[crote]

> People may prefer the English experience because they expect the translated version to be inferior

Even more, bilingual people exist!

A translated version is always worse. With a good human-made translation, it may just be a matter of making things un-Google-able or misrepresenting certain concepts. With an automatic translation, it's usually completely unusable.

I'm a native speaker of Dutch. I'm a near-native speaker of English. Having a page with both languages interspersed is completely acceptable! Don't "helpfully" translate everything which isn't in the configured language - you're only making things worse.

[qsort]

Exactly! Ironically, the most Anglo-centric assumption of them all is that people are only fluent in exactly one language. Configuring anything to be truly multilingual as opposed to "in another language" has terrible UX.

[jobigoud]

What do you mean? Having parts of the interface in one language and other parts in another?

I'm fluent in multiple languages (as most European devs) and I've never really heard or thought about this concept so I'm intrigued. What kind of software are you referring to that could have this feature?

[qsort]

I'm talking more about the behavior of websites or applications.

For example, I'm on macOS. I want the OS GUI to be in English and to use the US keyboard layout, because I'm used to that and buttons/labels aren't a big deal anyway.

However, most of my communication with my coworkers (for example, MS Teams) happens in Italian, so I'd prefer those programs to display their UI in Italian (so that everyone using the program would be on the same page) and to have Italian spellcheck.

When I open Safari to look at docs, Wikipedia or search results, I want those in English. But e-commerce sites like Amazon need to be in Italian. Except if I'm shopping for technical books or manuals: I need those in English.

For some of those needs there's a workaround, some I found completely impossible to solve (I can't seem to get the spellchecker to switch reliably, my solution is simply to disable it: I make zero grammar mistakes in Italian and most people are willing to put up with my broken English).

Generally speaking, I find that most UIs are downright hostile to "mixed" needs like mine, and I end up defaulting to the US/English locale everywhere because it's the least broken (except for units of measurement. Come on guys, inches? Farhenheit?)

The concept of locale itself is broken and wrong: I want it.IT or en.US contextually, neither is the correct one, why should I be asked to definitively pick either? In many cases, localization is downright harmful. Excel comes to mind, but even several ETL tools "helpfully" "translate" decimal points to commas by default!

Websites could greatly benefit from this, e.g. social media, where you're likely to be part of both a local community that speaks your native language, and a global community that speaks English.

[jobigoud]

Ah ok, I agree and I have some of the same issues. I'm using Firefox and the spellchecker works well. I regularly switch between 3 languages. Same for Thunderbird, plus there is an extension that remembers which language I'm using with a specific contact, which is great.

Regarding the en-US locale, I've read that some people use the en-CA locale instead, this way you get (partly) American spelling, but with metric units and international standards like A4 paper size and reasonable date format.

[Symbiote]

en-IE is a good choice in Europe: defaults to €, Anglo-Irish spelling, metric, 10 September style dates.

[zapzupnz]

You can set per-application language settings in macOS. Go to System Preferences -> Language & Region -> Apps. Click the + button to add an app then choose the language you want.

You can also do this in iOS and iPadOS. Go to Settings, scroll down to the bottom where your app is listed, tap on its settings, then click on Language.

[sundarurfriend]

While this is true, as another near-native speaker of English, reading things in my native language always feels easier. There's a slight stress on the mind when reading and using English that I don't even realize exists, except for the 2% of the time when I get to interact with UI in my native language and realize that it feels significantly better this way.

[marcan_42]

A translation doesn't have to be worse, especially in a technical context. It's just that the translation market has been steadily going downhill since the 90s, and nobody cares about quality any more.

My parents are software translators. They've been in the business since before I was born; back when software was just starting to be translated. You have no idea how much prices and quality have fallen. It's really, really sad.

Software localization used to involve the localizers working together with the developers, making UI changes, testing the real software, and using translation memory tools as an aid to ensure consistency.

These days people just get a pile of strings to translate with no context, machine translation is used by default (and agencies pay less because they give you a garbage MT version to start off with, as if it doesn't take as much time to fix it as it would to transalate from scratch), and translation memories are used with no cross checks, often translating things wrong due to entirely different context.

Further, localization is often treated as an afterthought, with developers having no idea of what the technical requirements for good localization are. Plural forms, placeholder reordering, etc.

If you want a good translation, you need to pay for it, but nobody wants to do that these days; they just want the bare minimum so they can claim to have their software available in such and such language.