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Comment by cyco130 | Hacker News Reader

The weirdest one I saw was this: User claims that the wording of the info they enter into a certain form changes when they save. At first I suspected someone else editing the same form at the same time unbeknownst to each other but it wasn't the case according to the logs. And I saw the correct wording on my own computer.

Then I noticed in their screenshots that some of the menus had weird wording too. Turns out they had Chrome's "Translate this page" option on. Problem went away when we showed them how to properly switch languages in the app.

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I added

  <meta name="google" content="notranslate">

to all pages in a single-page-web-app after discovering some bug or other with Chrome screwing up the page.

Apparently the new incantation to fix an app (can be applied to an element) is (ugly: I presume it isn't CSS to avoid supporting dynamically changing it):

  <html translate="no">

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

Every now and then I would look at the meta tags for a major single page app and discover some new horror when searching for the reason for the meta tag!

I know what you mean, but this caused me a second of "wait, what?"

> all pages in a single-page-web-app

Good point. This was the Elizabethan days when computers ran on coal: IE when we were explorers of The Internet.

We were bleeders, but there still existed a vestigial login page, and some other evil cthulic pages (I know whence they were begat for I was their father).

In the USA, 20% of computers still run on coal!

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

    <html translate="no">

I first read this as "translate to Norwegian"

It's the reverse-Norway problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26671136

In Norway, the word “subject” translates to “fag”. Back in the Usenet days there was a Norwegian group or hierarchy named “no.fag”, which of course regularly got misunderstood.

I wouldn't want to disallow translation, but in this case it was unnecessary anyway.

This is really annoying. I often rely on Google Translate to read Japanese websites (I can read Japanese but only very slowly), and it breaks every website using React [1] because both React and Google Translate try to update DOM nodes without knowing each other. I even seriously looked at Google Translate to see how they are implemented, so that maybe I can recreate the web widget without this issue in the future.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872770

What was translating from English to American or something?

From English to Turkish but Google won't just leave the parts that are already in Turkish alone and subtly reword them instead for some reason.

you should submit this story to DaylyWTF or smth

it's hilarious

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