[est31]

Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.

However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.

It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.

[jfoster]

What do you mean "every browser advertises English"?

In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.

I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.

[T0Bi]

The problem is that websites don't respect the browser language but translate based on IP. Which is stupid for people who want to read the original English content in English and not their native language.

[Waterluvian]

Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!

I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).

I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)

This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!

[JumpCrisscross]

> I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data

This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.

[gpjt]

Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.

[Waterluvian]

Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."

[kragen]

I have the same problem in Argentina. Worse, I'm pretty sure that Google and other search engines decide that I don't deserve to receive good information because I live in a Spanish-speaking country, so they send me to terrible low-quality pages because often that's all that's available in Spanish.