Hacker News Reader

Comment by JelteF | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't he tick the always translate this language? I feel like it's very uncommon that someone would like a language translated half of the time.

I'm Dutch myself, so I have English and Dutch never translated. And everytime I'm on a webpage with another language I like that I can ask Google to translate it for me and remember it for that language.

View on HN

If it translate all the time, then you never get to read the original language and never get better at it. Many people (including me) intentionally browse in foreign language to exercise it while reading news and blogs. If the text gets too difficult I may need help, otherwise I want to keep it as it is.

Plus automatically translated texts are often pain to read. The translation is good enough to help you decipher meaning, but not good enough to make a real text.

Then why is it so onerous to tick the 'never translate this language' option and then simply right click and click 'translate' when it's needed....

I can myself relate to the use case and understand why the not-so-discoverable context menu isn't a solution. We are making changes to the UX that I hope will provide a better solution (see my other comment)

As a non-Dane living in Denmark, I prefer pages to start out in Danish, and then to be able to click "translate" if I'm not able to successfully read it. I don't want to never translate Danish, but I also don't want it to translate right up front before I try to read it. Starting out in Danish and then having a little icon where I can click on a case-by-case basis to translate it is exactly the functionality I want, which is how it has worked so far.

Totally agree. If Chrome was used by a small group of people it wouldn't matter, but for a browser with world domination ambitions it's just wrong to miss a big user base. Arond 10% of the world population are immigrants and a bigger group are language learners. Chrome annoys both.

It doesn't matter how common it is.

You never steal focus from the user, unless you're designing a system to purposefully interrupt someone.

exactly. Now that the browsers have built-in popup blockers why should they show a popup of their own? It's like police selling weeds! WRONG! :-D

The quality of translation is atrocious, so you use it as a last resort if you stumble upon some word/phrase you don't know.

(Most language pairs are much much worse than the high profile ones like german->english - try swedish->polish or something)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com