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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Weird to hold off on adding a language because the UI isn't translated. Why would there be an assumption that the language people want to record is linked to preferred UI language?

I don't want Norwegian UI - I just want to be able to record Norwegian sentences. If the UI switches to Norwegian I'd be very annoyed, as I haven't indicated I want that and my browser settings specify English.

(I avoid Norwegian for UIs, because the translations are generally wildly inconsistent in how they translate key terms that I'm used to seeing in English, so it's a massive nuisance - when people assume UI and content language should be the same, that is a major failing to me)

Re: tags someone else pointed out the accent field is being used for this, even though the UI describes that as specifically for accents.

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Frankly this does seem like a massive barrier to me.

It's certainly causing me to lose interest, and I suspect it's driving away a lot of people, not least because it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place.

It was already off-putting not to be given a way to write sentences or record right away.

But now that I know, I have no interest in wasting time contributing to a UI translation I actively don't want to be subjected to, but would happily contribute recordings and sentences on occasion if the language was enabled because the potential for speech recognition and tts utility is entirely separate in value from UI.

This whole approach feels really backwards to me, and the really short list of languages no longer surprise me.

EDIT: I see I actually have had it bookmarked a long time, and presumably lost interest once before due to the lack of my language.

EDIT2: As much as the Norwegian UI is already annoying me and I've already spotted at least one spelling mistake in it, and one translation that is "correct" that thoroughly annoys me, I'll see if I can submit some sentences at least.

> it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place.

Yeah, that's the biggest failing of Common Voice in my opinion. Getting a new language up to speed could be much improved by simply adding a few links to documentation, but even the existing links are broken, which I reported in March 2022... https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/3637

> I have no interest in wasting time contributing to a UI translation I actively don't want to be subjected to

Translating the UI may still help you get other people to record, even if you don't want to use it yourself.

> I'll see if I can submit some sentences at least

If you want to go faster, there's also a project to extract sentences from Wikipedia etc. in small doses Mozilla's lawyers and Wikimedia's lawyers have agreed are fair use. I think you'd only need to define how Norwegian Bokmål separates sentences. (E.g. after a period but not if it's a common abbreviation like "etc." in the preceding sentence.) https://github.com/Common-Voice/cv-sentence-extractor

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