[fresh_broccoli]

It's very annoying that Google's websites, including this blog, are automatically translated to my browser's preferred language.

Sillicon Valley devs clearly believe that machine translation is a magical technology that completely solved internationalization, like in Star Trek. No, it's far from it. Ever since internet has been flooded with automatically translated garbage, the experience of international users, at least bilingual ones, got much worse.

[slyzmud]

The worst offender to me is Google Maps. I'm a native Spanish speaker but set my phone to English because I hate app translations. The problem is when I want to read reviews it automatically translates them from Spanish (my native language) to English. It doesn't make any sense!

[mook]

At least it's still Latin. In places like Korea, the roads are often only in transliterated Latin alphabet, so if you read the local language (and know places in that language) you'd need to transliterate it back to know what it's saying.

This despite Google already knowing what languages I can read…

[3form]

Hey, at least it's preferred language. It's much worse when it bases it on the country that I'm in, which I can only reasonably influence with a VPN, and calling that reasonable is a stretch.

[ch4s3]

This is the worst. I was in France recently and tons of mobile websites were just suddenly in French. It was a real chore to read through them, and I can only imagine how frustrating this is when you can't read the language put in front of you at all.

[spookie]

It cuts in both ways.

I'm trying to learn the language of the country I now live in. And yet, Google thinks they know better than me, my preference, at the moment.

And this preference is quite circumstantial, mind you.

[kypro]

Wouldn't the alternative be worse for most people?

If you're a global company it would be silly to assume all your readers speak/read a single language. AI translations (assuming that's what this is) are not perfect, but better than nothing.

I get how poor translation could be irritating for bilingual people who notice the quality difference though, but I guess you guys have the advantage of being able to switch the language.

[cyberax]

I have `en-US` set as the second preference language, so just show me the content in `en-US` unless you have a real human-vetted translation into my primary language.

[3form]

Excluded middle. It doesn't have to be automatic, it could well be a choice. Best of all worlds if you ask me.

[vaylian]

It would be nice to have a browser setting that says: Use the original version of the text, if it is written in one of my preferred languages.

[stevekemp]

I keep setting all my preferences *everywhere* to English, yet 50% of the time google search results are 100% Finnish. With a helpful "change to English" link that does not work.

Worst still Google Maps will insist on only showing street names, area names, an directions in Swedish.

[kccqzy]

Strong agree. I had worked at Google for four years before discovering that the API documentation I meticulously wrote was machine translated to other languages. Only by perusing these translations did I realize some API concepts had been translated; I had to overuse the backtick notation for code to suppress these translations.

This is not a just Silicon Valley problem though; Redmond had similar issues if you just use the newer parts of Windows in a non-English language.

[GaggiX]

Translation technology has gotten so much better in the meanwhile, I didn't even notice it at first.