Idea / Feature request

[alghostzx]

This extension has saved me a many white hairs, but to reach absolute anti-translation perfection, much like you had to make a special case for youtube, I'd like to request you do the same for reddit. Google has the annoying tendency of offering translated reddit pages instead of the original thing, EVEN when my reddit language is set to not translate english to my native language.

I'd love for you to make it so reddit results are always in the original language (i.e: remove the ?tl=LANG from the url and update the result accordingly)

Here's to making the internet better for bilingual people!

[lnoss]

This need had already been expressed a few months ago in #34.

I initially rejected the idea because it didn't meet the same need that the main objective of the extension. The idea is that YouTube internally translates the titles of their videos and Google forces the use of these translations in Google Search results. Initially, only the websites titles were translated. This YouTube videos titles translating is more recent.

Whereas reddit translates all posts and gives them to search engines to index. This translation can be disabled on reddit side, but yeah, it will not remove the indexed translated reddit posts. So, we will no longer untranslating results translated by Google, but untranslating indexed results from reddit.

What I'm trying to say is that reddit itself provides its translations for indexing, and there's nothing unusual about Google's side of things. Or any other search engine. What reddit is doing is annoying everyone, but it's an expected result of indexing the pages they provide.

It broadens the scope. I'm already surprised that it's so stable and that I don't have to catch up with any changes Google might make to the structure of the results returned.

Because:

• I rarely use Google Search anymore;
• I no longer see the results translated automatically, so I'm working blindly.

To refocus on the subject:

• Perhaps people appreciate finding English results translated into their language, for example, because it broadens the scope of their search. Perhaps they would not have come across them otherwise. And when they consult reddit, if they have disabled the option, they will return to the original post.
• I can exclude results translated by reddit from the results displayed by Google, or untranslate them afterwards.

We must consider that most people have installed this extension only to remove Google's automatic translation. Removing results translation from reddit is another matter, and it may not please everyone. Sure, it can be disabled via an option, so that solves the problem.

That leaves the question of how to proceed: if I exclude translated reddit posts (?tl=LANG), I'm limiting the best results according to Google by restricting what it displays. But then we wouldn't have any translated posts at all. Or I could let Google Search display what it finds and untranslate afterwards. But in that case, if I want something stable that won't break over time, I can only remove the translation of the titles and not the summary (provided by Google). But again, this isn't necessarily an easy task, as some reddit results are grouped under another instead of displaying separate results).

The first solution is implemented by another extension already (redditUntranslate), but you could argue that it's sub feature that could be handled by both. The second solution is not covered by any extension I know.

A third one would be to rework Google's results for reddit to display everything in the language of the post, but that's where it gets really complicated. It means parsing the website, which makes the extension much more complex and burdens it with external dependencies.

In any case, if the extension were to remove the translation after display (successive requests, as with YouTube video titles), that would start to generate a lot of secondary requests, and it might be necessary to implement a temporary cache to avoid undesirable side effects (imagine if reddit started flagging the user's IP address because they sent 100 reddit results at once, resulting in 100 queries in one minute: it's not a typical behavior for a standard reddit user).

In short, it seems straightforward, but the more I look into it, the more potential problems we encounter by attempting to ‘correct’ what we want from their services.

Also, this problem will only get worse: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-softens-automated-translation-stance-39579.html

I really believe that the final solution is to ditch Google (for what the extension already solve) for open community-based solutions/self hosted solutions/other privates concurrents. Because I told you that it is normal behaviour for a search engine to index results as they find them, but that is actually a bit wrong historically. We could choose what we want to see and, above all, Google has started to tolerate these questionable indexable translated versions.

[alghostzx]

The main issue with reddit translation results is that, beforehand, using a specific language in the search terms was a good way to filter out context. If I search in Portuguese it is because I'm looking for Brazilian or at least Portuguese specific results. Now that everything is auto-translated to every language, no matter which language I use, I get terribly unhelpful results from places like Scandinavia. and it also has the terrible problem of summoning the Reddit app with translations on even with the translations are off in the app thanks to that annoying ?tl=LANG

I suppose a great compromise, that would involve pretty much no added complexity, is simply filtering out the translation strings from reddit results' url leaving the results themselves as they are.

the annoyance is mostly mobile specific because with redditUntranslate, PC is covered however browsing the website through mobile is terrible which is why we use the app and the app opens up when opening Reddit urls. unfortunately it also takes into account the translation strings, so the apps gets summoned with translation ON even when you set it to OFF, forcing the user, every time they open a reddit url, to enable and then disable the translation in Reddit app.

I've already tried talking to the Reddit devs and they don't want to do anything about it. So I'm coming to you more hope for understanding.

[lnoss]

I'm going to split this issue into two tickets. I'll clean up the reddit URLs until I decide how to handle the untranslation part, if desirable.