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Comment by AntonyGarand

4 days ago

You can change the language via the header: The rightmost option is a language dropdown.

It's a client-side change and doesn't impact the URL so users must manually change it each time they visit the site though

Thanks, I missed that on first glance and did manual translation.

Not sure why my iPhone shows an option to translate website but all the destination languages to pick from (I have multiple languages installed), including English, are greyed out. iPhone does support translating from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional), and the button to translate website isn’t greyed out like it is for unsupported/unrecognized languages. Might be an iOS 27 bug, because it is working on other websites?

It's entirely possible, and even standard, to allow the browser to tell your site which language to respond in.

While ignorance of internationalization standards is a possibility, and the most likely cause.. I do wonder if it's a bit of a nudge to promote Chinese influence in the AI space.

Not that they really need to do that, China is already doing great (relatively, depending on criteria). The implosion of the US, the resulting brain drain and world shake-up has been very timely for their AI and other industries.

It's a very smart move for them to think longer term and start freezing out NVIDIA. Then they can take Taiwan purely for ideological concerns and not worry at all about the fabs blowing up in the process.

And they won't be dependent on foreign factories sitting on an island just off the shore of a superpower who's shown nothing below absolute resolve for decades towards the idea of conquering that island....

Why not persist it through a query param? Or a lang param for that matter

  • Feels like maybe you're just noticing this because it defaults to Chinese. Is that true?

    How many sites do this but you don't notice because they default to English?

    • You're right, there are probably lots of sites misconfigured to not respect language headers, but we don't notice because English is the default.

      However, the right solution is still to use the language header. I send that to them, they should use it to give me the right one by default.

      One of the funny things is that this whole site is in an iframe; which breaks both Google Translate, and the Firefox translate feature. If you check, the outer iframe seems to indicate `lang="en'` and loads the iframe with `src="/coder/index.html?lang=en"`, but the inner iframe still gets a `lang="zh-CN'` by default until you use the toggle.

      If you go to the eventual redirect source of the page with `lang=en` parameter, you get a `lang="en"` attribute, but it's still in Chinese until you toggle it with the menu: https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en

      Anyhow, yeah, lots of pages are probably broken this way but we don't notice. But still, it has that info from your request, it should use it.

    • Personally, none, I’m not English native. I didn’t notice the locale switch, but mostly because the look of the website was so beautiful I didn’t pay attention to menus. I wonder if ideograms keeps looking so beautiful once you learned to decode them. I never found Latin script to be particularly beautiful, and to this date Arabic script remains my favorite one in term of esthetic (I can’t read Arabic ever).

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    • But what if you have English configured as a preferred language? Isn't that what it's for? Wouldn't it make sense for a website to respect that (when available)? I hate that google.com doesn't and defaults to random languages based on IP.

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  • Language support was probably an afterthought since their target audience all read Chinese