Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

The title of the page is Underpants 2.0, but the renderings are nothing like what the title promises.

I guess there is some automatic translation going on. I've said it a thousand times but I can say it again:

There are very few universal truths in life but here's one: Do not use uncalled for automatic translations. Ever. Certainly no type of translation without prooreading.

It is deeply disrespectful of your users. Should they want to read the page in another language than it was published in, there is a perfectly functional button in their web browser.

Your users get by on the rest of the web, and they can surely manage your page. Unless they have to hunt for the existence of your home cooked "language" setting, which may or may not even exist, without which they have to guess which words translate to underpants. It may be fun the first time, but believe me, it gets boring quickly. Any web shop that presents me with a butchered version of my locale gets closed immediately without giving it any further attention.

Are we looking at the same page? 'Underware', the name of the product, seems like a simple pun: it's hardware that goes under your desk (or wherever else) to simplify cable management. The descriptions are perfectly clear, if a bit heavy on the marketing-speak.

I also see it translated into my local language, and indeed the title was localized into the equivalent of underpants. Maybe OP was retranslating it back to English?

Strange enough, the description has a hint about the translation, and I even can turn it off to get the English original, but this is not working on the Headline or the website itself.

Of course we aren't. That's the whole problem. We have different locales. That results in a header somewhere with the languages I understand in order of fluency (which includes English, mind you), as per the specification. And the author of that web page decided to turn on an automatic translation tool to present its output instead of the original web page.

That tool is particularly bad as it somehow decides that underware is similar enough to underwear that it should map the word to the word for underpants in my language. The rest of the page is a little better, but not by much. But the problem here isn't the quality of tool itself which results in particularly amusing choice of words but by the use of the tool itself.

Don't do that. If the end user wants to read your page in a different language, they are perfectly capable of clicking that button in their web browser and deal with the outcome themselves.

Just don't. I will not hunt down the language selection button on your badly translated web site and I will not change my web browser settings for your site alone. I will simply choose not to visit your web site, and I suspect many others will do the same.

Ah, I see what you mean now. I've seen plenty of websites with very dubious English that I suspect were machine-translated, but websites trying to do their own realtime translation is something I haven't seen. Or maybe it's just something I haven't noticed.

(I wonder why people would even do that, since as you say, all the modern web browsers have built-in support for a translation button.)

even reddit does it now. i have to stumble over words in ny native language that don't make sense together to realize I have to disable the translation that I didn't ask for to make sense of what was written

If I open the page, I see "Sous-vêtements 2.0", the translation for underwear in French. Sadly, this does not look like 3d printable lingerie.

Somebody is trying to be more inclusive (because what else would any attempt at translating content be?). It's okay to have an opinion about, well, anything, but, what I think is "deeply disrespectful" is completely ignoring good intentions and pretending to be able to speak for a group of people in an overly forceful and authoritative manner.

> Somebody is trying to be more inclusive

Not likely. No one ever felt included by an automatic translation. It is impersonal and clearly comes off as such.

Stastical translation tools are tremendous and helps me regularly to understand the gist of texts in other languages, but I understand that it is at best an approximation and I am prepared that the details may be somewhat off.

Being presented a butchered text where key words must be guessed what they were translated from is deeply disrespectful of other language speakers, yes. It really is. Why else serve them a second-rate quality web page? A translation can only make the text worse. It can not make the text better. This time it was only a question of underpants but sometimes the result can include literal insults.

> because what else would an attempt at translating content be?

Misguided?

I'm trying to be kind and helpful here: Please stop this. It is not helpful, and every popular web browser already offers a drop down menu bar button with a translation tool that is not only potentially better but also under user control. There is no upside to this user hostile design and the downside is that it is confusing and potentially derogatory.

If you watch Hands on Katie on youtube (Katie created original underwire) it will all make sense.

The title is Underware, not Underpants. Katie is Welsh, so I don’t see why there would be any automatic translations. I also fail to see how any of this might be disrespectful to their users. Care to elaborate?

This was almost certainly done by Makeworld, not Katie, which makes the top comment even more pointless and needlessly vitriolic. Katie might read these comments, but Makerworld's UI people are not likely to take orders from an irate Hackernews user's screed.

Vitriolic is completely uncalled for. I have no idea who Katie is. I guess I could find out by translating the text back to English again?

Somebody linked a page which is more or less broken for people with other locales, and the nice thing is to give them a heads up just how bad the situation is. They likely don't even know since they do it nonchalantly without checking the results.

If I could get just one more web developer to stop installing automatic translation plugins it will all be worth it.

Hands on Kate, has an actual real sense of humour, so you know, I strongly suspect its Kate's deliberate choice.

I was greeted with a surprising "Underwear 2.0" (sic) in french, so not only it's translated against my will (my computer is configured in english) but it's badly translated

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