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Stop randomly switching languages... #1498

Open chylex opened 5 years ago

chylex commented 5 years ago

Describe the bug I have no idea how your system decides which language to use, it seems to work fine for a few days, but then it just randomly switches to my system language (Czech) instead of English, whether I visit the website from Google or sometimes even when I click a link on the docs website itself. Over the last few years, I've probably had to switch it back manually over a hundred times.

It's unbelievably frustrating, because nobody has been able to machine translate into Czech well enough yet, but even if the translation was good, I develop in English and all my tools and IDEs and documentation are in English, so it doesn't make sense to keep forcing a different language than the one I keep selecting every time I visit the website.

To Reproduce This time it happened after clicking a link, so I can at least provide some screenshots of one example that prompted me to create the issue...

Went to this website from Google, then decided to click the highlighted link...

obrazek

...and it just randomly switched the language.

obrazek

I read in another issue that you set a cookie for the language, these are my current language-related cookies I see after I switched the language back to English. I don't know why they're set this way, but maybe it helps. Both set to expire in several years, I'm certainly not deleting them manually, but I can't wait until the website decides to switch the language back again in a few days.

display-culture=cs-CZ; MarketplaceSelectedLocale=en-us
welcome[bot] commented 5 years ago

Thank you for creating the issue! One of our team members will get back to you shortly with additional information.

Andrzej-W commented 5 years ago

The problem described by @chylex is very annoying. I'm from Poland and I have to agree with @chylex that automatic translation (in my case from English to Polish) is simply unacceptable. It is often impossible to understand this gibberish.

Let's assume I start from this page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/ I have manually entered en-us in the address bar because I want to read English version. All links on this page don't have culture, for example "Introduction to ASP.NET Core" is https://docs.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/. When I click on this link I'm redirected from /aspnet/core to /pl-pl/aspnet/core. I have to click in browser's address bar and manually change pl-pl to en-us to read in English. This redirection is probably based on preferred culture set in browser configuration (Accept-Language HTTP header). I don't want to change it to en-us because I often use Google to search for something in Polish language (not related to programming) and with changed culture I see wrong results.

When documentation is displayed in Polish there is a switch titled "Read in English" (Przeczytaj w języku angielskim) in the top right corner but it is not fully functional. See the screenshot below: obraz

I can switch to English, but only main article is displayed in English. Table of contents on the left side and article content on the right side is displayed in Polish. This switch is not available on "previous-versions" documentation, as demonstrated by @chylex in the screenshot above and there are a lot of links without culture from current doc to previous doc.

There is one more big problem. You are publishing this automatically translated gibberish as fully valuable documentations. It is indexed by search engines and here is the result: obraz I'm searching for English term and I'm getting link to translated content. Look at text snippet selected by Google - it is partially in Polish and partially in English.

How to sort out this mess?

Probably the best option is to remove automatically translated content completely. Unfortunately there is also some content translated by real people. It is often outdated (at least in Polish) and I don't want to read it.

On new documentation pages there is already a switch "Read in English" and it almost works. Selected value is remembered in local storage as toggledToEnglish. If it is tuned on (set to true) redirect my browser to pages with en-us culture. Do it ALWAYS, for example when I click on a link with Polish culture in Google search result.

mvdmio commented 5 years ago

I reached this issue after getting annoyed about worthless translations into Dutch and being unable to consistently switch the whole docs.microsoft.com website to English (it just keeps going back to Dutch every time I come back).

I really don't need a Dutch translation for anything. I'm just fine reading the docs in English. This is just because I've working in English since I started and I've got international colleagues all around the globe. All of our communication is in English. I wouldn't even know what some programming terms are in Dutch, because I've only ever heard/read them in English. Any other language just wouldn't make sense.

At the very least I would love to be able to set the site to English and it staying that way forever. If you have time after that, you can just remove the Dutch translation altogether. I won't miss it ;)

chylex commented 5 years ago

Machine translation could be helpful to people, but forcing it upon everyone who doesn't live in a majority English-speaking country is atrocious design. You seem to be able to remember dark mode setting in the browser, so why can't you remember the language?

ryanmajidi commented 5 years ago

@shirgoldbird Can you please take a look at this issue?

lafe commented 5 years ago

I can switch to English, but only main article is displayed in English. Table of contents on the left side and article content on the right side is displayed in Polish. This switch is not available on "previous-versions" documentation, as demonstrated by @chylex in the screenshot above and there are a lot of links without culture from current doc to previous doc.

I have the same issue with German content. German is different in that the translations are done manually and that the screenshots are also switched to German. If you use the "Read in English" switch, those screenshots remain in German.

lafe commented 5 years ago

@shirgoldbird Any progress on this issue? This is an extremely annoying issue and there has been no response from Microsoft so far...

Andrzej-W commented 5 years ago

They have invested a lot of time and money in machine learning and bots and they think automatic answer like this:

Thank you for creating the issue!

is enough. Hopefully they work on the next generation artificial intelligence which will be used to automatically fix all issues reported by customers.

BenjaminHerbert commented 4 years ago

This is totally annoying. For me, it turns up pages in Bosnian, Czech and other useless automatic translated pages, as I use Google to find "English (!!!)" results. I just want to read documentation in English by default.