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0 pointskakkun4y ago0 comments

I've had issues with Google's localization choices for a long time. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue with other language combinations.

I'm a bilingual Japanese/English speaker. Searching Google's search languages to English and Japanese causes the following:

- Random Japanese words show up in things such as Google Maps, even though my display language is set to English.

- Japanese results will be prioritized over English ones. For example, If I search for "the beatles", it will show the Japanese Wikipedia page as the top result before the English version. For some sites (like Discogs) only the Japanese version of the site will show up.

If just set English as my search language, searching in Japanese can bring up results that are entirely in Chinese, even though I've set my preferred languages as English and Japanese (in that order).

0 comments

sofixa4y ago

Yep. I'm trilingual English/French/Bulgarian, and i have all three as languages in Google search, and they're mixed up too often. I can understand Google proposing the French spelling of an English word and results for it, but almost every time when i search something in Bulgarian i get results in Russian, even when i use words that don't exist in Russian. The languages aren't even that close, and they aren't the only Cyrillic ones...

Joker_vD4y ago

Well, those are quite close to each other from the orthographic point of view, I guess: Ukrainian or Serbian are visually very distinct from either Russian or Bulgarian, while to tell the latter two apart you need some actual knowledge about the differences of those languages: say, that the abundance of letter "ъ", words ending in "ът"/"та"/"то" and tons of prepositions (i.e., often repeated two-three letter words) are a pretty good indication of a Bulgarian text.

kakkunOP4y ago

Yeah, it's annoying, especially since I've told Google explicitly the languages I know. I do suppose that a lot of people haven't set their languages, and the automatic detection works well enough, most of the time.

brigandish4y ago

I’m learning Japanese and I’ve had a very similar experience... although I haven’t noticed the Chinese results, which is surely a result of my slow progress! (o_0)

junar4y ago

In my experience, the Chinese results tend to happen when the entire query is in kanji. Queries that have at least some kana generally aren't an issue. If it doesn't make sense to use kana, then I'll sometimes add "site:jp" as a workaround, since most Japanese-language sites do use the .jp TLD.

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