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Comment by icfly2 | Hacker News Reader

Majority of California based companies employee English only or English and Spanish speakers possibly with some Indian language as well. This leads to lots of problems when you are bilingual or bilingual in other languages such as German in French. Neither Apple nor Microsoft under this sort of language swapping well. Never mind rarer languages like Czech or Greek.

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> Majority of California based companies employee English only or English and Spanish speakers possibly with some Indian language as well [...] Never mind rarer languages like Czech or Greek.

That may be generally true, in this case Apple actually has an engineering team in Czechia that works on biometrics and authentication:

https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/ekonomika/apple-posili-v-praze-ty...

https://jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200636301-2611/software...

So could they finally fix their quotations marks in Czech? Probably no, they never cared, so why should they start caring now.

No but they might be able to fix authentication problems, which is what this is.

Guess what, they’ll do nothing. If Czech market is small enough for them to fix quotation marks, they’re not fixing Czech keyboard.

OTOH, if an American will whine enough on Internet, they may fix it for him. Maybe some other American should use standard Czech quotes as password to get it fixed also.

I'm a little impressed with Google. Recently the assistant started understanding when I speak Portuguese or when my wife switches to it in a text message. I hadn't had that experience before, the assistants would pick one language and mispronounce the other.

Alexa has an experimental bilingual mode but it's nerfed by its general failure to understand well.

This is a pet peeve of mine that makes it so annoying to communicate with friends and family who live in other countries.

I use danish and English and I must admit I don’t really encounter issues switching between them on apple or Microsoft operating systems.

Only thing I can think of is some features being available later in danish compared to the English release like the swipe keyboard in iOS.

Netflix can't even auto-translate subtitles (in the age of genai where we are close to generating entire movies from scratch). Let alone ever imagine that you'd want to see subtitles in two languages at once.

Language support is still such an enigma.

We run into this issue when watching Korean movies/dramas. My wife prefers Japanese subtitles and I prefer English/German. I haven’t found a way to enable two subtitles in Firefox (via extensions). So in those cases I usually download a release which contains subtitles in both languages and use a script to extract them via ffmpeg and then combine them into a single srt. Now the issue is that the lines of the different languages don’t always appear/disappear at the same time. This leads to text jumping up and down. I have tried to mitigate it by injecting white space where only one line is visible, but this again fails when the video player breaks long lines or when the location of the subs change to the top (because there is hard-coded text in the image). I feel like there must be a better way…

mplayer supports displaying multiple subtitles

IINA too.

I'm so over VLC.

I would not be surprised if Apple engineers are more likely to be bilingual than a random person selected from the world's population.

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