This was a Mac'n'cheesey one...

No Big(gie) Mac

Would it not have been better to get the customer to select their language as the default?

implicit defaults can be the devil

YouTube nowadays, in it glorious wisdom, does automatic AI dubbing into your local language.

Guess what, as a non-native english speaker, I do not want or need crappy, uncanny AI voicing in my native language when I am accessing an english-speaking video.

The language setting of the browser was most probably taken over from the OS's language setting. However, this does not automatically mean that I am not able to understand different languages.

Another point of pain, are microshaft's help pages.

They regularly pick up on my language setting and show me the AI translated pages in my native language. Guess what, their translations are crap. Fortunately, it is sufficient to replace the language code in the URL with an "en-en" to get to the original pages.

Oh, how I hate being presented with AI crap, just because the tech companies know better.

But companies HAVE to be using AI for something otherwise their investors (and peers) will think they are behind the curve, and that might impact their share price (and worse still, bonuses).

No-one in management cares WHAT they are using AI for, or if it is even vaguely useful, just that they are using it and can mention it in press releases, demos, meetings, interviews etc.

I actually ended up putting all of my language settings to english for this exact reason. Another one is that youtube decided it's a good idea to translate video titles to your native language. First of all, the translations are terrible, second, it's actually pretty important to know what language a video is going to be in before i click on it. There are so many implicit assumptions i make based on content language, cultural differences can have a huge impact on how things are perceived based on the language it is written in.

And what if i don't speak english, i click on a title in my native language, and get presented with an english or poorly auto-translated video? that would be infuriating. And it hurts creators too, as the perceived quality of their video is butchered, and their viewer retention is going to tank hard in regions where this is a common occurance.

The only downside is that i struggled quite a bit with getting youtube to stop enabling auto-generated subtitles when i do watch a video in my native language.

(as a side note, i think the auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles are a neat feature, they don't work very well in a lot of cases, but at least they're transparant about the fact that it's auto-generated)

Also irritating if you work for a multi-national and someone not a native speaker decides to publish a notice in English …. close but no cigar. I wouldn’t dare do that to them, especially after trying to write an email in French and then have my colleague comment over my shoulder that I was textbook correct but it’s not how they would say it.

I suffer the auto-generated youtube subtitles when I don't have headphones to hand, they're not too bad if you know the youtuber and can put their real voice into your head. Although BigClive's Scottish accent does trip it up occasionally.

This. Oh so bloody much.

I have my language settings in the browser set to improper English (en-us), because having it set to en-uk and then my local makes it translate to no-nb, which is likely even worse than their French translation. This used to work.

No influence about the localisation of the OS on my bloody work machine, and apparently now many websites rather use the OS default rahter than the browser standard, or the browser stops supplying the website with the language preference. Or it's a geolocation thing, as the same happens now on my (set to English) cell phone: automatic garbled translations. Didn't we have those memes in the naughties about the babelfish translations, once around 10 languages an d thenthe text was f'd up beyond any recognition? Glad things are not improving...

Another non-native english speaker here, and I wish I could upvote you twice.

Just... never give me automated translations automatically. It's not a complicated rule, is it? No exceptions, applies to every feature of every system or software. Either use a human translation, or use the original language and show me a button (in whatever language you think I might want) to request an automated translation.

During the 2020 UK lockdown when WFH, I had to connect to the corporate network via VPN to servers in Frankfurt (corporate HQ). Google Chrome "helpfully" kept translating pages into German despite of my default language setting of English..

There are other domains where the language setting is a major issue - namely Windows (what else ?).

My default language setting is English, but my location is France (where I live, duh).

Guess what language Borkzilla uses when I access it's bloody Store ? French.

That's where I live, not what I chose as default language.

Bloody idiots.

Doh.... where have you been for the last decade. Of course it is a threat. Maybe not directly but they collect huge amounts of data on all of us even if we try our hardest to stop them. They sell that data to people who might use it against us. They don't care once they (google) get paid for the data.

Just stop or at least try to stop feeding the google dragon. It will burn you later.

It continues to amaze me how many businesses put their future into Google's hands - Chrome as their browser and Google Drive and apps. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft should be grasped without caution, but at least they charge you up front and it's possible operate without sending them everything ; if that is seen as feeding a different dragon, there are options with Linux and open-source apps.

For me, I switched from Windows to Mac a while back and, whilst Apple are not 100% squeaky-clean. There's an occasional web page that does play right with Safari (probably because I've got it set to block most crud that accompanies many pages) but nothing I need on a daily basis.

I've found the Mac is a lot easier to manage (and the MS Office apps also seem to work better on macOS than Windows). I still have Windows as a VM in order to maintain compatibility with others I work with.

Google is at the bottom of my list of options, even below Microsoft. Of course YMMV.

Don't worry, if you use the Google Office Suite for work, Google charges you upfront as well. I'm not sure how much (if anything) they still slurp from you when you pay them to use it, but i strongly believe that Microsoft is absolutely no better in this regard.

Having used both, I have to say I prefer Google Apps over MS 365 - I find it unbelievable how awful MS Office has become, and don't get me started on Teams. Or Onedrive.

An ex-colleague told me that him and a friend at a previous job always ran their more personal emails through Google Translate to Mandarin before sending them to each other, as they had circumstantial evidence that their manager was snooping on internal staff emails. Once, my ex-colleague wanted to convey that he couldn't come along for a pint tonight as he just wanted to stay in and have dinner - or, as he put it in Mancunian, "I like to have my tea.". When translated back and forth to Mandarin, his friend was somehow presented with the statement that "I enjoy the fact that my brown is eaten.".

Could have been worse.... his hovercraft could have been full of eels....

Or his record was scratched?

The thing to remember with automated translations is that there isn't a direct mapping between different human languages and meanings of phrases can be highly dependent on the context of use.

I remember reading many years ago that a common saying in Mandarin translates to English literally as "Mis-enter not like mis-go out", and that that a native speaker wouldn't understand it unless they knew it was used in the context of Crime & Punishment where it would mean "It is better to let a guilty one go free than imprison and innocent one"

And then there's punctuation...

…. trying to be helpful by aggressively telling you your grammar and style is all wrong. I quickly reached for the eff off and die buttons.