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Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

That's really the core of the issue. Language switching is such a common thing that it should be part of Web infrastructure itself, not the individual Website, and it sort of is. But most Websites ignore those preferences and browsers have those settings hidden so deep away that no user will even be aware of them.

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.

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Hidden deeply in browser settings because the browser should inherit the locale from your OS, right?

Absolutely not. I don't want the same language on all apps and the one I have on apps is not necessary the one I want on your site.

That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the browser. But by default, the entire stack should respect the setting I configured at the top.

I'm bilingual, I prefer apps and websites to be in their original language of if it's one of the languages I speak, because that gets me the best experience.

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.

Same thing (trilingual), but haven't seen such a poorly translated website to be nothing worse. Translated websites, even if poorly, are better than a language I don't speak.

Typically website translations are pretty good, when they already invested resources into translations.

The setting I have on the top has nothing to do with anything on some website. With website, I want it in original language, whatever it is, especially if I know the language at least a little.

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.

That’s quite a rabbit hole, but I agree. I wouldn’t want things to start being machine translated to match my OS locale. But I would prefer maps.google.com not to default to Georgian just because I get IP geolocated there. It should give preference to my OS config.

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.

Great idea! I guess though you'd need a new header for a website to declare what languages a page is available in, so the menu options in the browser would only show languages that are actually available? Or a new meta tag? Or maybe there is one already?

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