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Comment by mdavid626 | Hacker News Reader

Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.

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What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request.

My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.

When you look around the comments here, you will see that while people agree on how this should be handled (list of languages spoken, in some preferential order) there is no consensus of where this should list come from.

It could be system - but there is a surprising amount of people who set their OS to some language they are learning, or just English for convenience. And they do not want this to affect the web.

It could be the browser, but YouTube and most other services for that matter, are mostly used through apps.

It could be in the profile (but which one Google, YouTube, local app?)

This seemingly simple problem has an issue with discoverability.

Actually it doesn't even matter. Whatever they choose, the user would adapt to. Problem is they don't.

Sure, people just need a way to change the detected language and the possibility to turn off “auto dubbing”.

I don’t see how this is a problem. Everything Is layers. An upper layer can override the layer beneath if it desires. OS -> browser -> web app

Yes, I know Sundar is Indian. This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation.

Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.

For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.

I agree that the way it's implemented at YouTube right now is utter garbage.

However i haven't noticed this to be a problem with Google in general. All the Google products i've been using have been properly localised.

Except both the head of YouTube and literally the CEO of Google are of Indian decent, have lived in India, and as such are almost certainly multilingual. Plus the fact that Google attracts developers from all of the world probably means very many developers at both Google and YouTube are multilingual. They obviously know how the world looks like, and still decided to do this.

I'm Indian. I can use four languages at full proficiency, and am in the middle of picking up two more. I can't explain how confusing and frustrating the past two weeks has been for me on YouTube. But there are people who handle even more languages. I wonder how they're doing emotionally! I'm confused about the planning and logic that goes into decisions like these.

And the country is resolved by IP - which totally doesn't work with roaming - you also get the home country of your provider.

Isn't Spanish spoken alot in USA?

Yes, but most likely not among developers at Google.

Yes. In America, there are over 60 million fluent Spanish speakers, which is more than the entire population of Spain. In many southern and southwestern parts of the country you can do just about anything you need to in Spanish and being bilingual is a big plus for any kind of public-facing work.

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