Experiment: Remember language 🧪 #739
Replies: 25 comments · 13 replies
-
|
This is an amazing experiment, I'd love to hear how it ends up helping folks read better on MDN! 📚 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Sanks very much💪💯💪🤟 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Please translate the course into Tamil. Tamil people also have good knowledge and logical skills, but some of them cannot understand English fluently |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I have just found this page from the "?" icon next to the feature. I just wanted to sing a few words of praise. A bit of feedback:
So what is my intent? It depends on the task:
A pet peeve of mine is clicking on an English result and seeing the German version, then having to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to change the language. A bit later, I click another English result and the same thing happens again. I find your approach very elegant, and accommodating to all user intents. Very well done! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I was wondering why my automatic redirection to English was acting weird, turns out I don't need it anymore! Thank you for this QoL experiment! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
-
|
OMG YOU ARE A SAVIOUR. For years I had to manually change the langague to english, because MDN translations are inconsistent (they generally have less content that the page in english and some layouts are broken). |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
-
|
Hi! Some weird behaviour regarding language redirections: If a MDN url is shared with NO language slug (without the /en-US/ or any other language part), it will redirect to the 'remember language' locale version of that page regardless if that translation exists or not. Example:
In this scenario:
Maybe this extra click to get to the English fallback page is the intended way to work. But it's a bit weird given that MDN asks to always use this non-localized format in the "mdn_url" field of several repos and services like BCD. One idea: all these non-localized urls could always be redirected to the /en-US/ version in the first place; then, if the user has set a preferred language, check if that page has a locale version. If the translation exists, redirect, and if not, stays on the English page. Not sure if this is a good idea as it could generate a lot of redirects. Another option would be to change all those mdn_urls to their /en-US/ version in the origin, but I guess that would also involve other complex things beyond my experience. And having that extra click is not a big deal for the user, really. Anyway, I came upon all these links and just wanted to point that out. Regards! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thank you for taking the time to report this issue, which is similar to https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/11717. @decrecementofeliz Can you share whether your browser's preferred languages include English? You can check via this Playground. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Hi, yes, my browser (Firefox) includes English (and Galician and Spanish) as preferred language:
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Tnx for support |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
There's another problem solved by the solution: I prefer local language, but sometimes I use English search engines. The search engine will give me English page and I had to switch back to my local language. This solution is really amazing! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as off-topic.
This comment was marked as off-topic.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
-
|
I also prefer English for development. It makes sense when you develop in English, with English variable names, English comments and English syntax. In my opinion, every developer should develop in English. It's easier to understand in a software context and you can communicate better with other developers around the world. Same for error messages and the use in search engines. I watch movies, play games and search the web in my native language, but when developing, everything has to be in English. It really bothers me when MDN is displayed in my native language and not in English. Thank you for addressing the matter, but it seems that it’s not working as expected. My case:
DuckDuckGo behaves similar. My choice of langauge select (remember) should ignore/override the URL. Correct URL: Btw. I would prefer it to be permanent in localStorage rather than in expiring cookies, but I can live with changing it again once a year. Why not just remove the language from the URLs? Because every user would read this in their own language (which can be changed via the selected input and is preselected by browser language by default). It makes no sense to have the language in URL. Not for bookmark, not for sharing, etc. I would never share the langauge URL to e.g. forums, etc. It would aldo reveal my language. Without this information, each user has a neural URL where the content is displayed in their individual language. If you want to point something to a specific language because it only appears there, just tell which language you want to switch to. Any reason against removing the language from the URL? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@fudom Thanks for sharing this feedback and your experience.
This sounds like a local browser caching issue, because our CDN uses the
I'm not exactly sure what you have in mind, but if you're suggesting to serve different content on the same URL depending on cookie or Accept-Language,, then this isn't a good practice, and neither recommended nor viable from an SEO perspective. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Now it works. Without hard reloading. I forgot to do a hard reload when I had the problem. I'm just wondering: Why Cookie (expiring) and not LocalStorage (persistent)? Regarding the language code in URL: I missed the SEO point. I don't know what options and best practices there are. Anway... Thanks for the feature. 👍 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
The primary reason is that the redirect to your |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
-
|
I simply don't understand why most companies that have some kind of developer documentation now show some terrible machine translated version. It's so annoying and unnecessary. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks for flagging this. @K0bin Just to make sure: Are you talking about machine-translated docs in general or MDN's German pages in particular? If it’s MDN, could you please share some examples so that we can fix those? For more background on why we added German to MDN, see this discussion. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@caugner I mean in general. The fix is really easy. Disable the machine translation altogether and always serve the English version. Besides MDN, Microsoft and Google also serve machine translated versions of their developer documentation now and it's incredibly annoying to have to change it to English manually every single time. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Yes, nobody asked for this, nobody likes it. It literally makes a considerable percentage of your audience hate you. See Youtube. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
This comment was marked as spam.
This comment was marked as spam.
-
|
Update: MDN has a new front end! 🎉 To address some of the feedback in this discussion, you can now switch from a translated page to the English original with just a single click, either temporarily ("View in English") or permanently ("Always switch to English"): 
PS: "Always switch to English" enables the "Remember language" feature, which remains accessible from the language drop down. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
It doesn't work for me. My german search engine always sends me to the German page in new tabs. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
so much this. it's so frustrating, aggravating even. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Please see my previous comment. tl;dr You can now switch to English permanently with a single click. (If that doesn't work, please file a bug.) |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
This works only as long as you keep the cookie. If you clean up the browsing data regularly, you still get it in the wrong language the first time you open it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
-
tl;dr
We launched an experimental MDN feature on September 25, 2024 that allows users to choose their preferred language and automatically switch to this language when the requested content is available in that language.
Background
MDN is currently available in English (en-US) and 8 other translated languages (es, fr, ja, ko, pt-BR, ru, zh-CN, zh-TW) and users have always been able to switch to their preferred language manually using the language menu.
Problem
There have been two outstanding issues:
Solution
We have introduced a "Remember language" setting in the language menu. Enabling the setting saves the current language in the
preferredlocalecookie, and this will prompt MDN to redirect users whenever they navigate to a page that is available in that language. Disabling the setting will delete the cookie, and users will no longer be redirected.Note: The cookie has been previously used to save the last language that the user switched to. For this reason, the setting is enabled for all users that have recently switched the language on MDN.
Use case 1: Preference for English
Charlie lives in France and uses French Google, but prefers to read MDN in English, so they enabled "Remember language" while browsing MDN in English.
preferredlocale=en-UScookie, they now get redirected to English:Use case 2: Preference for translated language
Jin lives in South Korea and has basic English knowledge, but prefers to read MDN in Korean, their native language, so they enabled "Remember language" while browsing MDN in Korean.
intersection()link.preferredlocale=kocookie and the page is available in Korean, they now get redirected to:Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions