Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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Here's a few fun facts about Belgium:

- Belgium has three official languages (French: fr-be, Flemish: nl-be and German: de-be).

- Belgium is divided in provinces.

- Provinces in Belgium are either French (thus mainly speak french) or Flemish (thus mainly speak flemish).

- … with the exception of some areas near the german border which mainly speak german. But not the whole province.

- Brussels is not part of a province. It's part of a region called "Brussels Capital". It is French speaking, although it's in the middle of a Flemish province. This is what that looks like: https://twitter.com/Adys/status/1175063489653727233

As you can imagine, most software doesn't account for any of that shit, yet tries to be clever and eg. have websites ignore accept-language.

I recently updated my Nintendo account to be in Belgium. My nintendo account is now half-translated in dutch (NOT flemish). Half because their dutch translation is vastly incomplete. I have no apparent way to change this back without lying about where I live.

> Half because their dutch translation is vastly incomplete.

By this you mean it shows a mixture of en and nl strings?

I have often found it super jarring that people are willing to ship such a thing. Is it better or worse to not attempt nl at all for such a circumstance? And then, OK, maybe Europeans are comfortable with English, but what about when this situation arises for markets where nobody understands English? You can go down a rabbit hole of having different fallbacks for different markets, and sometimes maybe that will work, but it's likely to be just as jarring.

Your Belgium case even suggests maybe the fallbacks should be a per-user setting. User comes in with a list of what they are OK being presented with...

Yes, it's showing me half-english half-dutch, for a translation supposed to be in flemish, on an IP that's supposed to default to french, with a web browser asking for english, in a country that speaks french or flemish.

But the worst part of it is it's doing so with NO WAY TO CHANGE THE LANGUAGE.

> User comes in with a list of what they are OK being presented with...

That is exactly what the Accept-Language header is: A list of preferred languages, detailing which ones work better and which ones to use as fallback, etc.

Youtube surely knows I have watched thousands of English language videos without subtitles. Yet they insist on sometimes giving me horribly translated video titles, seemingly at random. I don't know why and I don't know how to make it stop.

Good god if someone can tell me a way to turn this off I'd be ecstatic, Even having well translated titles is infuriating: The content is english, I will watch it in english, The whole website is in english, but yet somehow I'm required to see the title in a different language?

>> User comes in with a list of what they are OK being presented with...

> That is exactly what the Accept-Language header is: A list of preferred languages, detailing which ones work better and which ones to use as fallback, etc.

I knew about Accept-Language, but I just looked into it and I didn't realize it also had possibility for weighting of each language. I was thinking of an instance where you are highly proficient at languages X and Y, and a website has "native" content in X, and translated content in Y -- you don't want to be served Y in that case. Seems like a tricky case to get right and maybe some server code parsing Accept-Language could choke on it if not careful.

As a European who is comfortable with English, I find myself setting apps' language to English, exactly for this. My language (any language the author doesn't speak, I suspect) tends to be half-translated at best, or worse, "translated" into a hodgepodge of Slavic languages (Czech/Polish/Slovak/Croatian/Russian, whoever was at hand I assume), or worst, copypasted, word by word, through GTranslate, leading to bizarre results: e.g. "exit" in English has an "app" context, a "public transit" context, a "highway" context, and several others; most apps just pick one at random: "Press Back twice to exit the app" becomes "Push backbone twice to walk out of the app", and "Take Exit 24" turns into "Pick up the end 24"

> [Brussels] is French speaking, although it's in the middle of a Flemish province.

This is what I keep reading, but when I visited there I observed both languages in apparently equal measure. Of course my observations were superficial -- I was a tourist who spoke neither language.

But I even if I am right, that just underscores your point. The fact that a request comes from Brussels, gives you very little clue what language the user wants. Especially if that request comes from a some foreigner working for the EU.

Google can probably provide this kind of map with much higher resolution thanks to android. I'd love to see a zoomable world map with stats of what language people set on their devices. Even info about how many percent is set to English would be interesting.

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