is doing this as well. I google something in english, find an english MSDN entry with english title and preview, but when I click on the link, the language changes to German. I'm a native German speaker but having read about technical topics almost exclusively in english for years, I'm just much more comfortable in english now.

What makes it even worse is that often it's not properly translated, but just Microsoft's translation machine applied to the English version. The result isn't very good. And even if it were manually translated, the result would likely end up a mixture of english and German. German is a very nice language, as is english, but what I absolutely hate is the mix of the two, also called denglisch.

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Somewhat related to technical documentation, error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.

Sometimes when not working on my own machines at a client the locale is set to a language other than English and some Java frameworks such as Hibernate then will dutifully print out error messages in that language.

This is next to useless. At a time when you still had nothing but a printed manual in your local language to go on this might have made some sense but nowadays people research error messages on the internet. Searching for some arcane ORM framework error message in a language other than English is a futile endeavour.

Some programs work around this by prepending a global error ID to the localized, such as "E300: Ascorbic Acid Error", but this is harder to manage on the development side.

spaCy doesn't localize errors, but it does do a beautiful job of managing that kind of error codes.

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/master/spacy/errors....

The most fun I had was investigating some bug reports with .NET Exceptions in Japanese. Thankfully, there was enough of context in the rest of the logs to get to the bottom of things, but having to rely on machine translations for debugging would have been... fun.

Oracle does this too. The best part is that this is all set during installation, there's no way to change it afterwards.

It's really great trying to figure out an error that's written in Norwegian, when you're not the least bit familiar in that language.

Most of the errors do have codes though, and just Googling that will get you started at least.

You can install a new language easily by using the -addLangs parameter of the installer (on an existing install) or by copying the msg/msb files from another install (matching versions). After that you have to change the NLS settings of the DB and it will switch to the new language.

Sounds as easy as hitting yourself with a medium sized hammer :)

That's not entirely true. You can "change" the charset from 1 type to another... The problem with that is fields may extend past the max length of that field when converting from 1 to the other.

Source: me. I had to help someone with specifically this when they set the wrong charset on their DB. Had these problems.

> error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.

Ah, I remember MS Combat Flight Simulator 2. Translated to Spanish (or maybe automatically using local system files?) without bothering the check the text fit the allotted fields, which meant you could not read most things at all. Impressive QA, Microsoft! ;)

Their automated translation also affects language keyword and error codes. It renders the page unusable. The option to change the language is hard to find and the selected language is not stored.

Some people have worked very hard to make their doc as painful as possible.

One day I was visiting Austria when I used my mobile browser to find something on Google. The results came back in German.

Ok fine whatever, don’t really speak German but did enough in high school to muddle through. Proba localization, will turn back when I go home.

2 years later and Google on my phone remains German. This is my life now ... at least I get to practice a little german I guess

Not a language, but hotels.com was quoting me prices to North American hotels in Rupias months after my visit to India.

Same for Tripadvisor after being in Mexico - all Hotel prices have been in Pesos for a while (had to manually change it back)

Uber is convinced I live in Brazil and speak Portuguese now.

Slightly orthogonal: live in France, bought a new phone just before travelling. The first SIM card I put in it was a temporary travel card bought upon arrival.

Now Google Maps shows me prices of hotels in Uzbekistani soms. Didn't find a way to reset it in the UI, clearing GMaps cache didn't help either. It's been a year already.

Having integrated with that API before, I would be totally unsurprised to find the whole system was a complete mess.

https://www.google.com/preferences#languages

You didn't try deleting cookies, or finding the preferences page, or Googling "phone browser stuck in German"?

Don't get me wrong, I've had my moments where I've done similar things for years. I just have to say it's a little funny.

I have some websites assuming I'm Russian still, after a year in Latvia, and even when upgrading my iPhone, everything would default to Spanish.

I distinctly remember updating my address and location each time, but it never made a difference.

Now I just find it a little amusing. Keeps my Russian and Spanish fresh.

I have some websites assuming I'm Russian still, after a year in Latvia (why not Latvian? Who knows.), and even when upgrading my iPhone, everything would default to Spanish.

I distinctly remember updating my address and location each time, but it never made a difference.

Now I just find it a little amusing. Keeps my Russian and Spanish fresh.

I’m an European guy living in Japan that browse tech documentation in English. I’ve the same issue than you, sometimes MSDN or MDN pages are returned in French (all my devices UI are in English, with French locale). If it were good French, why not, but it’s crappy MT instead. Have so respect for the user please. Sometimes I got Japanese thrown at me, depending on which network I’m connected.

Finally I sometimes perform search in other languages, for instance Chinese. Of course I got results mostly in Japanese from Google... few years ago it was possible to change the language for a query, now the settings in burried under dozen of clicks, and are link to my profile. So basically unusable.

In a way it’s like the OS desktop UX: developers are busy trying to outsmart the user, yet the end result is more painful to use and less customizable than it was a decade ago.

I always use '&hl=en' parameter for changing Google search language.

There's a Firefox extension [1] to automatically change the language for MSDN (Microsoft) and MDN (Mozilla). I've extracted this functionality into a userscript [2].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/english-conte...

[2] https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/master/userscr...

Ahh, Microsoft.

They used to localise VBA too, all IFs and THENs and WHILEs were translated to the local language. Yes it was as bad as you think it was.

You could somehow run VBA macros written in the wrong language, you couldn't just touch them or it'd be all syntax errors everywhere.

Excel still has localized syntax, I think.

Are you following an Excel guide that's written in English but can't use the formulas because your own computer is set to use some other language? Or did you inherit some Excel sheets to maintain that are not written in English? No problem! Just install Excel Functions Translator [1] and say Auf Wiedersehen to all you localization worries!

[1]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-functions-tra...

There is an Excel "German" dictionary (probably others too), but when you Google "Excel German dictionary" Google shows "übertreffen". Which is the German word for "to excel"...

It's not only names that are localized, but also file formats. If you export a CSV in an English speaking locale, you won't be able to use it in a Latin one.

that’s because you should be choosing UTF-8 as the export encoding. Don’t depend on default.

The comma is used as a decimal separator in many countries which makes it impossible to use csv files without special import rules; nothing to do with using utf-8.

CSV is not so much localized as underspecified.

At one point Windows 10 used to use your keyboard layout to choose your local language. So as an Aussie I was stuck choosing between spellcheck telling me 'colour' and 'flavour' were wrong, or having to deal with a UK keyboard layout. It seems fixed now but it was really annoying.

I'm in the exact same situation, well, except for that time when for some unfathomable reason Google insisted, for weeks, to deliver what I believe is Lithuanian to my home browser.

Before the great Firefox extension purge I was sending out different language preference headers depending on domain. Unfortunately, this trick was already breaking down as more and more German companies redirect from their .de to their .com to show off ambition, leaving me with a bad English translation of the massive German due to headers.

What I'd love to see would be a server side distinction between primary and secondary languages, but of course companies would lie their asses off for uncountable reasons bad and worse.

For me it is even worse. I‘m Swiss-German, my name is french and have all my software set to english for consistency.

Some sites (and ads) don’t respect my settings and will default to french. My french is rudimentary at best.

I am even "less default" than that, expecting the dates to be formatted the way I've defined them in the system setting (it can be set separately from the language), and some programs ignore that too.

Even worse, when I was studying abroad in Germany I'd get the Microsoft English-translated-to-German page and then Chrome, which I had originally installed in the US and configured for US English, would "helpfully" translate the German back to English.

I can read English and usually German, but I definitely can't read technical documents that have passed through a machine translator twice.

Microsoft seem to be particularly rubbish at this. For example, the Microsoft Store (when it works at all) does not acknowledge the idea that you might live in a non-English speaking country but speak English.

For example, here it is looking very silly in Denmark: https://i.imgur.com/kdux88q.jpg

Try the FFS MSDN in English browser extension. Available for Chrome and Firefox.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ffs+msdn+in+english

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