Html – Why does Chrome incorrectly determine page is in a different language and offer to translate

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The new Google Chrome auto-translation feature is tripping up on one page within one of our applications. Whenever we navigate to this particular page, Chrome tells us the page is in Danish and offers to translate. The page is in English, just like every other page in our app. This particular page is an internal testing page that has a few dozen form fields with English labels. I have no idea why Chrome thinks this page is Danish.

Does anyone have insights into how this language detection feature works and how I can determine what is causing Chrome to think the page is in Danish?

Best Answer

Update: according to Google

We don’t use any code-level language information such as lang attributes.

They recommend you make it obvious what your site's language is. Use the following which seems to help although Content-Language is deprecated and Google says they ignore lang

<html lang="en" xml:lang="en" xmlns= "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="google" content="notranslate">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">

If that doesn't work, you can always place a bunch of text (your "About" page for instance) in a hidden div. That might help with SEO as well.

EDIT (and more info)

The OP is asking about Chrome, so Google's recommendation is posted above. There are generally three ways to accomplish this for other browsers:

W3C recommendation: Use the lang and/or xml:lang attributes in the html tag:
```
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en" xmlns= "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
```
UPDATE: previously a Google recommendation now deprecated spec although it may still help with Chrome. : meta http-equiv (as described above):
```
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
```

Use HTTP headers (not recommended based on cross-browser recognition tests):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 10:46:04 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Language: en

Exit Chrome completely and restart it to ensure the change is detected. Chrome doesn't always pick up the new meta tag on tab refresh.

Related Solutions

Google-chrome – How to specify your webpage’s language so Google Chrome doesn’t offer to translate it

Google Chrome currently requires several tags to make an (HTML5) document opt out of translation. Before doing this, you should be sure that you know your audience's language, as otherwise it will prevent foreign sites from properly translating your site.

The relevant tags are:

<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta name="google" content="notranslate" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en_US" />

And here is a full example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="google" content="notranslate" />
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en_US" />
 </head>
 <body>
  Dies ist ein Test Deutsch
 </body>

R – check if a user allows the app to use their location

Your first call to get the user's location will fail with an error which tells you the user has denied location services. Your CLLocationManagerDelegate method didFailWithError will be called, as below. (The constants are defined in CLError.h)

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager*)aManager didFailWithError:(NSError*)anError
{
    switch([anError code])
    {
    case kCLErrorLocationUnknown: // location is currently unknown, but CL will keep trying
    break;

    case kCLErrorDenied: // CL access has been denied (eg, user declined location use)
    message = @"Sorry, flook has to know your location in order to work. You'll be able to see some cards but not find them nearby";
    break;

    case kCLErrorNetwork: // general, network-related error
    message = @"Flook can't find you - please check your network connection or that you are not in airplane mode";
    }
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Google-chrome – How to specify your webpage’s language so Google Chrome doesn’t offer to translate it

R – check if a user allows the app to use their location

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