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Bad UX when swithcing languages

Open eric-burel opened this issue 2 years ago • 4 comments

Hi, I just wanted to share with you the problematic workflow I encounter:

  • I access React docs, eg to read about ErrorBoundaries
  • I get redirected to the French version automatically
  • However, the translation of technical conept is actually more confusing than helpful when you are used to work in English. For instance "Périmètres d'erreur": it's nice to have an intelligible French translation of course, but "Perimètre" and "Boundary" have nothing in common and might be actually hard to find more documentations in English afterward. Another use case: I want to share this piece of docs to React beginner on Discord or elsewhere so I need the English version
  • I switch to English via the locale switcher
  • I get redirected to the home page :(
  • I have trouble finding the page back since the URL is also translated

This workflow could be vastly improved by simply keeping the current page when we switch languages

eric-burel avatar May 19 '22 07:05 eric-burel

You can switch to react english site very easily. All you have to do is replace https://fr.reactjs.org/ with https://reactjs.org/ in the URL.

Also if you think the French translation is confusing feel free to raise a issue and PR here https://github.com/reactjs/fr.reactjs.org/

I have trouble finding the page back since the URL is also translated

This shouldn't happen? The URLs are not translated generally. Can you share a translated URL so that we can have a look into that?

harish-sethuraman avatar May 19 '22 08:05 harish-sethuraman

Yeah sorry I didn't describe the workflow quite right:

  • Indeed the the URL is not translated so you can change the URL
  • However usually you'll click on "languages" and hit a list of language, but at that point precisely you lose the page. You would need a "?from=the-page" query param for instance I answer a lot of questions and check the docs often so it can quickly become an issue to change the URL everytime

eric-burel avatar May 19 '22 11:05 eric-burel

I strongly second the OP. The localization in this form is a massive setback in using the website. The Hungarian translation is most probably not even remotely interested to the vast majority of Hungarian developers, and the way the sentence structures are mirrored into Hungarian makes it painful to read. The language chooser should keep me on the same page, and the preferred language should be persisted in a cookie.

sarimarton avatar Jun 16 '22 07:06 sarimarton

The Hungarian translation is most probably not even remotely interested to the vast majority of Hungarian developers, and the way the sentence structures are mirrored into Hungarian makes it painful to read.

You can add suggestions regarding Hungarian translation here https://github.com/reactjs/hu.reactjs.org/

The language chooser should keep me on the same page, and the preferred language should be persisted in a cookie.

@gaearon thoughts?

harish-sethuraman avatar Jun 16 '22 12:06 harish-sethuraman