Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't' Velkomin, Vælkomin, Hoş geldin, and welcome to Friday, and therefore to another edition of On Call – The Register's end-of-week celebration of the tech support tasks you managed to tackle without too much trauma. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mac" who worked for a software developer that targets non-English- …
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 have set my language defaults to English for years, even before AI made matters worse, because I found the Dutch versions of menu names were quite frankly a bit puzzling. Not because my Dutch isn't up to snuff (I grew up bilingually), but simply because the chosen words and phrases seemed awkward. The downside of setting the default to English is that various programs now offer endless translations of Dutch websites (and guess what: they are rather poor), whereas I much rather read them in Dutch. Even when I repeatedly told google I don't want it to translate Dutch pages, it still pesters me.
And don't get me started on Acrobat reader and others offering me AI tools to help me (with what exactly? I just want to display and read this file). I really wish there was a general AI toggle switch (the "No thank you, I like to think for myself" option) that bannished all copilots and other plastic palls who are fun to be with to the nethermost circle of hell.
End of rant
(for now)
>> Not because my Dutch isn't up to snuff (I grew up bilingually), but simply because the chosen words and phrases seemed awkward.
It's not because your Dutch isn't up to snuff, it's because English to <insert language here> becomes mangled in intent and meaning, this is why I always set all my computers to English (US vs UK, I won't goo there), it's easier to understand the original meaning rather than playing "telephone" getting a translation going through 5 levels of translations with poorly trained AI/Translators.
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...
I use an older version of the YouTube app on iPad, it's uYou+ with Adblock and Sponsor block enabled, so I don't want to upgrade.
My iPad is set to en-gb and the YouTube app seems to select a random auto-translation for all videos I watch. One is playing in Spanish, another in French and another could be Italian, even though the original language is English. My guess is that the default English language is defined as en-us (that's what the language dropdown seems to indicate anyway) and the YouTube app doesn't seem to realise that en-gb will likely want that language, so it just picks a random one. You can set the region in the YouTube app, but it's ignored for video translations and only seems to set the region for the 'recommendations' page. From what I read, the iPadOS language is checked for video translations.
Obviously I don't want to set the locale of my entire iPad to be the US just for YouTube. It's annoying, but not annoying enough to force me to upgrade and no longer have Sponsor and ad blocking.
I had some "fun" with a piece of software when they added non-English language translations to it. What it would do was query the OS and get the prioritised list of languages that the user had chosen, and then _ignore English_ and instead show the UI in the secondary language. The UI would only come up in English if that was the _only_ language configured on the system (or if none of the other languages were ones that the software supported).
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.
Basically, just stop guessing at things and present users with choices. At most, guess at things to set which one you put first in the list.
A non-language version of this happened to me a while ago when I was trying to help someone install Microsoft Office on their Mac. Step 1: download the installer. But for some reason, they couldn't find it, so I had to go get it for them. I didn't have a Mac with me. Microsoft insisted on giving me the Windows installer and having no option for a Mac version. Their site didn't even seem to acknowledge that they had a Mac OS version. Once I changed my user agent to identify Firefox as Safari on a Mac, then they didn't acknowledge that they had a Windows version and gave me the file I needed, but it would have been easier for me and much easier for the average person if they could just have a button that says "If for some reason you need a file for a different kind of computer, those do exist".
Sometimes it may not even be automated translations. I once participated in a company-wide (very large well known company) translation program.
We were given various phrases to translate into our native language in an excel spreadsheet, without context. And there's the key, context! I can't remember the exact word, but I went through an example with a colleague, I started with an English word, did the literal translation, given the context I changed it to a different word, which then back-translated into a different English word that somewhat applied but not really.
The original English word was correct, the direct translation was not, it's depending on context. I guess the next gen AI models will be called CDLLM or something similar.
And those translations are horribly wrong now. The Auto-sub-translations were better before, now as crappy as the dubbing translation.
And I talk about "English to German", which is a simple tasks for such bots. It gets funnier for a non-English to German dubbing since Youtube does an In-Between English step.
The YouTube auto-translation is also very hit and miss. We were watching a video for a recipe for Haferflocken mit Datteln (oat flakes with dates). The original video was in English and it translated dates as Datum und Termin not Datteln (date and appointments, as opposed to the fruit). We gave up, when it got as far as saying we should puree the appointments! (My wife doesn't speak English, so watching it in English wasn't an option.)
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.
I lived in NL for a loooong time, France for a couple of years, and now the US, my browser is confused... I recently clicked on a link to an Amazon page on .com, while christmas shopping, and for a brief instant, I saw a page in French of a purchase I made a few years back while in France. I cannot go back to that page using back button, and I don't see it in history.
Yes, I've checked all settings I can find for regions, languages, in system settings, browser settings, cookies and history have been purged numerous times.
Firefox's auto-translate seems to offer to translate some pages where there are just a couple of 'foreign' words, but then fails to offer for pages that are clearly in need of translation... not even through a right-click or toolbar option
(they may now have an option, but I've long given up looking)
I find Firefox's and Vivaldi's autotranslates generally useful, though sometimes I would like to see the page in the original, that's not usually an issue.
What is a pain, though, is searching for something. They've handily translated the website I'm viewing, but don't translate my search terms in the opposite direction...
I wanted to use the Firefox automatic translation to make something English be in French for a cow-orker to read. While Chrome did a good job it completely messed up the formatting when printing, outputting a single mostly empty page (for some reason).
Firefox could print the eight pages correctly, but oh my god, parts of the page were translated, parts not, and the parts that were done looked to have been translated by damn near picking words at random.
In the end I used Chrome and copy pasted the entire text into a Docs document and added the formatting myself (as much as I could be bothered to do).
FF does it's translations locally offline, so it is not going to make as good a job as an online job that's just slurped all your personal info.
Answering my own comment above, there now appears to be more control over things, including a right-click option to just translate a block of highlighted text
Firefox's offer to translate only works if the page has been labeled. For example, if it has a <html lang="cz">, it will offer to translate from Czech. If the person who wrote the page didn't label it, which is quite common, or if they or something automatic labeled it as a language it's not, which is unfortunately at least as common, then it won't offer to translate. Fortunately, there is now a button in the menu* that can be used to manually request translation though you have to know what language it is and select that from the list.
* Note: As far as I know, that is only in the single browser menu, not the menu bar menus. I looked through those and I couldn't find it there.
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.".
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...
"how did they know that the manager didn't also put the message into Google Translate?"
I suspect "I enjoy the fact that my brown is eaten" might answer that question. ;)
I might imagine that mucking about with British English to Mandarin and back the two underlings could decode the mistranslations eg my brown = my tea (evening meal cf chá) and I enjoy the fact = I like .. the sum of such mistranslations could constitute a peculiar* English dialect. With enough practice they could possibly omit google translate and use their novel dialect directly.
"I enjoy the fact that [my] hops is drunk." -> I like to drink [my] beer.
"I enjoy the fact that the slave driver's totty is serviced." -> (exercise for the reader)
* arguably no where as peculiar as many extinct and extant dialects found in the British Isles.
When Microsoft articles were better translated to German. Even Bot-Tranlsation was mostly correct until about 2019. Then they switched the bot. And about 2022 the switch to AI translation. HORRIBLE!
Imagine HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer translated to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fenster\Aktelle Version\Erkunder.
The AI-translator did not get the correct "code" marking from the original article and translated registry keys. Same thing can happen with scripts and other things, even if marked as "code" in original article.
So the first thing for every MS-webpage is to change the "\de-de\" part of the URL to "\en-us\" to make sense.
Those Browser auto-translators are about the same bad quality, when they work, which they often do only half. Even Firefox suddenly shows such nonsense popup, again a bad new Firefox setting to be disabled. But at least I can disable that popup everywhere.
A little while back we got a ticket that a machine was displaying numbers in the European fashion*. After some investigation I worked out that a colleague who had built the machine had tried to click on the map in the Mint installer to select the UK as the location, but had missed slightly and selected the Faroe islands instead. Because Mint doesn't have a translation for Faroese, the text was all still in English, and the change in numbering format wasn't noticed until it got to the end user.
(My build instructions already highlighted the need to check that the networking was working correctly before installation, which auto-selects the correct location, so I made the text bigger)
*ie £1,337.50 had become £1.337,50
Heh. My DE bank has noticed (presumably from my account original opening documents) that I am English. So it has handily automatically ticked the 'GB' button it's recently added to its webpage.
Now the challenge is working out whether 17.32 will be translated as 17,320 or not - it's different on different function pages! Sometimes it's UK style, sometimes DE...
The default import rules for spreadsheet software are often "helpful", in that they'll try to auto-convert anything which looks vaguely like a date or number.
Which can cause issues when dealing with telephone numbers, as they'll trim the leading zero off.
And can cause even more issues for bank details, since things like sort codes (11-22-33) can often look like a British formatted date.
This can be partially mitigated by putting a tab character at the start of the value, since this forces the spreadsheet to treat the value as a string and leave it be. And spreadsheet developers do seem to have gotten a bit better when it comes to offering an "just import it as is" option when loading a CSV or similar.
But I've still spent a lot of time patiently explaining to customers that it's not us, it's your spreadsheet software...
Recommend LibreOffice. It opens a dialogue when opening .CSV. There you can mark all cells in the preview window with a single click, and set "Text" instead of "Default" (Or "Standard" depenting on your LO language). Without it it tries to be intelligent too, and does things like converting cells with TRUE and FALSE to 1 and 0.
Then save as Excel xlsx and continue in Excel.
Or, instead of just opening the CSV in Excel (and even that's got better than it used to be, it often checks about reformatting fields), use Data - From Text/CSV which gives you the option to turn off data type detection and load everything as text.
> Why would you torture yourself when you already have LibreOffice.
Because there are quite some things better in Excel than in LO. Complex conditional custom cell formatting is easy in excel, and one of my pet features is still not avail in LO which Excel can do since, at least, 1992. I could make that list very long for both of them. At home LO is enough, at work i need both since they even out each others shortcomings.
I long ago lost any count of how often my tech support for a colleague was in working out that some random setting had been accidentally changed by an unwitting kep press or two, with no indication to the user that something had been done, beyond the effects.
Like the number of times that the key that turned off the wifi got knocked. All the user new was that they were no longer connected!
Someone needs to explain why a typical domestic user needs a quick access keyboard shortcut to rotate the display by 90°... Because there are apparently multiple people working for multiple PC manufacturers who have at some point thought that was a neat third party app to pre-install.
Only old intel GFX drivers do that. Those keyboard shortcuts have been out for about ten years now, around the time Windows 8 came out and it collided with the Windows auto-rotate function. Could be reactivated on the first few versions with those hotkeys deactivated by default. Later (2016 or 2018?) even the optional got removed. You have to use replacement programs if you need it back.
I guess you could still tip the laptop on its side so the screen is in portrait orientation. Not sure why you would want to, but you could definitely do it. I could see it being used if the laptop could unfold 360°, even without a touch screen as a small additional screen for desktop use, but I'm guessing yours doesn't do that, so propping it up on its side might be your only option.
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The FIRST test of the nice "automatic" translations is to translate to then translate back. Hopefully the result should be similar to the original, but not always.
I seem to recall thare was something like the translation of "The mind is willing but the body is weak" getting ALL mixed up going to/from foreign languages.
Life goes on. Me? I speak English (or at least that is what I think it is).
A (Swedish) remote desktop application Thinlinc 'helpfully' translates the dialog to whatever country it believes you're in, not by locale in your computer but based on geolocating your IP. So good luck should you say visit South Korea and need to fire up Thinlinc (OK the dialogs are predictable so you can guess what it's saying). The daftest part is there is no option to configure this!
A few years ago now I worked on an online direct mail creator, essentially fancy mail merge online that was sent to print; we kept getting complaints that the system was drawing red squiggly lines under users' copy, which tured out to be the browser's helpful spell check feature.
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