Tom

@iiotenki

The Tony Hawk of Tokimeki Memorial

He/him
freelansations.com/

A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.

❓ Ask Archive

cohost.org/iiotenki/tagged/tom%20talks

Tom @iiotenki6/17/2024, 1:57 PM

All I want for Christmas some days on the Internet is global websites that don't auto-redirect me/configure my language based solely on my IP address/browser language, or at the very least, make it easy and painless for me to switch both of those things and yet even in the year 2024, it's a gigantic crapshoot whether a company's web developers even imagine that someone other than a native for a given country would ever want to access their site.

I don't care if your Japanese localization is actually good (also by no means guaranteed), if you're a global company who's help documentation I need to check or I wanna see the price of something in dollars or something for any number of reasons, nine times out of ten, I'd rather access your site in English and I'd really rather do it without having to turn on a VPN for something so minor.

Just, please, consider that maybe westerners live in non-western countries sometimes, too, while you're building those things, please and thanks. 😩

(And if YouTube could knock it off with those auto-translated video titles or give me a setting to turn that shit off myself, that would also be great!!!)

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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

xdaniel @xdaniel6/17/2024, 2:31 PM

Oh god, I hate it when websites do this, especially when they have multiple different language editions and editorial teams. There's a reason why I go to, say, "ign.com" instead of "de.ign.com", or "eurogamer.net" instead of "eurogamer.de", I want to read the English content!

To be fair to those two, Eurogamer no longer auto-redirects me to the German site, and IGN's non-English editions all seem to have a "change region" dropdown on the side. Still, it is really annoying that this is the default behavior for many sites, no matter if it's just ex. shopping sites' interfaces and prices, or worse, completely different editorial teams per language.

As for YouTube's auto-translated video titles, the only way I know of to influence these is by changing your language. I have YT set to English, because the translated German titles on ex. some English and Japanese videos were annoying, but now I'm pretty sure I'm getting translated English titles on Japanese videos, which is less annoying to me personally, but could still be a dealbreaker for others. It's a stupid mess.

Tom @iiotenki6/17/2024, 2:41 PM

Yeah, it came up for me again because I was trying to help my mom shop for some luggage for an upcoming trip she's going on, but Google always defaulted to the Japanese site in its results and even after I figured out the US URL, it still redirected me to the Japanese site with no way to switch it over. The Japanese site isn't gonna help me figure out what things cost in dollars, damn it. I'd be okay with a pop up or something asking if I'm sure and/or warning me I can't actually shop elsewhere from where I am, just don't take the decision away from me, ahaha.

And ugh, that sounds about right regarding the YouTube stuff. Sounds like it's probably a damned if I do, damned if I don't situation no matter which language I use. I mostly use Japanese out of habit because I started doing that for sites and applications for language practice when I was younger to learn those terms. But I imagine if I switched back to English, I'd get cursed with my Japanese subscriptions sometimes giving me English auto-translated titles, so I kinda just grin and bear it ahaha. It's baffling stuff, especially when Google itself obviously lets you set multiple languages for the search results you want to see (or at least you used to? Who knows these days.).