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I hate automated translation, why can't every site be displayed in original?


everywhere and nowhere

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everywhere and nowhere

I really hate automated / computer / mechanical translation. Reading a machine-translated text, with its horrible ungrammatical style, offends my love for language. I hate it to the point that I'd rather not be able to understand a text than use a translating engine. Anyway, I avoid looking at machine-translated texts to the point that I have set up English instead of Polish as my first language choice. However, it still doesn't work for some sites, such as Etsy or Aliexpress and I don't know how to change it manually - particularly since I would still like to have prices displayed in Polish currency.

Why isn't there a simple solution available: to set up "display every site in original language" or "never use automated translation" as a preference?

If it matters, I use Firefox. On a computer, of course, my mobile doesn't even know what internet is (and doesn't know any colours except green and black ;)).

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Maybe your operating system is still running on Polish by default? I had a similar problem with my system because it refused to use the language that I wanted. Firefox might think:"Hm, what language should I use? The OS is in Polish. So lets use that". I don't know what OS your are using but I would give it a try to switch the language to English. I'm just guessing here, so it might not work.

 

8 minutes ago, Nowhere Girl said:

 my mobile doesn't even know what internet is (and doesn't know any colours except green and black ;)).

These are the best mobiles in my opinion. I have one of these too, in addition to my smartphone. When my smartphone is done, I'll switch back to the old one with only two colors: blue and black. Smartphones are overrated and they have annoying bugs like computers do.

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I understand and share these frustrations. Google in particular irritates the crap out of me, because its language settings are so inflexible and stupid. If you want to regularly use or search in two or more alternate languages, Google is just not geared towards that and they make it as difficult for you as possible. It appears to read the language that you have set the operating system of your computer or smartphone to, and it assumes that you only ever want to search in that language.

 

I might go to google.co.uk and type some search term in English, but because my operating system language is French, I will get an irritating message telling me "tip: search for results in French only", and the results that it does return are absolutely crap because it comes up with loads of translation sites telling me how to translate the phrase I typed into French, which is not at all what I wanted! To change the search language requires several clicks, and even then the setting randomly change or reset themselves. 

 

Why the hell can't Google work on the basis that if you go to google.co.uk, you probably want to search for something in English, if you go fo google.fr, you probably want to search for something in French, google.de - German, Google.pl - Polish, et cetera. Or is that just too bloody obvious for them?

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RoseGoesToYale
24 minutes ago, Ortac said:

Why the hell can't Google work on the basis that if you go to google.co.uk, you probably want to search for something in English, if you go fo google.fr, you probably want to search for something in French, google.de - German, Google.pl - Polish, et cetera. Or is that just too bloody obvious for them?

I could only guess as to how they do it, it's something of a mystery. I thought maybe the sites tap into your computer's ip address and use that to determine your internet service provider, and thus what country you're in. But I use a VPN, and even if I select a French server and get an ip address in France, google.fr still comes up in English for me (I'm in the US). So it can't be that. I also don't think they're tracking your site activity, because due to the frequency with which I visit Finland-based websites, google should be coming up in Finnish, too.

 

If they're using some sort of GPS triangulation system, that's extremely concerning for user's privacy rights. Wouldn't be illegal in the US, but still ethically questionable.

 

A few years ago, I could go to google.ca and it gave me the option to switch to French if I wanted to search in French. Now if I go to any google site, all are in English and it does not give me the option to change. If I search "what is today's date" in English, google will tell me. If I search "quelle est la date aujourd'hui", google won't tell me and I get a bunch of English links to French learning websites. If I search "mikä päivä tänään on", it still won't tell me, but I get a bunch of results in Finnish about Finland's flag days and a random featured article about pi day. :huh: Algorithms are weird.

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Grumpy Alien

I always get the option but can toggle back and forth?

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everywhere and nowhere
10 minutes ago, disGraceful said:

I always get the option but can toggle back and forth?

What do you mean? I can't find the option for changing language on Etsy. I could only change my presumed location and I don't want to do it because then prices wouldn't be displayed in Polish zlotys.

Any site with more than one language version should enable simple switching and not assume that they know better what version do people want to use. I vastly prefer English to ungrammatical Polish.

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Fantastic Name
21 hours ago, RoseGoesToYale said:

I thought maybe the sites tap into your computer's ip address and use that to determine your internet service provider, and thus what country you're in.

That's exactly what it does, if it's a site issue. You could circumvent this using a VPN, but using a good VPN can get a little pricey.

 

Firefox doesn't autotranslate anything for me. Maybe it's the version or distro you're using? Some installations of Firefox come preinstalled with certain extensions (i.e. automatic Google Translate). Usually you can disable these in the extensions menu, but sometimes you can't.

 

I would suggest maybe using a VPN like Tunnelbear or NordVPN alongside this. It's not the best solution, but it's probably good enough until you can find a better one.

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Grumpy Alien
1 hour ago, Nowhere Girl said:

What do you mean? I can't find the option for changing language on Etsy. I could only change my presumed location and I don't want to do it because then prices wouldn't be displayed in Polish zlotys.

Any site with more than one language version should enable simple switching and not assume that they know better what version do people want to use. I vastly prefer English to ungrammatical Polish.

I use Chrome and it always asks before translating

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Grumpy Alien

I do have to say I have great difficulty ordering from UK Etsy when I’m in the US. Etsy doesn’t do region swap well so maybe it doesn’t do languages well either?

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  • 6 months later...
J. van Deijck

I hate it when my Dutch pages are being automatically translated to English, but thankfully we can turn this option off.

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