My website is created 100% in English, and I just had a client telling me that my website is full of mistakes in Spanish...
Well, dude, I never translated it to Spanish...
What he saw was the automatic translation from Google Chrome, and as a nontech-savvy user, he is unaware of that...
He just felt my website was 100% wrong and gave my company a terrible image.
Is there any way to force Chrome or any other browser to NOT translate the website?
I thought about that but is there any way to do it ALL side wide? changing individual sections would be extremely time consuming
<meta name="google" content="notranslate">
I used this meta tag once, but can't verify if it still works.
Just change your theme to add that attribute to the html element, and that should then work on all pages
<html translate="no">
Every business gets crappy feedback at some point, you can't please everyone. I think most reasonable people understand how auto-translation works, so IMO the downside of preventing auto-translation completely outweighs the dubious upsides. As a traveler I've always relied on auto-translate, and any website that wasn't translatable (some of them have key info in images, for instance...) would have lost my business.
Regardless, if you really want to, take a look at https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-translate-flag .
Very true indeed :-) And looking to the future, these cases of people who are unaware of automatic translation should be very random :-)
Man, that's bizarre
Probably their browser settings is "always translate English to Spanish". The only logic explanation.
That's my guess too!
What's bizarre is how ignorant they are to put the blame on the product and trash the provider company, instead of just asking the cause and understanding how they messed things up by themselves against the default standard used by the whole rest of the world
I’m sure you can, but why would you want to? You are removing potential accessibility for ego. The latter looks much worse IMO than inaccuracies in an automated translation. You are basically telling your users “fuck your language and preferences, if I didn’t curate your experience I don’t want you here”. There’s very few scenarios where that is preferable, and if you fall into one of those categories why not just translate it and provide accurate alternatives yourself? I’m sure with AI being what it is these days it’s a breeze to create manual translations that are context aware.
TL;DR - Instead of asking “how do I prevent users who prefer Spanish from using accessibility features” you should be asking “how do I provide a better experience for non-english speakers”
You are 100% right!
Thanks for showing me the other side, I wrote that one in rage on the initial thought of "the old internet" when automated translation was not there..
Exactly. Instead of trying to prevent translation use a translation plugin and pay a native Spanish speaker $50 or something to check the work.
Even if a method exists: do not do this.
That one person is an idiot. It is much better that your website is available in not-very-good-Spanish than no Spanish at all.
Ignore it?
That’s a possible fix https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/translate
Double check your lang attribute or if there’s any content-language header set while fetching content through http requests.
How about asking a native speaker to translate your website, then use a plugin to switch to the user's preferred language? I am the webmaster of a religious site, and I wouldn't trust Google to translate correctly in any case. If your audience speaks a different language, the good news is that you can expand your readership. I wouldn't miss the opportunity!
How many of these complaints do you get? How relevant are they actually to your company? Like do you service people in Spanish speaking countries? Keep these factors in mind if it was just a Karen or an actual issue.
From an accessibility point of view this is about the worst thing you can do. I strongly suggest not to do that.
you can also block google internally with htaccess https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/102709/how-to-block-googlebot-from-accessing-one-specific-page
This way it will also reduce bot traffic.
That would involve touching the browsers of visitors. Big NO-NO!
Since when? And which nono exactly is that in technical terms?
I think they're saying it's generally considered poor form to attempt to modify the user's browsing experience except in edge cases, and they're right.
Show us on the DOM where they hurt you.
Well, he needs to communicate to Chrome a translation behaviour, not to hacking into user PCs…
Setting one global attribute of HTML Element is hacking into user's PC!?
Last time I have checked https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ it was not.
Dude, he says “that would involve touching the browser of visitors”… i actually agree with you
As I have said: my site, my realm, legit code; where's the problem?
I've seen enough funny, but annoying, issues with machine translation. Can you imagine what mess it can produce, for example, translating a restaurant's menu cart from Italian to Polish/Russian/English?
My site, my realm. If I decide it will not be translated, it will not be translated.
Translate attribute is HTML standard; so I am free to use it if I want. If a visitor wants machine translation, he/she is welcomed to use some of numerous translation services at his disposal.
You can put "notranslate" tag on elements you don't want to be translated.