But despite having learned the Georgian alphabet and being able to read მიღება as "migheba" I still am none the wiser since I have no idea what that means.
Today my kid bought a pokemon toy and the box was only in Japanese. I proudly deciphered ニャスパー as "nyas'paa" but my son only recognized the name when I googled it and found the English spelling "nyasper" (we're not native English speakers so perhaps the translation would have been more obvious to some of you).
Long story short: knowing writing systems is super fun but often you need to know more about the actual language. That's especially true with languages like Arabic that don't spell out all the vowels
Having a little icon in your browser, not the Website, to switch language would make this issue largely go away. What symbol you use in the end doesn't really matter, the issue is that every site does it a little differently.
There's nothing worse than apps that are badly translated with no easy way to switch them to English just because they decided that they should use the OS language.
Typically website translations are pretty good, when they already invested resources into translations.
With apps, I want to pick the translation per app, again what I have set into windows has nothing to do with what I want in app.
Me setting a windows language should not cascade to any webpage. And I never ever want the automatic AI translation.
I’m saying this as someone who’s bilingual and lives in a foreign country. I usually want things in my mother tongue, but I’d prefer the original language to some crappy translation.
Of course, with google, you are likely logged in with an account and they should know better, but most other websites you visit, you are not, so they give you the version local to where you are, as that’s usually more correct than not.
Now where is that flag …
Unfortunately that's not solvable with the current system which only allows listing a preferred order of languages and that's that. Like if I'd list English first, I risk getting English content even on pages originally written in my native language, if I put my native language first, then e.g. MSDN puts up so so-quality machine translations instead of the original English.
In theory you'd have to differentiate between at least native text, high quality translations and low quality translations. Now good luck creating an UI for that and also good luck for getting publishers to classify their websites and its contents according to such a scheme…