I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.
I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.
The parent comment is essentially correct that translations of the same material into different languages represent different views of the same data. A human translator must put in quite a bit of effort establishing what underlying situation is being described by a stretch of language.
Machine translations don't do this; they attempt to map one piece of language to another piece of (a different) language directly.
ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details
For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine.
Translations seem to be similar in that regard.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
By the way, the name of the river translates to “River of the Old Ladies”. I don’t know where the label got the 28 from!
"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.