Translation of 'Your language' to the same 'Your language'

[astr0gator]

First of all, thank you for the extension. It's amazing.

A small thing about auto translation.

Settings:

1. Common settings: Your language: English
2. Common preferences for this language (English): Enable
3. Source language: Autodetect (correctly identify English)

Result:
Translates both non-English to English (desirable) AND English to English (not desirable, changes capitalization etc).

[vitonsky]

@astr0gator what is your expectations?

Linguist translate from English to English as you requested. If you wish translate for specific languages, you may choose that language in popup.

Try to explain your expectations in details. The deep reasoning about your use case from your side may highlight incorrect assumptions, bad UX, and help us to understand is it you doing something wrong or a Linguist must be improved.

[astr0gator]

Fair enough. Well, I thought it's obvious, but you're right.
My expectation that Your language is never translated to Your language

[vitonsky]

@astr0gator this behaviour was implemented in #36

Quote from #36 (comment)

Pls allow translation of webpages of any original language into English.This function is important and indispensible, because in many cases webpages are in mixed languages.

In many cases the original language of a webpage is not detected or wrongly detected. For example, the original language of the following webpage is detected as English by your addon and can not be translated, but actually it also contains many Indonesian words.

---

Your expectation totally have sense, but it implies that Linguist must be able to reliable detect language. Linguist currently can't.

The Linguist uses a browser API to detect languages, the quality of that API are vary between browsers, so it detects languages wrong sometimes. We have bug about that #574

With consider of that limitations we have to decide the Linguist behaviour to fix a mentioned problem.

The trivial possible solution is just don't auto translate a page when the detected language is equal to user language.

The potential problems

• Sometimes languages will be detected incorrect, so page will be translated anyway
• This behaviour would invert the original request in Several proposals for improvement  #36, so on pages with mixed content language will not be translated

[vitonsky]

@astr0gator also I noticed you've said

Common preferences for this language (English): Enable

It does mean that you instruct Linguist to translate pages in English. When the page language is English, the Linguist will translate it into your target language.

Could you confirm it is not your intent?

In case it is not what you actually want, first try to change this option to "Never translate". Does it solve your problem?

In case your problem may be solved with no changes in code, that's would be nice, and only problem we have is an UX problem - we confuse a users because of bad interface that is unclear, and we should improve only UI, not the translation behaviour.

[astr0gator]

Oh, I see what you mean.

So, the right order of business (for future users):

1. Leave Auto-translate: Enable as convenient default
2. As soon as Your language -> Your language triggered: disable it in Auto-translate. It will create an exception that would prevent to translation for that case.

Makes sense now. Thank you for explaining 🙏

[astr0gator]

I'm still stepping on that rake.

While technically it's correct that
User SHOULD know that he should EXPLICITLY switch it off for base language.

Common preferences for this language (English)
Auto-translate:OFF

But I'd say it's a safe default: Never translate to my language. Don't think any user would like to change it tbh.

[vitonsky]

@astr0gator could you elaborate what is working bad, why it is bad, and how it should work to feels nice.
Please include all context in your story. It is important to mutual understanding.

[vitonsky]

Hi @astr0gator
Is there any problems we should solve in scope of that ticket?