Page translation sometimes does not work
I'm using Firefox from the official Ubuntu repository (packages.mozilla.org). I have used the (very cool) "translate page" feature successfully, but for some reason it doesn't seem to work on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NL:Basisregistratie_Adressen_en_Gebouwen which I'd like translated to English. Even though Firefox thinks the page was translated, only one of the headings seems to be in English.
I would like to understand how to troubleshoot this and help you improve this great feature. Thank you in advance.
All Replies (4)
I should have added (sorry, the interface is not allowing me to edit my post) that I have tried with a "clear restart" of the browser without any plugins enabled, as well as opening that page with no specific container, and the behaviour was exactly the same. So I don't believe this is a plugins/configuration issue. Besides, I can translate other pages just fine, and about:translations#src=detect also works well.
Thank you for the bug report.
This page has the following HTML code under the hood:
<div class="..." lang="en" dir="ltr"><p> De <b>Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG)</b> is een landelijk register van alle gemeentelijke basisinformatie omtrent adressen en gebouwen. Het is een uitvloeisel van de Wet basisregistraties adressen en gebouwen van 2008. De BAG-viewer geeft een visuele indruk van het bestand. Er is zelfs een officieel filmpje op YouTube: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_YmHUqAROo">De BAG in 5 minuten</a>.
While this is currently expected behavior in Firefox to trust the lang attribute (the website itself is configured incorrectly with lang="en"), perhaps we could do a better job of running our language detector on nodes that have these attributes to get a second opinion.
We already do some double checking if the lang attribute is on the top-level <html> tag. We likely could extend this to check other nodes more specifically.
Not sure it's related, but I was also coming to ask about webpages where Firefox Translation oddly doesn't want to work.
In my case, I've found several pages where the Translate button doesn't appear in the address bar, and trying to manually start Translation from the menu results in message "Sorry, we don't support translations from this language yet". Even when the language is one perfectly supported.
An example is (sorry, it's "commercial") https://rent.decathlon.cz
Why?
Aaah, because the authors are funny bunch. ‹html lang="cz"› … Czech is "cs", not "cz", so they declare the page to be in an nonexistent language.
If you, like in the thread above, select any amount of the text on that page, or paste it into a separate translations tab, it will pick up Czech correctly and translate it.
Equally, the error in the translate panel will give you the option to manually pick the source language for that page, and if you select Czech in there, it succeeds:
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