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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

lol I really despise it when corporations try to be "too" smart/helpful and automatically translate their shit to the local language guessed from your IP, which is a major pain when traveling.

Google absolutely sucks ass at this: You can't set your default language without having a Google account which I refuse to sign in except on YouTube, and there's no easy way to change the language on some of their pages.

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Even worse nowadays on YouTube itself: The auto-translated titles and machine dubbing, for which you can only pick one default language, which all other content will be forcibly translopped into. God forbid I speak more than one language and am comfortable consuming content in its original language.

It's insane that their don't have proper support for multilingual people. How hard is it to add a "if language is in [x,y,z], don't offer translation" check?

It's made even crazier by Google being such an international company. Don't they have a huge number of Indian developers? Why has not one of them been bothered enough by this to fix it?

Translation thiefdoms, they are usually part of the local ledia gatekeeping infrastructure

Translop, what an apt term! Thanks)

In my case, I browse YouTube in English, but my Google account has both Polish and English enabled.

Polish video titles get translated to English, and English video titles get translated to Polish.

Even better, somebody probably got a promotion out of ruining that, because they made the amount of content "available" in other languages go up

> Even worse nowadays on YouTube itself

YouTube is the epitome of "echo chambering": When you open YouTube from a hotel or Airbnb in other countries, god, you will see a flood of the most clickbaity videos from that country only, or whatever's been targeted for that IP/area watch the most, sometimes with lewd/suggestive thumbnails and just horrible

You know what's really dumb though? How they're an ads company and try to spy so much shit about you, but if you watch just 1-2 Russian videos then you'll get Russian ads for a while..

Anyone who determines language solely from IP is per se incompetent and needs to be completely blacklisted from the industry. The Accept-Language header exists for a reason.

Yeah! Why can't it just check the OPERATING SYSTEM LANGUAGE????

It's literally there!! My OS is in English, my browser is in English, don't fkn show me everything in Klingon just because I happen to be a prisoner on their ship!

Sometimes it's impossible even with an account. I can't search in English on my phone in Japan. If I go into options and change the language, the moment I click OK, it switches everything right back to Japanese. I know multiple colleagues who've had the same issue for years.

Did you try No Country Redirect?

http://www.google.com/ncr

It doesn't work for some/many things, like account sign-in screens, and I think the last time I tried, Google Files/Drive either

> set your default language without Google account

You can: https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1

Conveniently this URL supports th hl param https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/xml_results... It explicitly sets the language, so in case you switched to a language you don't understand, visit this English link: https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1&hl=en Ofc you can also delete cookies.

Interestingly not all available languages change the UI, e.g. 'Èdè Yorùbá (jorubera)' does nothing. The dropdown has 144 options, but the official interface language list only 74: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/xml_results...

Yes, I hate this.

It's more annoying because browsers literally tell you what language they want.

Developers seem to have a canned response to this; largely that they don't trust users to have set their operating system language to the correct one... somehow

https://dijit.svbtle.com/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-la...

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