Before I link you to the story this item is actually about, I want to tell you about one of my biggest frustrations with computer hardware and software. It’s something that I have to work around every single day, and its consequences bother me almost every few minutes.
Hardware and software have no idea how to handle people who lead multilingual lives.
Like hundreds of millions of people, I speak and understand several languages, but on top of that, I use two languages every single day: Dutch and English. I switch between these two all the time, often even multiple times a minute when juggling multiple friends, clients, work-related material, entertainment, and so on. I might be writing an e-mail to a client in English, work on a translation in Dutch, WhatsApp with a friend in English, and write a Facebook post in Dutch – switching between all of these.
Software has no idea what to do with this. The most operating systems like Windows and OS X can do is offer a small icon somewhere tucked away to manually switch input languages, which is incredibly cumbersome and just wholly impractical to perform every time you have to switch languages. It gets even worse on mobile operating systems, which are heavy on the autocorrect (I cannot type on a touchscreen), so if my input method is still set to English while I’m typing something in Dutch, it gets autocorrected into meaningless garbage (it’s only recently that both Android and iOS at least offer some form of true multilingual input).
It’s even worse when it comes to these voice assistants the entire technology industry is trying to ram down our throats, like Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri. Do you know what you need to do to switch voice assistant input language on an Apple Watch or Android Wear device? Are you ready for it?
You need to perform a full wipe and set up the device as new.
Since my use of Dutch and English is split about 50/50 – or maybe 60/40 – the end result is that for about 50% of the time, I cannot use any of these devices to reply to an e-mail or write a text message. While Android Wear 2.0 has a keyboard and handwriting recognition, I have no idea how to change the input language for those input methods. Even if I could by tapping around – the point of these things is that you can use them without having to look away from whatever you’re doing (e.g. cycling).
And just in case you think this kind of multilingual use is rare or an edge case: just in the United States alone, dozens of millions of people speak both Spanish and English every single day. This is not an edge case. This is not a peculiarity. This is daily reality for possibly hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
There’s countless other daily irritations that arise from this inability of software to deal with multilingual use (Win32 vs. Metro vs. Chrome vs. Office vs. etc., which all have their own input language switching mechanisms I manually have to keep track of), but the point I want to make is the following.
Because software has no idea how to deal with multilingual use, I know for a fact that very few of the engineers working on Windows or Office or iOS or WatchOS or Android or whatever lead multilingual lives, because any person who uses multiple languages every single day would be able to spot these problems within 15 minutes of use. If the manager responsible for WatchOS led a multilingual life, or had a bunch of people on his team that led multilingual lives, WatchOS would’ve never been released without the ability to easily switch Siri input language.
Despite what some low-level Googler claims in his rambling manifesto of idiocy, diversity matters. Or, as ex-Googler Yonatan Zunger puts it way more eloquently:
Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding them - and since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system.
If, at this point in time, you still don’t understand the importance of diversity when developing products, you are beyond help, and have no place on any product development team.
That’s… probably not going to change anytime soon with either Apple or Google’s software, since the changes might require some deep overhauling of the operating systems as well as the dictation software.
Microsoft, believe it or not, might be the ones who have the best shot at this since they have a multilingual CEO at the moment, and the more recent Windows/Office updates have been increasingly better at handling multiple languages in written form.
Now I don’t usually change the interface at all (I keep it in English), but the speech/text switching should be standard fare.
Or, it just nicely illustrates that the “lack of diversity” is a too simple way of explaining those issues.
Let me illustrate it with the following point: I own a 24″ 4K monitor that requires a 200% scale factor (192 DPI, “retina”). It has tons of usability issues, even on Windows 10. It doesn’t work properly on Linux at all. It works flawlessly on macOS, of course.
Is Apple really the only company with the monitor diversity to notice and fix those problems? No, of course not. What is really going on is that there are people in key positions that either don’t have a proper solution, plainly don’t give a shit, or both.
Apple users were so fortunate to have Steve Jobs as the CEO at the time (someone that gave a shit), and a technical team that could upgrade Cocoa to deal with it (an easy technical solution).
It is exactly the same when it comes to language support. Especially when there isn’t a well-known industry wide solution to a complex problem. They don’t support English+Dutch in their fancy chatbots because their sad crap software can’t handle that. Heck, it can barely handle English alone as it is.
One thing I don’t like is the Windows keyboard shortcut to switch between languages: Ctrl + Space and sometimes Ctrl + Shift to switch between regional variants.
The former is difficult to press and everyone ends up banging the space bar with their thumb which you could distinctly hear and know someone was switching languages.
The second requires twisting the hand counter-clockwise for the pinky the reach the Ctrl and ring finger to reach the Shift.
However I don’t profess to know a better alternative.
You can redefine the keybindings, also you can assign hotkeys to languages.
dpJudas,
Like most people, he “gave shits” about some things but not about others. For example safari really became regressive on his watch, holding back web standards much like IE had done before. He actively impeded open video codecs, the iphone was the black sheep that made webm non-viable as a multi-platform solution – he didn’t give a shit and the web suffered for it. Jobs could have single-handedly set the trend for mobile devices to be open, but instead he pivoted hard towards taking away owner freedoms in general. If you care alot about open technology, then steve jobs was really on the dark side of the software patent wars.
Obviously steve jobs did good things too, but if your going to use him as an example, then we need to take the bad with the good.
Edited 2017-08-07 15:19 UTC
Oh, absolutely. But my point here was that it isn’t the diversity of the work force, but how much certain key people care about the problem.
For example, I’m from Denmark and should supposedly be hit by all the problems Thom describes. However, I solved the problem by making my computers all communicate in English and then disabled the auto-correct. Voice recognition systems I don’t use at all.
Give me the key position of prioritizing problems in Windows and Thom’s pet problems will be far down the list. On the other hand, it seems if Thom was made the product owner of Windows, he’d get me raging in very short time because he’d apparently try apply language auto-detection techniques that I do not desire at all.
Nothing pisses me more off than when a program or website noticed I use danish regional settings and presents their interface in danish. Heck, Microsoft did that when it “upgraded” my English Windows 7 to a Danish Windows 10. Took me a lot of cursing and effort to persuade it to go BACK to English.
dpJudas,
I dislike when websites use IP geotracking, as if IP changes my language preference and I absolutely hate services like netflix that block foreign content based on IP.
Edited 2017-08-07 21:26 UTC
OK, so had to register just to post on this topic.
Thom, you clearly hit the nail on the head on this one. Exactly as you describe, an ordinary day for millions of people involve constantly switching between languages for responses.
It just seems so outdated that software isn’t capable of grasping which language you’re responding in, and switch auto-correct etc accordingly.
The only exception to the rule that I am familiar with is/was BB10. Blackberry BB10 on my various devices did an excellent job working out which language I was responding in (ref https://crackberry.com/how-enable-multiple-languages-blackberry-10-k… )
I can’t get why this should be so hard for other OS’s to figure out.
I’m not sure what the content of that Google employee’s post has to do with improving the handling of multiple languages, but I’ll bite anyway…
Despite being smeared as racist, misogynistic, and anti-diversity, he starts off his “manifesto” by commenting on the importance of inclusion:
“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”
Some of the claims he makes about the average differences between men and women are poorly evidenced, but it’s downright delusional to deny that differences exist. Aside from fringe feminists who consider sex a “social construct”, e.g. loonies demanding the “desegregation” of sport, I think most people accept that, even if they disagree on specifics.
The idea that unequal representation within a field is proof of sexist discrimination is dubious at best. If some of the difference is down to biology (or simple choice), I think it’s reasonable to question attempts to force equality of outcome, especially using hiring quotas and positive discrimination.
I find it interesting that those opinions are considered absolutely beyond the pale in many tech circles. They’re simply dismissed as bigotry or idiocy and aren’t even open for discussion.
The people calling for him to be fired for expressing his views are certainly making his point about the intolerance of diverse opinion…
Brilliant. Thank you for that reply, just what I was thinking. I share Thom’s problem with multiple languages (for me it’s three languages at about 50%, 40% 10% usage).
But like you I was lured into that discussion and the “manifesto†(which I didn’t hear about before).
Your last paragraph “The people calling for him to be fired for expressing his views are certainly making his point about the intolerance of diverse opinion…†reminded me a lot about what happened to Richard Dawkins a couple of times now, having invitations to him withdrawn at UC Berkeley and KPFA Radio (see also here for an older comment of his on the matter https://youtu.be/LvvQJ_zsL1U or here for a reaction to the KPFA incident https://richarddawkins.net/2017/07/letter-to-kpfa/).
(Going down the rabbit hole that I also consider only marginally related to the main topic)
* There are clearly physical differences between men and women that would greatly affect sports and some jobs, but not the jobs we are talking about here at Google
* The mental differences between men and women are a much bigger debate that eventually always boils down to “hormones” or “society”. This is the giant debate about nature-vs-nurture that tries to explain why men and women behave differently. This is an incredibly complicated discussion to which I personally lean heavily to the “nurture” side
* There is also the reality that you will earn more if you “upgrade” your employer or, to a lesser degree, if you get promoted internally. Both are realistically happening more when you work fulltime and when you get older. Since women tend to have pregnancy break(s) and date/marry older men they are likely to earn less than men.
Given all of the above I still see no evidence that women would be less fit to work in IT-jobs. Quite the opposite actually:
* IT-jobs are quite flexible and modern compared to many other jobs.
* It is light work that would suite women more than men.
* If you look at early history it was mostly women that worked in IT
Most social-scientists in the UK think it is more to do the with the nature side. Somewhere an 80-20 split. However I am still reading Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” so we see what he says about the subject.
Edited 2017-08-07 09:45 UTC
I personally don’t think that women are less fit to work in IT jobs, but I do think that fewer women are actually interested enough in the field to choose it over their other options.
There’s often some truth to stereotypes, and I don’t think it’s entirely a social construct that geekiness is associated with men. There’s a gender imbalance right across geeky hobbies, from trainspotting and stamp collecting to tabletop wargaming and tinkering with old computers. I’m not convinced that this is entirely down to the way men and women are socialised by society, or that “basement dwelling misogynerds” are making those spaces unwelcoming to women.
One brain difference that there does seem to be some evidence for is a greater prevalence of autism/Asperger’s among men. In my experience there are certainly fewer women/girls with obsessively narrow interests. Obviously not all programmers fit that stereotype, but quite a few of the keen open source and hobbyist developers I know certainly do, and they all happen to be men.
I support programs to encourage women to enter IT and make it a more welcoming environment. I’m just not convinced that any such efforts will lead to equal representation, or that their failure to do so will prove that there’s a sexism problem.
You wrote this bitchfest in English, and people are reading it all over the world. That’s the real reason why this is never going to get “fixed” to your satisfaction – English is the standard language of computing, always has been, and always will be. The only language that even comes CLOSE to the number of fluent speakers is Mandarin, and Mandarin is so laughably unsuited for computer usage that Chinese keyboards are just US-ASCII with software translation layers that basically convert pinyin to hanzi. There’s simply no way that the level of multilingual integration you’re screeching about is ever going to justify the enormous cost. If Microsoft were still as dominant as they were in the 90s I can see them trying, but they’re not. We’re less than five years from Windows 10 going free-of-cost and ad-supported, so there’s no way they’re going to shell out a billion dollars of dev time to cater to people who their advertisers aren’t even trying to reach in the first place.
Just give up on this, Thom. Let it die.
The reality around most of the world is that people have a local (social) language or two and then an international (bureaucratic/ administrative) language. In daily life sentences will often have a smattering of both.
People like the British, the Americans and the French sometimes fail to notice because one language often appears to cover both bases.
Taking account of this in software is another mountain to climb, when they get around to it.
You clearly have no clue. I want my devices to speak English and use my voice assistant in English 80% of the time.
But as a Dutch person in Germany, English voice assistants are pretty useless, because they cannot properly decode German street names or Dutch/German names. Hence, I’d like to be able to switch between English, Dutch, and German easily (which as Tom said is virtually impossible).
Just to give an example: my family name is ‘de Kok’ which is a normal Dutch name. When I try to call family, I get complaints from my voice assistants that I shouldn’t ask vile things like ‘call dirty the cock’.
As they are, voice assistants are pretty useless to 90% of the world population. Apple, Google, etc. need to come out of their SV bubble.
Another pet peeve: you cannot set an Xbox One that uses the German store to English. Either it’s German or you won’t get access to the store.
Edited 2017-08-07 06:22 UTC
A dutch person living in Germany speaking English to a voice assistent. You account for how many percent of users in the country? 1% or 0.1%?
It probably simply isn’t worth the bother of supporting you.
Also most of these voice assistants don’t even work correctly if you are in the UK and don’t have American or London accent. I am from Devon and Siri doesn’t understand anything I say.
Edited 2017-08-07 06:36 UTC
Maybe in Germany, because general English competency is not that high. But e.g. in The Netherlands (and probably Scandinavian countries) many people use English as their default language on their devices. Virtually all Dutch people I know set their phones/desktop OS to English. However, they still want to navigate the Dutch streets or call their Dutch friends. Add other Northern European countries and you are easily talking tens of millions.
And let’s not start with India, where English is commonly used, but where names are obviously not in English.
While my particular combination may be a small minority, the general problem is not (e.g. English device language, localised names).
It is safe to assume that scandinavians use their native tongue for devices, whenever possible. The biggest victory for the F/LOSS community is the localisation of software, quite rare among proprietary software (for windows) until recently.
Smartphones, tablets, computers, set-top boxes etc. – everything is in Danish, Norwegian or Swedish. Nothing is more offputting in regard to IT than untranslated software.
What are you on about? I’ve been writing .NET applications with localisation for like over 10 years.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c6zyy3s9(v=vs.71).aspx
That is at least 14 years ago.
Edited 2017-08-07 15:41 UTC
A decade is also “recently” for me. It was only with the release of Vista that localisation was properly supported by Microsoft.
In the past it was normal for proprietary applications to be 1 language only, perhaps with support for German and French, but nothing else. Localisation was generally a sign of open source or community-supported freeware/shareware. In 2004 localisation was the one thing Linux had going for it, whereas Windows would usually be all English or a blend of Danish and English until recently. Broad support (outside the biggest sellers) for non-english users is a thing of the last 5 years.
Anyway, the point is that most danes use devices solely in Danish and will gladly refuse to use an app or device, if it isn’t (properly) translated to Danish.
As someone that worked in an office where both English, Spanish and Llanino was spoken. All official comms were done in English.
The anti-diversity manifesto you managed to completely miss the overall complaint because you disagreed with it.
The author was saying Diversity of Race / Sex is more more important that diversity of thought in Google which affects policy. It is true that is larger corps certain political opinions (I am not talking about anything far right) are frowned upon. It is no accident the term “Diversity Hire” exists. All the author wants is for people to be hired based on their competency rather than arbitrary quotas on how many of X should be in the department.
As for men and women moving into particular industries. There is some truth to this. There is quite a good documentary that looks into this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
Also I think it might be worth you reading either of these:
“the blank slate” – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blank-Slate-Modern-Penguin-Science/dp/01402…
and The righteous mind:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp…
Now do I think the tech industry should have more women in it? Yes it probably should! The reason why the tech industry is a sausage fest is most of the guys that are in the tech industry now were kids back in the 80s and early 90s and were mucking around with Amigas and DOS and happened to turn a hobby into a career. Also there are plenty of women in the tech industry they just aren’t developers, they are normally artists, project managers, BI, Testers, QA etc.
Does it need a more ethnically diverse, I don’t know … In the UK most people I work with are Indian men and women who have emigrated and most are quite good. I don’t know about the situation in the US or anywhere else. The area I live in now is mostly white, so most of the people I am going to be working with will be white.
Edited 2017-08-07 01:45 UTC
1) I have an English IME and Japanese one. I can switch between them by tapping one key on the IPhone keyboard. In the English IME I get English suggestions and in the Japanese one I get Japanese suggestions. English, as it happens, is the 5th language I learned to speak and one of a number I use regularly. I don’t have any of the problems you describe.
2) I can change the language Siri speaks through Settings > Siri > Language. The reason why it can’t speak two languages isn’t some conspiracy against diversity, it’s just that is way WAY harder to teach a neural network to recognize two distinct languages accurately ( one day, I have no doubt, Siri and Alexa and Hello Google, will be effortlessly polylingual ). In the mean time I don’t see how Siri is any different then the billions of people who only speak one language.
K
and yet Google Now can recognize at least 3 languages interchangeably without changing any setting, beyond the initial setup of choosing 3 languages. At least in my experience of choosing French, English and Japanese. Of course it doesn’t mix-and-match within a single query, but it DOES work, at least it did when I tried it earlier this year.
I also used to have a BB10 device and can testify to its language switching capabilities. As I have the same problem, I’m also in the translation business part-time and need to switch between English and Swedish all the time. But at least on my iPhone and iPad it’s not such a big deal as I use SwiftKey as my software keyboard. It’s possible to set two active languages at a time and switch between them, even in the same sentence.
There are other software keyboards out there as well capable of the same. So there are solutions out there.
And on Android, SwiftKey supports up to 5 simultaneous languages.
It’s my major dealbreaker when trying other keyboards: they might be nice but every single day I write in 3 languages, and more often than not, 4.
On a computer I get by using US International layout, it’s more convenient than switching back and forth. When writing Russian I switch, obviously, and switch back immediately (as most shortcuts are very wonky and inconsistent in non-latin scripts).
Very few of the engineers working on Windows or Office or iOS or WatchOS or Android or whatever lead multilingual lives.
Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems.
Javascript obfuscator https://javascript-obfuscator.org/
Edited 2017-08-07 06:23 UTC
I live in a country where, for historical reasons, there is another official language despite the fact only ~5 % of people actually use it.
However, it affects everyone’s daily tech life as even Google Maps prefers Swedish language over Finnish when it displays street names etc. (Not in all cases but it mixes up the two languages without any sensible logic.)
I’ve also noticed that the digital TV program info is also fetched in Swedish unless I set the GUI language to Finnish aswell. On multiple devices. I would prefer using English because I use it on all of my devices, but that triggers the program info to load in Swedish.
Edit: OSNews is broken it seems, because I can’t fix the typo in my post’s subject line.
Edited 2017-08-07 06:38 UTC
I don’t use these voice assistants, they don’t work for me anyway: in French they don’t work properly, in English my accent doesn’t work properly either
Alt+shift on the desktop, easy and fast enough.
On Android, no auto-correction: again, this never worked for me in any language. I can use the French keyboard for French and English easily as English has no special characters. On the rare occasions I need to write Korean, the keyboard switch is quite fast as well.
I cannot think about better solutions so I’m pretty happy with the current situation. I remember the difficult times of the early 2000s when unicode was not widely used, and I wanted to write and read Japanese and Korean, it was a headache on Windows and a nightmare on Linux and Windows CE.
The current situation is a dream in comparison, everything just works.
Edited 2017-08-07 07:24 UTC
I once had a wealthy Indian friend who was a monolingual English speaker. I asked him how he managed to talk to the workers at his family’s factory in India. He replied “I just ask my overseer to translate”.
Edited 2017-08-07 08:11 UTC
In Belgium the situation is even worse. I am speaking 4 languages in my personal and professional life (Dutch, French, English and German).
Take the Desguinlei, one the biggest streets in Antwerp. The first part (Desguin) refers to a person with a French name, the second part (lei) is a Dutch word. I don’t know any GPS that can pronounce the street correct, or any voice assistant understands the correct pronunciation. Another very nice example is the metro station Pannenhuis in Brussels. It is a Dutch word and even the French speaking people pronounce it the Dutch way, but a GPS or a Voice assistant are struggling with it.
The larger Belgian cities have 4 language versions(e.g. Brussel, Brussels, Bruxelles, Brüssel) and all streets in Brussels have 2 language versions (e.g. Grote Markt, Grand Place). All electronic assistants gets confused by it. A lot of French speaking people have complained to Google about the fact that Google Maps sometimes used a Dutch version of a street in Brussels, a name which was totally unfamiliar to them.
On top of that Siri has serious difficulties to understand the Belgian pronunciation of Dutch. If you want to have a evening of fun, just use the Dutch version of Siri with a Belgian accent. The only thing Siri understands always without any issue are the swear words: “kus me kloten” (kiss my balls).
When Apple launched the Apple TV with voice assistance, the launch in Belgium had to be postponed because Siri did not understand the commands in Belgian Dutch to change channels, a key feature for Apple TV. The French speaking people were upset because of this. but Apple remained firm: it can only be launched in Belgium if it is working for all Belgian people.
It was launched in The Netherlands anyway and you had to use a horrible remote to enter text one letter at a time. One of the worst product experience you could possibly have!
We have gone pretty far on the multilingual ladder. You can change the User Interface of most OS, Office and other programs.
You can change the input language with the touch of a button or keyboard combination.
Webbrowsers and Office programs are trying to guess which language you are using on a per-page/per-paragraph basis from a list of configurable languages.
But voice assistants are too new for this. Having a voice assistant available in your own language is becoming more common, but they still don’t scale well. Siri exists in Dutch but is really bad and Cortana and Google Assistant are still not there yet. If you think Dutch is a fringe case, look at the recent Bixby (non)-introduction in English
Even if “assistants” are available in your language, they will probably not understand your local culture and services so they are far less useful
And if you really want to have a laugh, try Bing.com outside the US, or see how few features Amazon has to offer.
Male/Female diversity, Racial diversity, High-Low income diversity are all very important. But those US-Countries also should realize they cannot just sell “made for US” products outside the US
I understand that using Siri for two languages can be a problem, but a keyboard?
Why not just install an auto-switcher that detects when you change language by language-specific letter patterns and corrects last word you have typed?
I use Punto Switcher for Windows аnd MacOS, but there are EveryLang, Keyboard Ninja, Key Switcher, and XNeur for Linux.
To manually switch language on windows you push alt left shift or alt right shift. It is even directional so if you have 3 languages, 1 shift is enough to get to the correct language. To switch between latin and hiragana you push shift capslock, to switch to katakana you push alt capslock.
On mobile , at least with swype you can setup multiple languages to be used for autocorrection, though I prefer to switch between languages by pushing space.
On both PC and mobile I can switch languages in literally 1 second.
Now proofing is a different problem. Afaik Word has auto language detection, but I never used it, and I never checked the hotkeys to change the language of the text.
Edited 2017-08-07 09:20 UTC
It is also possible to redefine hotkeys and assign hotkeys on Windows as one comment above reminded me to that.
Oh wow, so you’ve never heard of keyboard shortcuts such as Left Alt + Shift (Windows) or Control + Spacebar (OS X)? You really surprised me here, Thom… I mean, from the things you write I did not really expect you to be technical/power user, but still… Wow.
Keyboard shortcuts are dumb. This is a computer. It can render virtual environments to crazy detail, yet it can’t automatically decide what language I’m currently using. That shows you just where priorities lie.
And keyboard shortcuts are never a solution; they are a stopgap until we figure out how to do things automatically. I know a lot of people here have this crazy idea that the more they have to do manually in some arcane fashion the better, but that’s antithetical to what a computer is supposed to be.
Mundane shit like fucking text input should be effortless and automatic by now. It’s fucking 2017.
You really have no clue do you. Just regarding English there are at least 3 variants and then all the accents, localised spellings.
Then you might have things like slang to deal with and that is one language and the fact that sometimes you use foreign phrases.
This is not an easy problem and manually doing it is probably better than doing badly for now.
Even on web pages you have to give the language weighting in the headers https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Lan…
Also {{Current Year}} isn’t an argument for anything. The onion are mocking it http://www.theonion.com/article/report-stating-current-year-still-l…
Edited 2017-08-07 13:08 UTC
Exactly! I cannot imagine how can Thom be so clueless about things as obvious as these.
Another major annoyance caused by auto-prediction crap: I often connect via some kind of foreign proxy (since I’m working for a foreign employer) and every day I stumble upon a web page that decides to present itself to me in foreign language that I don’t understand a word of! Just because I came from this IP does not mean I speak this language! Same shit when traveling…
Spotify when I lived in Gibraltar gave me the Spanish page even though Gibraltar officially speaks English.
Yeah, Spotify even announces it’s audio ads in Danish when I listen from work 😀 That’s just such an absurd situation, makes me laugh every time I hear it: their precious, revenue-generating advertisements, they want me to hear them so much, yet they announce them in a language I don’t understand.
It absolutely is. I honestly never had any issues with this. It’s as effortless as it can be. And I am NOT a native English speaker, I use at least 2 languages all the time, every day. I cannot imagine how do you manage to stumble so much here. It’s really not a problem. If it was, someone would have found a solution already. In shor: it’s all in your head.
What is that supposed to even mean? A computer can run any program you wish, just because you have some ideal in your head of how you would you would like it to run doesn’t make it the raison d’être of a computer.
At least on Android, the built-in keyboard has offered a simultaneous language mode for quite a while now, i.e. I have mine set up to allow English, German and French input, and it tries to match inputs to those languages in order of priority. In my experience this tends to work fairly well, no manual language switching by the user needed.
I definitely feel you. I’m not technically multilingual myself (that usually implies fluency, and I’m only fluent in English), but I have friends around the world, and among all of us we speak about 30 different languages. When chatting online, we mostly use English (because everyone involved is fluent enough in English that we can communicate efficiently), but end up using words and phrases from almost all of those 30 different languages just because there often isn’t an easy way to say exactly what we mean in English.
Because of autocorrect and otherwise poor software design, we’ve ended up having to work out our own typographical annotation to communicate in textual chat, usually by putting whatever accent mark after the letter it’s supposed to go with (so you see a lot of stuff like e` or o/ in our chat), but that itself imposes complications for anyone new in the group (beyond what would already be the case, but it’s not hard to ask what a word or phrase means).
The fact of the matter though is that people who are just as comfortable using a computer in any language they know (like you appear to be), or who need to switch languages on-the-fly are in general a minority. Most people have one preferred language, and they will use that unless the situation calls specifically for something else.
That said, Android (or at least, upstream Android) has gotten a bit better in recent years, the IME switching is really quick and easy with the Google keyboard (although you have to specify input methods ahead of time), and the English handwriting recognition has learned to a certain degree to handle accented characters correctly (it kind of has to because of some of our loanwords).
OS X automatically detects spelling languages for me (English and Polish). I never had any problems with it and I always remove the flag icon, as it’s not needed in my case. I assume it’s much more complicated for two languages with different keyboard layouts and accented letters.
Apparently iOS can do this too, but it’s implemented in a weird way where there are separate dictionaries for multilingual… and my language is not included. Not surprising – for Apple, Poland might as well be Antarctica.
Windows is total chaos, of course. Win32 has no system wide spell check. UWP has no auto switching, and is still inconsistent with itself. For example, UWP Mail app has a text field unlike any other.
Personally I absolutely hate manual switching, I’d rather disable spell checking/autocorrection altogether.
I’ve had good success with adding these 3 languages to the default Android Keyboard. It seems to do a good job of autocompleting between the multiple languages. However, it could just be because these 3 languages merge well – there’s a lot of overlap among them.
As someone who speaks English, Cantonese, and Japanese on a regular basis, I share your frustration. However, things just don’t happen/change overnight. I remember my Apple II+ only had English input and output no matter how hard you try. I could make my 386SX to take some Chinese typings, display and even print docs in Chinese characters. Now, my Android phone can do all these, and on top of that, all different languages on the screen at the same time, although I have to do the switch manually if I want to input in different languages.
Things are getting better, but not without our efforts. We can put as much resource as we have on developing the interface just to solve its multilingual disability, but should we? There are a lot more problems waiting to be solved. How important is this multilingual disability compared to the others? By the end of the day, it’s just a question of priority, no?
Well, Chinese/Japanese/Ancien Egyptese apart, this is neither a “disability” nor a problem, really. For most of latin-based input methods/keyboard layouts it’s a non-issue. Quickly hitting two-key shortcut on your keyboard to switch language is as easy as it gets. It does not need any more automation than this. Even cyrillic script has a “phonetic layout” which is very simple to use for casual users. For full-time cyrillic typing you want native cyrillic layout, of course…
Yes, switching languages is a mountain to be climbed on most OSes. Why? Because language is perhaps the most difficult problem in computing. We barely only have language syntax error detection, forget about meaningful grammar error detection. And auto-correction is usually presenting the user with a list of suggestions to choose from, or using the most commonly used word that is similar.
Users complain, but don’t understand how difficult the problem is. They grew up with the languages and then spent years in school, but expect a computer to shift as easily and readily as they do in life. This is an issue that won’t be solved until home computers reach the level of IBM’s Watson. Don’t expect it to be easy or cheap – the easy and cheap solutions are already part of your computer – hotkeys to switch between hardcoded languages. Give it another couple decades – when input is nothing but speech recognition that works in any language and people think of keyboards as relics from Grandpa’s day, then maybe computers will shift languages as simply and easily as you do.
I sure hope not. Can you possibly imagine that in an office environment? There goes confidentiality!
Sound-proofed cubicles!
Or maybe implants in your head so you just THINK it rather than say it.
JLF65,
Hell no! Haha. It’s bad enough that we can’t even use voice recognition locally and have to be tethered to corporate datacenters. Just think about when we start sending out brain scans to corporate servers, because in reality you know it will be engineered this way so that companies can mine the data for their own purposes
It could actually be cool technology, but the potential for abuse is huge if users aren’t in control, which we won’t be if today’s corporate leaders have their way. They will optimize it for advertisers. Users aren’t the customers, we’re the product. And then there are the government surveillance powers…
…ies students, not fewer (there has been global slashing of Humanities departments’ funding, particularly in the last 4-5 years).
Unfortunately, there is still an emphasis on STEM, from industry, to HE, to governments, to Citizen Science. The Humanities are viewed as irrelevant.
There is only so much you can do with a hard engineering perspective.
Orf.
(Edited for limited title space)
Edited 2017-08-07 16:22 UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50zFyDroYvI
Edited 2017-08-07 18:22 UTC
Aghast I got voted down for this view. I guess the echo chamber extends beyond gendered issues. Not heard of the digital humanities?! The “Two cultures” argument actually runs both ways (or ought to).
We use the following languages, dutch, english, german, czech and a little russian now and then.
The computing industry is not able to handle that and I do not see much improvement although I am over 30 years in this business.
The nr 1 database in the web, mysql, is still used with a load of different collations that can be defined on a load of levels creating what is called collation-hell.
In Android Multilingualkeyboards can only be loaded as apps and switching language for the apps themselves is as rare as the sabletooth tiger.
I have several PC-keyboard that one must plug in and out to serve another languages.
Try to find a keyboard that has the ability to show different languages on its keys, it is only there in concept.
So, ICT is still a very young industry that is not really ready for global interaction. Seeing the politics nowadays I guess i will not live to see that happen.
LOL WHAT? Collations have nothing to do with translations it is simply a sort order.
Databases rarely have anything to do with the translation of the site. Unless you are stupid enough to put all your translations in the db.
The front end of the website should be showing the localised language and the data presented accordingly (Accept-Language header?)
Couldn’t be anything to do with the RFC … not ath would be too easy.
Edited 2017-08-07 20:11 UTC
Hmm – how best to reply to this?
https://www.xkcd.com/1726/
https://xkcd.com/927/
Those pretty much cover it completely.
@Thom you do realise that whole first paragraph on their manifesto was trying to tell you “calm down before you read this because I mostly believe the same as you”.
Yet you called it idiocy when it clearly wasn’t. That isn’t productive to discussion he specifically references conservative view points
For the person that wrote the email it wasn’t about sexism or racism. It was a concern that other viewpoints i.e. conservative were stifled at the company via policy. I’ve encountered this myself when telling people the reality of how say tax works.
This is a legitimate worry for both UK and US conservatives.
I am pro gay marriage, but wait for it … I am anti-mass immigration, mainly due to Douglas Murray and his arguments on it, which come from a conservative point of view.
So it is quite possible to hold some conservative and more left wing positions. But dismissing the whole thing as idiocy you are just saying that every conservative viewpoint has zero merit.
Especially when their are books out there with convincing arguments such as Charles Murrays the bellcurve and Steven Pinker’s “The blank slate” which argue in favour of what that particular employee said.
Edited 2017-08-07 22:51 UTC
Since he got fired over the memo he seems to have a valid point.
Edited 2017-08-08 18:07 UTC
A lot of people are really pissed off about the firing. Even on the guardian’s comment section people were like “Well I don’t agree with what he says, but she shouldn’t be fired”.
I used to work with a holocaust denier and anti-semite. I find such views abhorrent, but she shouldn’t be fired for having them if her views don’t conflict with the work.
Edited 2017-08-08 19:38 UTC
I would never buy anything or be a client of a company that employs anti-semites, holocaust deniers, fascists or similar. Such views might not conflict with your work, but they sure as hell conflict with company values. And if you go directly against company values, you should be fired.
The same woman believed in palm reading and astrology. Are we going to outlaw idiocy as well?
I don’t think people should be required to believe what their employers believe.
The problem is if you just shun everyone that doesn’t agree with you, they will vote for extreme right-wing or left-wing candidates and extremes aren’t great.
Edited 2017-08-09 08:34 UTC
Anti-semitism, holocaust denial are not just beliefs. Those are malicious and dangerous ideas that are intended to do harm to certain groups of people. Palm reading and astrology might be dumb and idiotic, but palm readers don’t want to “kill all jews” (unless a palm reader is also anti-semite).
Edited 2017-08-09 09:06 UTC
Except these beliefs are fringe enough that none of these people have intuition or political power. The best way to deal with such idiotic beliefs in mockery, satire and scrutiny.
In the UK I believe it was in 2010, we had Nick Griffin which was at the time the head of a Party that was effectively White Nationalist. He was invited to speak on Question time. Before the event it was debated as to whether he should even be invited.
He did speak and he was soo utterly demolished by the audience, that the BNP is effectively a dead party. It kinda like people crowing about the KKK in the USA, they have approximately 3000 members in a country of ~ 250 million people, they are a non-entity.
Edited 2017-08-09 09:15 UTC
That’s absolutely true.
And yet again, almost every respectable company in the world has it’s official values and as an employee you must be in line with them (or at least not against them). If you’re not, you’re free to look for job elsewhere. That’s more than fair.
Would you support a Christian company that from say discriminate against Atheists, if part of the core values were Christian values, even if the business itself has nothing to do with Christianity? By your logic they should be able to.
If there is no obvious conflict of interest and it doesn’t affect your work or how you work within the business I don’t see why an employer should care if you hold abhorrent views, as long as you don’t bring it to work.
Edited 2017-08-09 10:32 UTC
Well exactly: believe whatever crap you want, just don’t bring it to work and all will be fine (at work). But if your co-workers know about your retarded beliefs, then you obviously failed at not bringing it to work.
Discussions happen between people outside of work and at lunch, people add you on Facebook, people might know you previously from outside work etc etc.
In this case, I worked it out from some things she had said that wasn’t overt and later my suspicions were when I was invited to a house party. The only reason I worked out most of this stuff is because I’ve read quite a bit about this stuff over the years and I know some of the tells.
You’re talking about that palm-reader? That’s not really related to this discussion, as no one was fired for believing in palm-reading. People get fired for being openly racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitist etc. Which totally makes sense in a modern society that treats all people as being equal and respects basic human rights. Racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism — all of these try to rob people of their basic rights and the right to not be discriminated.
If an employer would refuse to hire an employee based on race, gender or sexual orientation, he would get hit with lawsuits so hard he would forget his own name. Same should apply to employees/peers. Be as stupid with your beliefs as you want, just please don’t try to say (or even imply) that particular race/gender/sexual orientation is somehow less worthy.
Look I know this might be hard for you to understand as you seem to be conflating two different things.
But thinking something vs acting are two very different things and we shouldn’t be punishing people for the former because we are going to do what we do in the UK and Germany which is locking people up for telling jokes.
It is you who is conflating several very different things.
Thinking something is not a problem. Telling jokes about certain things is also not a problem (might be offensive, but these days everything is).
Telling certain things with serious face can be a big problem. That is why we put people in jail for threats to kill even in internet comments. You think it’s just fine to let people walk around streets/offices/whatever shouting “Kill all jews!”, “Death to faggots!”, “Niggers must die!”? Boy, we are very different people…
Well yes we are totally different people if you completely straw-man my position into something completely different.
I think people should be as racist and as sexist as they like in their free time as long as they don’t break the laws of the land. I fend up of people being kicked out of places for wrong-think and this guy at Google had the mildest opinions and they are making him out to be a monster.
Edited 2017-08-10 09:33 UTC
Where laws include harming others verbally. I fully agree with your take.
This days in germany the huge majority is pro same sex marriage. Just some weeks ago we finally got our government to put that into law – thanks to pressure due to upcoming votings. I was among the people forcing that to happen and partying hart to finally have it happen. Yet I would anytime defend these who where or are still against when someone tries to punish them, ie get them fired from there job, just becausen of that. We should follow ethical minimum standards when dealing with opposing opinions. More so if we are the majority and them are not.
There is a red line and Google crossed it. Just minutes ago I saw Facebook is in full swing to implement its huge new censor-department. Of course they got forced to by our government bypassing all kind of protection-laws. We are full ahead, as in close follower to UK, building up a surveillance and control state. 1984 was wrong, it took them 35 years longer. As usual the first victims will be idiots (ie homo-haters) and everybody is fine. But as usual it will not stop there since it never stops there. Thats what we call the politics of small steps. Something our government plays well since decades.
Edited 2017-08-10 12:22 UTC
Don’t get me on about Facebook. I deleted my account after they decided they are going to start reporting atheists in Pakistan. In those companies you can be killed or imprisons for being an atheist (the crime for apostasy is death in some parts of the Muslim world).
When are we going to admit that some of these companies have become essentially utilities.
I think you’re underestimating the effort that some vindictive people will put into investigating and exposing a colleague’s private life. Obviously that wasn’t the situation here, but I’ve run into a few cases of people being fired after being outed by people who went digging for dirt.
Larry Garfield at Drupal is a recent public example. He didn’t bring his personal life to work – nobody knew the details of his sex life until his kinky online alter-ego was doxxed.
Of course that didn’t stop the “diversity and inclusion” crowd from demanding his expulsion from their safe space. In fact, a number of them argued that people should be monitored outside of work and fired/blacklisted if they ever privately express “problematic” views or behaviours. The fact that the Drupal code of conduct only covered things said and done in the work environment was highlighted as a major failing that needed to be corrected.
There was a similar case with Alison Rapp being fired by Nintendo after people sent her employer information about her “moonlighting” – although that drew a very different reaction from the same factions.
Allison Rapp was kinda a bit different she did do a rather tame photoshoot with her holding a Nintendo product.
Brendan Eich is another example.
To all the people talking about localization, this is not what Thom complains about.
I have no need for a localized UI. The translations are completely ridiculous and usually too verbose. I actually HATE sites that detect my location and automatically deliver a shit translation instead of the original English.
What I do need is support for communicating in at least two languages, possibly in the same phrase. What does localization have to do with it?
Again, autoswitchers? Try them at least.
I do that constantly and have zero issues. What in the world is so difficult about hitting two-key shortcut for you people? Are you also having trouble holding “Shift” key when you want to write a capital letter?
Yup, the original Swype app. You can have many languages on it, even two at the same time. Just install the language packs you want and hold the spacebar to switch languages
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Edited 2017-08-11 22:03 UTC