Why wouldn't people have their language set correctly? Usually your browser language defaults to your system language, and presumably when you bought your computer, you selected your preferred language during the initial setup. If you had your browser set incorrectly, you would probably have dealt with that problem immediately when you saw all the menus and such in an unfamiliar language.
Perhaps some multilingual users might have one of their secondary language(s) set instead of their primary/preferred one, but at least it'll be a language they speak.
More importantly, even if the user has their browser screwed up, it's something that can be easily fixed on their end. But on sites that set language based on location, there isn't such an easy fix available; short of relocating or using a VPN, people in OP's situation are kinda screwed.
I don't run a German website, so I can't give you exact numbers, but in my experience, software can often default to something like 'en-US' in a variety of cases where you might not expect it to.
This is especially common in poorly localized tools. For example, a poorly implemented browser component inside some other tool or phone app might not properly set this value, and instead default to en-US.
Switching to the proposed method might fix the author's problem, but create a bunch of problems for other users in other scenarios.
Why wouldn’t Germans have their “browser languages configured correctly?”
German is well supported by software. If Germans want German content, they’ll have their OS set to use German.
Filipinos on the other hand would be a better example: Their software is likely to be in English but surely they prefer reading Tagalog or Cebuano.
- -
As a traveler, I’m thoroughly annoyed by being shown websites in the local language, but that would be perfectly fine if it was easy for me to change the language.
Sadly though changing the language often means having to learn what “Settings, Language, <language name>” looks like in the current country.
I don't run a German website, so I can't give you exact numbers, but in my experience, software can often default to something like 'en-US' in a variety of cases where you might not expect it to.
This is especially common in poorly localized tools. For example, a poorly implemented browser component inside some other tool or phone app might not properly set this value, and instead default to en-US.
Switching to the proposed method might fix the author's problem, but create a bunch of problems for other users in other scenarios.
Not sure about German-speaking countries, but in Francophone countries, everything is in French. Even if the default is English, the user would insist on switching to the French version.
Agree with the op. Not only do I regularly struggle with location-based internationalization, sometimes I can't even /see/ pages depending on location. Tried to find the product page for new google ear buds thing (in Korea) and they refuse to even display it. Of course, setting up local ssh tunnel to ec2 machine based in US takes < 60sec but it's still annoying.
In my case: I want Danish, if and only IF the site is a Danish website. If you're not a Danish website, I would like English, even though a Danish version may be available.
Of cause that bad advise for many sites, because basically my request is that sites like Linkedin or Facebook just drops localization, but that's not what my mom wants.
I experienced this a lot while growing up in a country with ~4 national languages - I spoke one of them well, but sadly only about 20% of the population speak it, so most websites will default to using the bigger national language (~70% pop) regardless of what your computer is set to.
It's really not that hard to find the language switcher on most websites, but it's still a bit annoying.
Yeah, it's annoying as hell. I especially despise when sites force me to manually select another country from a list, in order to get an interface in my native language.
The country selection itself is trivial, but often the content will be geo-specific as well, and you might end up with things like the wrong currency and so on.
That article is more about aesthetics than anything.
Also:
> There is a perfect symbol for any language which you can use on the Web: the name of the language in the language itself, such as English (or British English or US English, if needed). Be careful with the grammatically correct use of upper and lower case here! If a reader doesn't know the name of language X in X, he probably does not know X enough for the link to be of use to him.
So now that I'm on this Korean site, with no idea how "Korean" looks in Korean, how am I supposed to find the language picker?
He is not saying to use the current language's hame for the language picker's icon (I would use a globe, personally), but instead to use the language's name in the list.
Pretty much, yes. But the situation is even more messed up here in Europe and I am especially happy that I'm not a native German speaker.
It would cause a bunch of other problems, of course, but it would be nice if we could just have a bunch of languages with an EU flag next to them. At least from an UI perspective. :D
> * “US English” is good enough for all English speakers.
>
> * US English is well defined and refers to a single language.
There are certainly pretty extreme differences in spoken language, especially in the UK with its vast collection of local dialects, or in places where English is on a continuum with a creole language (Jamaica, Liberia, etc.)
But I would have thought that any regional variety of written English could be readily easily understood by most functionally literate speakers. I can browse English-language newspapers from the US, UK, Jamaica, India, and the Philippines and understand everything or nearly so. Is my assumption incorrect?
Anyway, I'd add another falsehood to your list:
* People prefer to consume content in their native language.
I think most bilingual people would prefer to read original content in their non-dominant language than a (poorly) translated version in their native language.
If you're going to use definition of 'language' so narrow that languages effectively don't exist, your article is not going to be useful. Kinda want the falsehoods to actually be false, you know?
G Suite does this and never saves my preferences! I'm in Tunisia and the business language is French. My PC and my browser are both set to English. Yet, Google insists on showing me the Arabic page!
Not only that, but their translation is terrible. Plus, since Arabic is not the business language here, most of the terms used on their site are quite ambiguous to most Tunisian users.
One of the many reasons why I hate modern websites. They try to be too clever and try to guess what language I want, despite my OS and browser being set to en-US. And then make it particularly difficult to change the language manually in a persistent way. Why even bother with region settings if they're not going to be respected by websites or, hell, even games. I've noticed that if I have my system language set to English and my region set to German, some games will default to German. Which is annoying, but particularly infuriating when some games don't even provide an in-game language select, instead forcing me to Google for the right config file I need to change. And the only reason why I sometimes have my region set to German? There's no other way to change the MS/Xbox store region.
Actually, it's not just websites I hate. A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.
my other pet peeve.... stop hi-jacking my scroll wheel and converting it to 'smooth scroll'. i dont want crappy animations, you have content, i have a method of scrolling, let me control how i do this.
Smooth scroll that snaps to set scroll levels is absolutely infuriating. I question the psychological integrity of anyone who thinks it's a good idea; how much of a control freak must you be to want to micromanage people's scrolling?
Another obnoxious thing is how websites disable the normal behavior of Ctrl+F in favor of whatever their vision of what a search UI should look like is.
Yeah, that's incredibly annoying. So frustrating when you're coming to a discourse thread from a google search. I tend to avoid discourse forums because of that.
Ha I used to worked on a tablet app that did a load of industrial safety checks.
We kept getting tickets to lock more and more of the device down as 'solutions' to support requests.
One ticket was to lock the device to maximum brightness, because support had fielded some calls where the users couldn't see the screen.
We then started getting calls from users who worked nightshifts complaining that this tablet bolted to their truck was blindling bright and there was nothing they could do to dim or turn off the screen...
The way AMP hijacks my Chrome menu bar and disables tab management until I scroll all the way back up the page to the top makes me actively wish death and despair upon its developers.
Is it unclear that I mean that I don't want text selection to be disabled and I am questioning why you can disable that I can select the text in my browser of your website, or is someone really invested in having non-selectable text?
I'm surprised.
Your post literally says you do not want text selection to be available.
Yes, as you said, this makes no sense, and the only available interpretation is that you do not want it disabled, but it took me a WTF moment before I got to that. Maybe some people are quick to downvote.
Ok, perhaps "literally".
But it's a reply, right? Context is a thing.
- [...] A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.
- Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF!
- And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible?
I guess that's not clear at all once there are many replies. What I'm learning here is to craft responses that stand on their own. This is not a spoken dialogue.
This isn't a new thing. Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. I was at Google at the time they first started doing this, and it was somewhat controversial.
The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.
I feel like this makes sense and probably needs to be applied more broadly.
Default settings need to be treated as the lack of a choice rather than an explicit choice for the default. So much software doesn’t make this distinction apparent and makes peoples’, usually users’, lives difficult.
If “agree to send me promotional email” is the default (and is gross but that’s not really the point here) you’re missing out on good data knowing who explicitly chose it. If the new version of a software has a setting with a new default but you can’t change it on upgrade because you don’t what users explicitly chose then you wind up with this weird case where version Y fresh and version Y from X behave differently. Maddening for debugging and support.
The problem is that there's no way to explicitly say you want "en-US". If you're in a non-English speaking country and your Accept-Language is "en-US" then you're going to get the "local" language.
To make matters worse, Google uses ccTLDs for everywhere except the US. google.us just redirects to google.com, and google.com uses your IP to figure out your country, so you can't even use the domain as a workaround.
> The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language.
Sounds like a potential workaround is to set your language to another flavour of English like "en-CA" or "en-GB".
If I'm in Denmark, and I've got an en-US browser setting it can be because I am visiting Denmark, in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.
In short if your location has a different default language setting than what you are sending, what you are sending is probably what you really prefer.
> in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.
...or because your browser defaults to sending en-US even though you're using a Danish-localized browser on a Danish operating system, as described by the parent comment.
I don't think you've read the parent comment very closely, if I'm mistaken please point out to me where they exactly discuss localization of browsers and Danish operating systems? Those are factors you've put into your definition of what by default means.
It is however not what I experience when I look at my Danish localized firefox because it sends da-DK by default, and my english browser sends en-Us, because I took the effort to make it so, because I don't much like the Danish language for UI.
I admit this is just a quick look over of the different language browsers I have on my system. What do the different language browsers on your system do that you feel so confident in telling me to pay more attention to the parent comment?
> many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language
Indicating that "the user's actual language" and "en-US" are different. Yes, I extrapolated this to both the browser and the operating system having a different language, maybe it was just one or the other.
> What do the different language browsers on your system
From the parent comment:
> Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. [...] The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was [...]
I don't have any 20 years old browsers to test with, I'm afraid.
If someone has been doing something for 20 years the normal interpretation of that would be they started doing it 20 years ago and are still doing it, and you probably don't need 20 year old browsers to actually test it.
As I stated in the comment you quoted from, this was about 20 years ago. Also, Chrome is made by Google, so it seems entirely reasonable that someone fixed a problem they found annoying about browsers. (At the same time, Google is so big now that they may continue ignoring "en-US" because of momentum and/or because no-one remembers the original reason behind that decision.)
Google was the most major annoyance when I was expat, as it would default to an alphabet I could barely read. Trying to find the 'English' setting at the time was a nightmare.
I'm surprised browsers haven't addressed this yet, by adding an extra header stating if the locale is in the default setting or if the user has explicitly configured it.
The results you get are very much dependant on where you are visiting from. I can set my everything to Japanese, both in my browser, OS and my Google user account and search via google.co.jp - but if I am not in Japan, results will be skewed away from Japanese websites.
For example: The other day I wanted to find the lyrics for the Japanese version of a song, so I typed "[song name] 歌詞" and because Google knows that 歌詞 means lyrics, and it can see I'm in Europe, my top result was an English lyric site, with the original version of the lyrics and no mention of the Japanese word from my search term. Technically, that is really impressive, but kinda useless.
On top of that, it can sometimes be impossible to visit help or product pages if you happen to be in the wrong country.
I'm in the USA and get Japanese results when I search for things in Japanese. Google has settings for both region and search result language, I would try setting those.
It’s not that you don’t get Japanese results - adding a few more words to the query got the result I needed. It’s how about how far they force their localization on users.
Exactly right. A modern website is one that knows that the browser's configured language is the best way to determine the user's language. A website that uses location to determine language is hopelessly outdated.
I never completely agreed with the rationale for using location, but 15-20 years ago I at least found it understandable...Internet Cafes and borrowing your host's desktop computer were more common scenarios then. Today they're rare enough that I can't understand why anyone would accommodate those scenarios over the scenario of someone traveling with their own device.
This rationalization may have been valid at the time, but certainly the software has changed in the intervening 20 years such that it is very likely that the user configured their OS and environment to their preferred language weights -- at least their preferred primary language.
Given Google's wanton dropping support for RFC-compliant HTTPS in the name of changing times, certainly they should be open to changing this policy with the appropriate data.
> If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.
Thank you so very much for this tip! I don't use cookies and live in a non-English country so I've been clicking that yellow "change to English results" button for at least half a decade now, numerous times a day, every day. Switching to en-GB indeed makes Google respect my language choice.
Not kidding, you've just saved me thousands and thousands of clicks and small annoyances.
Why is defaulting to the user's implicit choice silly?
Where there are two possible defaults for a game to use (OS or Steam), the Steam language setting is closer to the game, so it should use that. For most users it'll be correct.
It shd allow that you can choose. Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version. The UI doesnt matter what language (apart from understandable by then reader)
Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version.
You say that because you speak English. If you don't then obviously English is much worse than even a poor translation. Game developers have to take that in to account - using the user's Steam language setting means they can definitely read that language, so putting the game in that to start with should work for them.
The app has to default to something even if the game enables the user to change the setting. Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population.
As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
>Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version.
>You say that because you speak English.
...well yes, and I assume they'd say the same for whatever their native language was. You missed the point entirely that language should be an easily accessible option.
> Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population.
I'm pretty sure much more than 20% of the world's population is fluent in English. It's the language of the western world and the global economy, after all.
> As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
Like the market ever cared about distributed failures like these. Every studio uses a different translation group, they can't really verify the final product, and the translators will happily save money doing shoddy work. Not to mention, the workflow isn't usually optimized for correct translations. To do this right, you'd have to have the translation team play through the entire game at least once to understand the whole picture, and only then have them work together on translating the text and audio. No single-pass translations, and no dividing the work between multiple people that don't talk to each other. I.e. more expensive. At the same time, the studio will get 90% of the profit (which happens at the point of sale, not at the completion of the experience) with a shitty translation anyway.
> Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging.
I think it was hidden in the accessibility menu... This made me absolutely furious when I couldn't figure out how to change the game's language to the one that my Windows installation is using.
Yes, please! It is incredibly annoying, especially when it is hard to find the button to change it. Google seems a big offender; I have to fix it many times. Very weird as they also present localised ads which I cannot read...
This is one of my main pain points with a lot of websites, including Google. I live in Hong Kong, and it constantly keeps setting itself in Chinese. Quite a few websites do this, even though my browser is set to English.
Worst of all, even when I set Google to English, the OAuth popups remain in Chinese with no option to change.
I have a theory that if there are many ways to do something, but one retrieves more data about the user, that way will win.
For example, cisco webex turns on 24/7 microphone access "to find nearby displays".
this could be a funding model - if your app can plausibly access (contacts, location, microphone, camera, photo library, ...) then it should get more funding (because you can slap on an advertising SDK to "coincidentally" extract more user data)
Yeah, this is pretty horrible. Many applications try to be friendly and show a Hindi webpage just because you are in India or in particular, Northern India. India has around 25 major languages, and people from all over the country work in all parts of the country, so assuming Hindi as the default language for every person currently present in North India is not correct.
Language is a sensitive issue in several parts of India. Why not be polite and ask the user for language preference first?
Why does setting the language based on location even happen? It seems like far more work to do that instead of just checking the `Accept-Language` header.
When I did it, I just mapped the browser language to our languages and called it a day, no complaints so far. So far as I know, most browsers send that header in.
That's exactly what should happen, the problem is a lot of sites don't do that. I'm US, living in Vietnam and half the time the Facebook login screen turns up with Vietnamese and no way to change the language. If anything, this forced me to learn those 'login' words in Vietnamese.
I can confirm having the exact same issue, Facebook isn't alone though. Google also tries to be clever and fails hard. There's only one way to get the preferred user language, it's to check the Accept-Language header, anything else will fail, please don't try to be clever.
I'm British and also living in Vietnam currently, and this has also been my experience. Also, if I'm in Thailand all the Google search results are returned with timestamps converted to Buddhist calendar years. Genius.
Is it unreasonable of me to be less tolerant of this brokenness when it comes from companies with all the money in the world, and also all the highest paid developers in the world?
Imagine being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, but not being able to follow a basic HTTP specification. Insane.
Yes this is super annoying, especially if you're in a country with it's own alphabet, and the 'change language' menu item is written in that script which you can't read.
Just this morning I was getting annoyed about exactly this.
If I want the Australian site I'll go to the .au domain name. If I go to .com then I want the global/USA site.
It is SO annoying when going to .com redirects to .au
Maybe this is what happens when companies stockpile so many developers that they have more than they need - everything that can be written does get written.
But then what do you do for some of my relatives who are not making that decision based on the domain and then get made when they can't get the .com stuff in Canada?
I think amazon makes this right. If you go to a amazon.com page it shows you the actual page but also asks you if you would rather go to your local amazom.whatever site.
On a related note, always leave the text on the page as an actual text. Don't put it into an image. This gives visitors a chance to easily translate the text. I've had this horrible experience so many times in a foreign country.
Somewhat ironically most of the time those would be governmental websites or some important announcements.
If you've made this fancy image that looks like a brochure and you must put it on a website and you can't be bothered making it in HTML with text, at least write all the text on the image in alt attribute or under the image.
I think this goes back to the early days of web development. Before we could add fonts with CSS @include and had to write progressive websites (yay 800x600), everyone who wished to use custom or platform specific fonts had to generate images with that text using a php script or some such. Since government IT is chronically underfunded (IMO) and the web hit critical mass late 90s/early 2000s - long before best practices or new technologies could be widely disseminated - most of them are stuck in that time period because that's when they were first forced to support the web.
Microsoft is doing this as well. I google something in english, find an english MSDN entry with english title and preview, but when I click on the link, the language changes to German. I'm a native German speaker but having read about technical topics almost exclusively in english for years, I'm just much more comfortable in english now.
What makes it even worse is that often it's not properly translated, but just Microsoft's translation machine applied to the English version. The result isn't very good. And even if it were manually translated, the result would likely end up a mixture of english and German. German is a very nice language, as is english, but what I absolutely hate is the mix of the two, also called denglisch.
Slightly orthogonal: live in France, bought a new phone just before travelling. The first SIM card I put in it was a temporary travel card bought upon arrival.
Now Google Maps shows me prices of hotels in Uzbekistani soms. Didn't find a way to reset it in the UI, clearing GMaps cache didn't help either. It's been a year already.
I have some websites assuming I'm Russian still, after a year in Latvia (why not Latvian? Who knows.), and even when upgrading my iPhone, everything would default to Spanish.
I distinctly remember updating my address and location each time, but it never made a difference.
Now I just find it a little amusing. Keeps my Russian and Spanish fresh.
Their automated translation also affects language keyword and error codes. It renders the page unusable. The option to change the language is hard to find and the selected language is not stored.
Some people have worked very hard to make their doc as painful as possible.
I’m an European guy living in Japan that browse tech documentation in English. I’ve the same issue than you, sometimes MSDN or MDN pages are returned in French (all my devices UI are in English, with French locale). If it were good French, why not, but it’s crappy MT instead. Have so respect for the user please. Sometimes I got Japanese thrown at me, depending on which network I’m connected.
Finally I sometimes perform search in other languages, for instance Chinese. Of course I got results mostly in Japanese from Google... few years ago it was possible to change the language for a query, now the settings in burried under dozen of clicks, and are link to my profile. So basically unusable.
In a way it’s like the OS desktop UX: developers are busy trying to outsmart the user, yet the end result is more painful to use and less customizable than it was a decade ago.
I'm in the exact same situation, well, except for that time when for some unfathomable reason Google insisted, for weeks, to deliver what I believe is Lithuanian to my home browser.
Before the great Firefox extension purge I was sending out different language preference headers depending on domain. Unfortunately, this trick was already breaking down as more and more German companies redirect from their .de to their .com to show off ambition, leaving me with a bad English translation of the massive German due to headers.
What I'd love to see would be a server side distinction between primary and secondary languages, but of course companies would lie their asses off for uncountable reasons bad and worse.
Somewhat related to technical documentation, error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.
Sometimes when not working on my own machines at a client the locale is set to a language other than English and some Java frameworks such as Hibernate then will dutifully print out error messages in that language.
This is next to useless. At a time when you still had nothing but a printed manual in your local language to go on this might have made some sense but nowadays people research error messages on the internet. Searching for some arcane ORM framework error message in a language other than English is a futile endeavour.
Some programs work around this by prepending a global error ID to the localized, such as "E300: Ascorbic Acid Error", but this is harder to manage on the development side.
The most fun I had was investigating some bug reports with .NET Exceptions in Japanese. Thankfully, there was enough of context in the rest of the logs to get to the bottom of things, but having to rely on machine translations for debugging would have been... fun.
You can install a new language easily by using the -addLangs parameter of the installer (on an existing install) or by copying the msg/msb files from another install (matching versions). After that you have to change the NLS settings of the DB and it will switch to the new language.
That's not entirely true. You can "change" the charset from 1 type to another... The problem with that is fields may extend past the max length of that field when converting from 1 to the other.
Source: me. I had to help someone with specifically this when they set the wrong charset on their DB. Had these problems.
> error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.
Ah, I remember MS Combat Flight Simulator 2. Translated to Spanish (or maybe automatically using local system files?) without bothering the check the text fit the allotted fields, which meant you could not read most things at all. Impressive QA, Microsoft! ;)
I am even "less default" than that, expecting the dates to be formatted the way I've defined them in the system setting (it can be set separately from the language), and some programs ignore that too.
There's a Firefox extension [1] to automatically change the language for MSDN (Microsoft) and MDN (Mozilla). I've extracted this functionality into a userscript [2].
Microsoft seem to be particularly rubbish at this. For example, the Microsoft Store (when it works at all) does not acknowledge the idea that you might live in a non-English speaking country but speak English.
At one point Windows 10 used to use your keyboard layout to choose your local language. So as an Aussie I was stuck choosing between spellcheck telling me 'colour' and 'flavour' were wrong, or having to deal with a UK keyboard layout. It seems fixed now but it was really annoying.
Are you following an Excel guide that's written in English but can't use the formulas because your own computer is set to use some other language? Or did you inherit some Excel sheets to maintain that are not written in English?
No problem! Just install Excel Functions Translator [1] and say Auf Wiedersehen to all you localization worries!
There is an Excel "German" dictionary (probably others too), but when you Google "Excel German dictionary" Google shows "übertreffen". Which is the German word for "to excel"...
It's not only names that are localized, but also file formats. If you export a CSV in an English speaking locale, you won't be able to use it in a Latin one.
The comma is used as a decimal separator in many countries which makes it impossible to use csv files without special import rules; nothing to do with using utf-8.
Even worse, when I was studying abroad in Germany I'd get the Microsoft English-translated-to-German page and then Chrome, which I had originally installed in the US and configured for US English, would "helpfully" translate the German back to English.
I can read English and usually German, but I definitely can't read technical documents that have passed through a machine translator twice.
God yes.. in particular Google is horrible with this. They have the interface language and the search language as different setting, both default to German if you're in Germany. Have you tried using German google? It's abysmal. Try googling for Any piece of open source Software. You'll end up at a third party clickbait website that offers an infested download (often chip.de). That's why many Germans end up with horribly infected PCs.
Chip.de is a reputable site. I see your argument for going tonthe primary source of a software and this is what I always try to do. But I don't get your hate. They don't repackage things the way Sourceforge tried to or anything like that. So all the downloads I made from their site were maybe outdated, but they were all genuine.
I stand corrected if that changed. I definitely remember that they offered some own binary downloader in the past (might have been a decade though). SEE EDIT
At the very least they should not be the first hit if you search for the program name. I don't get how that could possibly change with language selection.
edit: Inkscape results in a "Inkscape - CHIP-Installer.exe" download with my antimalware immediately sprinting to my rescue.
Whoa, I cannot reproduce that. I don't doubt your report, but I see a completely different behavior.
When I want to download Inkscape for Windows, I get a zip file. When I download GIMP for Windows, I seem to get a genuine installer with the same size and filename as what is offered on gimp.org. I didn't download these files on Windows, though.
I went to their website[1], and clicked the prominent Download button[2]. Next to that button it says "Sicherer Download" (secure download). The executable file downloaded is not the original installer but the a binary with their chip icon and signed by Chip GmbH.
Running that "installer" then asked me if I wanted an amazon desktop icon (with their affiliate link in it, I am sure), and clicking just Next asked me again if I wanted it because I "did not make a selection". Then it offered to "block annoying ads" (the irony!) by installing Opera (again asking me again when I clicked next).
Then it finally downloaded something. Says that something was checked by Kaspersky. The download progress screen also asked me if my PC was slow, and if I wanted to call some "free" number to have experts check my computer for free(!) (via Teamviewer or telephone, wat). And if I did call those experts, I'd even get a free McAfee license! (what do Kaspersky, who scanned the download, think about that?). The "free" number is actually a number somewhere in Frankfurt am Main, so it's not actually toll free as far as I can tell; if I am correct, this would be a direct violation of German law which states that ads giving you a number to call have to correctly state the charges associated with a call.
I eventually ended up with a .zip file that contains the actual Inkscape installer. Or rather installers; it contained both the 32 bit and 64 bit installers. Those installers are not launched automatically by the way. So the usual "unsavvy" user will end up with two files in a zip with no idea what to do next. So the Chip "installer" is just for displaying those ads, pushing their crapware, but will not actually help you install the software you wanted.
And rather on-topic it displayed the UI as a mix of English and German because I was using an English language Windows Sandbox...
If you just want the zip without the adware "installer", you have to click the regular "Manuelle Installation" link (far less prominently featured than the crapware button), then again click something, and then it will download the same zip without the "installer".
Okay, everything in your lengthy post was exactly NOT what I was seeing. And I finally figured out the reason for it: the site behaves completely differently if it doesn't think the browser accessing it is running on Windows. Then you get the actual installers for download. But if it DOES think you're running windows, the site hands out the wrapper executable. My guess is that the wrapper only works on Windows and they don't want to appear broken for users on other operating systems.
So many websites do this. It's been very frustrating for years. I have everything set up to Catalan or otherwise English, but so many websites decide they should force me into their Spanish version. I don't even live in a Spanish-speaking country. I get it, you see Catalan and think, hey, we don't have Catalan, but we can offer Spanish! Well, not all Catalan speakers live in Spain. Catalan has been spoken for centuries in other areas. Consider the case of my kids who read and speak Catalan and English, but not Spanish.
I'm in the exact same situation and it is terribly infuriating! As a good thing, this has somewhat forced me out of google search and now I get to enjoy duckduckgo which does not seem to pull this kind of shit on you.
And stop disallowing me to paste into password fields please. I use Keepass.. ..ever tried to enter by hand secure passwords like this: cw-ZY~!$m=#3RM4",Y9Mpcd\_!+z;FN]p
They actually trying to force me to use more insecure passwords.
Three things:
- YES, you are 100% right
- Keepass has a Ctrl+V mode, which pretends to type into username / password fields char by char. maybe this feature can give you peace of mind
- Still, you are right, the website shouldn't make assumptions on how you handle passwords
I ended up writing a custom browser extension to handle one particularly annoying login process for a site I need to use regularly that in addition to asking for password asks for several other pieces of information on a "1st character of ..., 3rd character of ..." type basis. It's infuriating.
Youtube has this "feature" where it translates video titles for me (and it is always horrible). I feel like it never occurred to them that a person could speak more than one language.
Ah yes, that's horrible. No matter if the user couldn't understand a word in the video itself if he needed that translation, let's just deceive him by showing him a badly translated video title in the wrong language. Meanwhile I have to set the site to dark mode and English again multiple times a year because Google struggles to persistently store this simple user setting.
Ow, yes, the translated titles are so confusing. You think you're getting a video in your language, but no, you don't.
It's just a badly translated title and captions.
And don't get me started on those captions! Youtube, please stahp! Why do you keep forcing these? I don't want them, stop pushing them.
Whenever we use Chromecast with multiple people, Youtube enables the auto-translated captions. So, we turn it off, next video youtube turns it on again, we turn it off again, next vid, it's there again. arrgghhhhhh
The youtube app recently got awful wrt caption. It always enables them now, so I end up disabling them manually. But then if there's an ad in the middle of the video, after the ad, they're back! And that's with subtitles being disabled in the app settings!
I don't really know. I assumed it was auto-generated since it has always been bad.
But my point was more that I didn't want localized video titles and I should just get the original one since the video is in that original language anyway.
If it is the intention of the uploader to create a localized title and description, shouldn't you be getting the localized one according to your language setting? I also find it is annoying, but I think it is intention of the uploader.
Yeah this feature is pretty stupid. It makes you think the video is in a different language than it really is and makes search much more complicated.
I like that you can set language and region on top of the browser settings though and it's cookie based. This way I have a firefox container for Spanish another one for English, etc. Same Youtube account different languages.
aliexpress had the worst version I had ever seen. I clicked on a link to the French site and got the french version, then I tried to find a way to switch it, saw nothing (couldnt access the footer due to infinite scroll) so I went to the .com version and it was still in french. Cleared my cookies for that site and it was STILL in french for the main page on the .com domain. No idea _what_ they were doing, must have been browser fingerprinting or saving it by IP address. I was not logged in.
The browser vendors don't make it easy to change the browser language (and especially not on a per-site basis) so users are unlikely to be able to change the language if it is wrong, so if decide to use the browser language instead of the location, please also have an option in your site to set a cookie that overrides the browser settings.
You can even do this on completely static HTML-only websites that don't use JavaScript or server-side code. Debian is an example of this:
> The browser vendors don't make it easy to change the browser language
In Firefox it's in the first page of the settings: Tools > Options > Language and appearance, there you can change the language of the UI and the preferred language for displaying pages.
I have my Firefox "Language and Appearance" language set to "English (United States)". I'm not sure why this setting even exists, because the operating system also has a language setting, which I've also set to "English (US)". Yet somehow, some parts of my Firefox UI are still in Japanese. Nobody has ever been able to explain why, or how to fix it.
I don't understand why a web browser (or any application) needs a custom language setting, much less a prominent one. It's just one more place that can fail.
> I don't understand why a web browser (or any application) needs a custom language setting, much less a prominent one. It's just one more place that can fail.
For entertainment including games I want them to be in the original languaugage they were developed in (if it's one I can speak fluently) even if that differs from my system language (which differs from my native language (which at many points in my life has differed from the default language for my location)).
I don't personally have a reason to have a different language for my browser UI though, but perhaps someone else does. However I agree that the default for application languages should be "use the system default" - not whatever was the system default at installation time or some other fixed language.
300 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadMy guess is that they don’t, and this fix would hurt more users than it helps.
Perhaps some multilingual users might have one of their secondary language(s) set instead of their primary/preferred one, but at least it'll be a language they speak.
More importantly, even if the user has their browser screwed up, it's something that can be easily fixed on their end. But on sites that set language based on location, there isn't such an easy fix available; short of relocating or using a VPN, people in OP's situation are kinda screwed.
This is especially common in poorly localized tools. For example, a poorly implemented browser component inside some other tool or phone app might not properly set this value, and instead default to en-US.
Switching to the proposed method might fix the author's problem, but create a bunch of problems for other users in other scenarios.
German is well supported by software. If Germans want German content, they’ll have their OS set to use German.
Filipinos on the other hand would be a better example: Their software is likely to be in English but surely they prefer reading Tagalog or Cebuano.
- -
As a traveler, I’m thoroughly annoyed by being shown websites in the local language, but that would be perfectly fine if it was easy for me to change the language.
Sadly though changing the language often means having to learn what “Settings, Language, <language name>” looks like in the current country.
Switching to the proposed method might fix the author's problem, but create a bunch of problems for other users in other scenarios.
Yes, I live in Mexico, and yes I speak Spanish, but no I don't want to see your terrible translation.
I’m in Switzerland, please follow my browser language. Don’t guess whether I speak Swiss, French, Italian, etc
I’m in Laos, my OS is in English. Please show me Laotian.
However, do make it easy for anyone to change the language. I shouldn’t have to hunt the settings page when traveling.
Agree with the op. Not only do I regularly struggle with location-based internationalization, sometimes I can't even /see/ pages depending on location. Tried to find the product page for new google ear buds thing (in Korea) and they refuse to even display it. Of course, setting up local ssh tunnel to ec2 machine based in US takes < 60sec but it's still annoying.
Statistically speaking, Laotian users speak Laotian. As a traveler, I’m the minority.
Regarding the rest, I feel you. They can guess whatever language as long as they make it easy to change it, without unnecessary redirection games.
Apple.com is relatively good with this:
> Hey I see you’re in Thailand, maybe you want to check out the Thai site.
In my case: I want Danish, if and only IF the site is a Danish website. If you're not a Danish website, I would like English, even though a Danish version may be available.
Of cause that bad advise for many sites, because basically my request is that sites like Linkedin or Facebook just drops localization, but that's not what my mom wants.
It's really not that hard to find the language switcher on most websites, but it's still a bit annoying.
The country selection itself is trivial, but often the content will be geo-specific as well, and you might end up with things like the wrong currency and so on.
I’m genuinely surprised that there’s not a falsehoods article that includes things like:
* The mapping between languages and countries is 1-1.
* Every language has a mother single mother country.
* “English” refers to a single language.
* “US English” is good enough for all English speakers.
* US English is well defined and refers to a single language.
* You can partition a map into areas for which there is a single reasonable default language.
And so on.
Also:
> There is a perfect symbol for any language which you can use on the Web: the name of the language in the language itself, such as English (or British English or US English, if needed). Be careful with the grammatically correct use of upper and lower case here! If a reader doesn't know the name of language X in X, he probably does not know X enough for the link to be of use to him.
So now that I'm on this Korean site, with no idea how "Korean" looks in Korean, how am I supposed to find the language picker?
He is not saying to use the current language's hame for the language picker's icon (I would use a globe, personally), but instead to use the language's name in the list.
For example:
It would cause a bunch of other problems, of course, but it would be nice if we could just have a bunch of languages with an EU flag next to them. At least from an UI perspective. :D
>
> * “US English” is good enough for all English speakers.
>
> * US English is well defined and refers to a single language.
There are certainly pretty extreme differences in spoken language, especially in the UK with its vast collection of local dialects, or in places where English is on a continuum with a creole language (Jamaica, Liberia, etc.)
But I would have thought that any regional variety of written English could be readily easily understood by most functionally literate speakers. I can browse English-language newspapers from the US, UK, Jamaica, India, and the Philippines and understand everything or nearly so. Is my assumption incorrect?
Anyway, I'd add another falsehood to your list:
* People prefer to consume content in their native language.
I think most bilingual people would prefer to read original content in their non-dominant language than a (poorly) translated version in their native language.
Not only that, but their translation is terrible. Plus, since Arabic is not the business language here, most of the terms used on their site are quite ambiguous to most Tunisian users.
Ugh.
Actually, it's not just websites I hate. A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.
WTF!
We kept getting tickets to lock more and more of the device down as 'solutions' to support requests.
One ticket was to lock the device to maximum brightness, because support had fielded some calls where the users couldn't see the screen.
We then started getting calls from users who worked nightshifts complaining that this tablet bolted to their truck was blindling bright and there was nothing they could do to dim or turn off the screen...
Not to mention the infinite scrolling insanity.
Is it unclear that I mean that I don't want text selection to be disabled and I am questioning why you can disable that I can select the text in my browser of your website, or is someone really invested in having non-selectable text? I'm surprised.
Yes, as you said, this makes no sense, and the only available interpretation is that you do not want it disabled, but it took me a WTF moment before I got to that. Maybe some people are quick to downvote.
- [...] A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.
- Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF!
- And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible?
I guess that's not clear at all once there are many replies. What I'm learning here is to craft responses that stand on their own. This is not a spoken dialogue.
The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.
Default settings need to be treated as the lack of a choice rather than an explicit choice for the default. So much software doesn’t make this distinction apparent and makes peoples’, usually users’, lives difficult.
If “agree to send me promotional email” is the default (and is gross but that’s not really the point here) you’re missing out on good data knowing who explicitly chose it. If the new version of a software has a setting with a new default but you can’t change it on upgrade because you don’t what users explicitly chose then you wind up with this weird case where version Y fresh and version Y from X behave differently. Maddening for debugging and support.
To make matters worse, Google uses ccTLDs for everywhere except the US. google.us just redirects to google.com, and google.com uses your IP to figure out your country, so you can't even use the domain as a workaround.
Sounds like a potential workaround is to set your language to another flavour of English like "en-CA" or "en-GB".
Browser set to en-au? "Oh, I'm sorry, you can't use this feature yet because it's not in your region." for years after launch.
In short if your location has a different default language setting than what you are sending, what you are sending is probably what you really prefer.
...or because your browser defaults to sending en-US even though you're using a Danish-localized browser on a Danish operating system, as described by the parent comment.
It is however not what I experience when I look at my Danish localized firefox because it sends da-DK by default, and my english browser sends en-Us, because I took the effort to make it so, because I don't much like the Danish language for UI.
I admit this is just a quick look over of the different language browsers I have on my system. What do the different language browsers on your system do that you feel so confident in telling me to pay more attention to the parent comment?
Indicating that "the user's actual language" and "en-US" are different. Yes, I extrapolated this to both the browser and the operating system having a different language, maybe it was just one or the other.
> What do the different language browsers on your system
From the parent comment:
> Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. [...] The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was [...]
I don't have any 20 years old browsers to test with, I'm afraid.
Which browsers? I'm using Chrome and it definitely does not do that. Should be easy to find out that with user agent.
I'm surprised browsers haven't addressed this yet, by adding an extra header stating if the locale is in the default setting or if the user has explicitly configured it.
The results you get are very much dependant on where you are visiting from. I can set my everything to Japanese, both in my browser, OS and my Google user account and search via google.co.jp - but if I am not in Japan, results will be skewed away from Japanese websites.
For example: The other day I wanted to find the lyrics for the Japanese version of a song, so I typed "[song name] 歌詞" and because Google knows that 歌詞 means lyrics, and it can see I'm in Europe, my top result was an English lyric site, with the original version of the lyrics and no mention of the Japanese word from my search term. Technically, that is really impressive, but kinda useless.
On top of that, it can sometimes be impossible to visit help or product pages if you happen to be in the wrong country.
I never completely agreed with the rationale for using location, but 15-20 years ago I at least found it understandable...Internet Cafes and borrowing your host's desktop computer were more common scenarios then. Today they're rare enough that I can't understand why anyone would accommodate those scenarios over the scenario of someone traveling with their own device.
Given Google's wanton dropping support for RFC-compliant HTTPS in the name of changing times, certainly they should be open to changing this policy with the appropriate data.
Thank you so very much for this tip! I don't use cookies and live in a non-English country so I've been clicking that yellow "change to English results" button for at least half a decade now, numerous times a day, every day. Switching to en-GB indeed makes Google respect my language choice.
Not kidding, you've just saved me thousands and thousands of clicks and small annoyances.
You say that because you speak English. If you don't then obviously English is much worse than even a poor translation. Game developers have to take that in to account - using the user's Steam language setting means they can definitely read that language, so putting the game in that to start with should work for them.
The app has to default to something even if the game enables the user to change the setting. Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population.
As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
Not really. They could pop up a language selection dialog on first use, like many installers have done for ages.
>You say that because you speak English.
...well yes, and I assume they'd say the same for whatever their native language was. You missed the point entirely that language should be an easily accessible option.
I'm pretty sure much more than 20% of the world's population is fluent in English. It's the language of the western world and the global economy, after all.
> As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
Like the market ever cared about distributed failures like these. Every studio uses a different translation group, they can't really verify the final product, and the translators will happily save money doing shoddy work. Not to mention, the workflow isn't usually optimized for correct translations. To do this right, you'd have to have the translation team play through the entire game at least once to understand the whole picture, and only then have them work together on translating the text and audio. No single-pass translations, and no dividing the work between multiple people that don't talk to each other. I.e. more expensive. At the same time, the studio will get 90% of the profit (which happens at the point of sale, not at the completion of the experience) with a shitty translation anyway.
Translation is inherently lossy.
I've never been to Germany, the last time I studied german was a quarter century ago. My Xbox isn't set to German either.
Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging.
I think it was hidden in the accessibility menu... This made me absolutely furious when I couldn't figure out how to change the game's language to the one that my Windows installation is using.
Worst of all, even when I set Google to English, the OAuth popups remain in Chinese with no option to change.
For example, cisco webex turns on 24/7 microphone access "to find nearby displays".
this could be a funding model - if your app can plausibly access (contacts, location, microphone, camera, photo library, ...) then it should get more funding (because you can slap on an advertising SDK to "coincidentally" extract more user data)
https://help.webex.com/en-us/WBX89838/What-is-Cisco-Intellig...
Short distance data channels that solve the “two computers physically next to each other can’t communicate frustration” are always welcome in my book.
(meanwhile I can also add an advertising sdk to listen for nearby television advertisements or recognize nearby music to "add value")
Language is a sensitive issue in several parts of India. Why not be polite and ask the user for language preference first?
When I did it, I just mapped the browser language to our languages and called it a day, no complaints so far. So far as I know, most browsers send that header in.
Is it unreasonable of me to be less tolerant of this brokenness when it comes from companies with all the money in the world, and also all the highest paid developers in the world?
Imagine being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, but not being able to follow a basic HTTP specification. Insane.
Google maps, for example.
If I want the Australian site I'll go to the .au domain name. If I go to .com then I want the global/USA site.
It is SO annoying when going to .com redirects to .au
Maybe this is what happens when companies stockpile so many developers that they have more than they need - everything that can be written does get written.
Somewhat ironically most of the time those would be governmental websites or some important announcements.
If you've made this fancy image that looks like a brochure and you must put it on a website and you can't be bothered making it in HTML with text, at least write all the text on the image in alt attribute or under the image.
What makes it even worse is that often it's not properly translated, but just Microsoft's translation machine applied to the English version. The result isn't very good. And even if it were manually translated, the result would likely end up a mixture of english and German. German is a very nice language, as is english, but what I absolutely hate is the mix of the two, also called denglisch.
Ok fine whatever, don’t really speak German but did enough in high school to muddle through. Proba localization, will turn back when I go home.
2 years later and Google on my phone remains German. This is my life now ... at least I get to practice a little german I guess
Now Google Maps shows me prices of hotels in Uzbekistani soms. Didn't find a way to reset it in the UI, clearing GMaps cache didn't help either. It's been a year already.
Don't get me wrong, I've had my moments where I've done similar things for years. I just have to say it's a little funny.
I distinctly remember updating my address and location each time, but it never made a difference.
Now I just find it a little amusing. Keeps my Russian and Spanish fresh.
I distinctly remember updating my address and location each time, but it never made a difference.
Now I just find it a little amusing. Keeps my Russian and Spanish fresh.
Some people have worked very hard to make their doc as painful as possible.
Finally I sometimes perform search in other languages, for instance Chinese. Of course I got results mostly in Japanese from Google... few years ago it was possible to change the language for a query, now the settings in burried under dozen of clicks, and are link to my profile. So basically unusable.
In a way it’s like the OS desktop UX: developers are busy trying to outsmart the user, yet the end result is more painful to use and less customizable than it was a decade ago.
Before the great Firefox extension purge I was sending out different language preference headers depending on domain. Unfortunately, this trick was already breaking down as more and more German companies redirect from their .de to their .com to show off ambition, leaving me with a bad English translation of the massive German due to headers.
What I'd love to see would be a server side distinction between primary and secondary languages, but of course companies would lie their asses off for uncountable reasons bad and worse.
Sometimes when not working on my own machines at a client the locale is set to a language other than English and some Java frameworks such as Hibernate then will dutifully print out error messages in that language.
This is next to useless. At a time when you still had nothing but a printed manual in your local language to go on this might have made some sense but nowadays people research error messages on the internet. Searching for some arcane ORM framework error message in a language other than English is a futile endeavour.
https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/master/spacy/errors....
It's really great trying to figure out an error that's written in Norwegian, when you're not the least bit familiar in that language.
Most of the errors do have codes though, and just Googling that will get you started at least.
Source: me. I had to help someone with specifically this when they set the wrong charset on their DB. Had these problems.
Ah, I remember MS Combat Flight Simulator 2. Translated to Spanish (or maybe automatically using local system files?) without bothering the check the text fit the allotted fields, which meant you could not read most things at all. Impressive QA, Microsoft! ;)
https://www.google.com/search?q=ffs+msdn+in+english
Some sites (and ads) don’t respect my settings and will default to french. My french is rudimentary at best.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/english-conte...
[2] https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/master/userscr...
For example, here it is looking very silly in Denmark: https://i.imgur.com/kdux88q.jpg
They used to localise VBA too, all IFs and THENs and WHILEs were translated to the local language. Yes it was as bad as you think it was.
You could somehow run VBA macros written in the wrong language, you couldn't just touch them or it'd be all syntax errors everywhere.
/s
[1]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-functions-tra...
I can read English and usually German, but I definitely can't read technical documents that have passed through a machine translator twice.
At the very least they should not be the first hit if you search for the program name. I don't get how that could possibly change with language selection.
edit: Inkscape results in a "Inkscape - CHIP-Installer.exe" download with my antimalware immediately sprinting to my rescue.
When I want to download Inkscape for Windows, I get a zip file. When I download GIMP for Windows, I seem to get a genuine installer with the same size and filename as what is offered on gimp.org. I didn't download these files on Windows, though.
I went to their website[1], and clicked the prominent Download button[2]. Next to that button it says "Sicherer Download" (secure download). The executable file downloaded is not the original installer but the a binary with their chip icon and signed by Chip GmbH.
Running that "installer" then asked me if I wanted an amazon desktop icon (with their affiliate link in it, I am sure), and clicking just Next asked me again if I wanted it because I "did not make a selection". Then it offered to "block annoying ads" (the irony!) by installing Opera (again asking me again when I clicked next).
Then it finally downloaded something. Says that something was checked by Kaspersky. The download progress screen also asked me if my PC was slow, and if I wanted to call some "free" number to have experts check my computer for free(!) (via Teamviewer or telephone, wat). And if I did call those experts, I'd even get a free McAfee license! (what do Kaspersky, who scanned the download, think about that?). The "free" number is actually a number somewhere in Frankfurt am Main, so it's not actually toll free as far as I can tell; if I am correct, this would be a direct violation of German law which states that ads giving you a number to call have to correctly state the charges associated with a call.
I eventually ended up with a .zip file that contains the actual Inkscape installer. Or rather installers; it contained both the 32 bit and 64 bit installers. Those installers are not launched automatically by the way. So the usual "unsavvy" user will end up with two files in a zip with no idea what to do next. So the Chip "installer" is just for displaying those ads, pushing their crapware, but will not actually help you install the software you wanted.
Here are some screenshots https://imgur.com/a/tyIopku .
And rather on-topic it displayed the UI as a mix of English and German because I was using an English language Windows Sandbox...
If you just want the zip without the adware "installer", you have to click the regular "Manuelle Installation" link (far less prominently featured than the crapware button), then again click something, and then it will download the same zip without the "installer".
[1] https://www.chip.de/downloads/Inkscape_15274752.html
[2] https://i.imgur.com/Bn2GU3A.png
[3] https://imgur.com/a/tyIopku
They actually trying to force me to use more insecure passwords.
And don't get me started on those captions! Youtube, please stahp! Why do you keep forcing these? I don't want them, stop pushing them.
Whenever we use Chromecast with multiple people, Youtube enables the auto-translated captions. So, we turn it off, next video youtube turns it on again, we turn it off again, next vid, it's there again. arrgghhhhhh
But my point was more that I didn't want localized video titles and I should just get the original one since the video is in that original language anyway.
I like that you can set language and region on top of the browser settings though and it's cookie based. This way I have a firefox container for Spanish another one for English, etc. Same Youtube account different languages.
You can even do this on completely static HTML-only websites that don't use JavaScript or server-side code. Debian is an example of this:
https://www.debian.org/intro/cn#override https://salsa.debian.org/dsa-team/mirror/dsa-puppet/-/raw/ma...
In Firefox it's in the first page of the settings: Tools > Options > Language and appearance, there you can change the language of the UI and the preferred language for displaying pages.
I don't understand why a web browser (or any application) needs a custom language setting, much less a prominent one. It's just one more place that can fail.
For entertainment including games I want them to be in the original languaugage they were developed in (if it's one I can speak fluently) even if that differs from my system language (which differs from my native language (which at many points in my life has differed from the default language for my location)).
I don't personally have a reason to have a different language for my browser UI though, but perhaps someone else does. However I agree that the default for application languages should be "use the system default" - not whatever was the system default at installation time or some other fixed language.