1905387 - Translations button is shown although translations from that language are disabled

Status: NEW

(Firefox for Android :: Translations, defect, P3)

Description

[Alejandro]

Steps to reproduce:

My phone's (and therefore Firefox's) language is not English, but I talk it.
I disabled translations from English (on the settings button on the popup, the "Never translate from English" switch) and visited a website in English.

Actual results:

The translation button (not the full popup) is still shown on the awesomebar on English pages.

Expected results:

The translation button shouldn't show on the bar on English pages.

Desktop doesn't show the button for this case, and I'd expect the mobile one not to either because the (Spanish) text for the option says it "cancels translation offers" (likely a bad translation on my side by trying to make it too literal).

This is quite problematic on my phone given it's quite small and it takes quite a lot of space, way more when the reader button is also there, leaving barely 10 characters visible, and a good percentage of websites I visit are in English.

Comment 1

[Olivia Hall [:olivia]]

Hi Alejandro,

Thank you for reporting this bug!

Desktop doesn't show the button for this case, and I'd expect the mobile one not to either because the (Spanish) text for the option says it "cancels translation offers" (likely a bad translation on my side by trying to make it too literal).

I think the reason Desktop does not show the translations button on the toolbar in this case is because English might also be in the list of preferred languages. If you go to Browser Menu -> Settings -> Search "Language". There should be a drop-down that says "Choose your preferred languages for displaying pages". If English is listed there, then the translations icon won't appear on Desktop. Firefox will consider that as a language the user if familiar with and not show the icon.

When I select "Never Translate French" on an English Desktop app, with nothing in my "preferred languages", I still see the icon, but if I add "French" to the list of "preferred languages", then I no longer see the icon.

(I copied a Desktop engineer as well, so he can chime in as well if this assumption is fully correct.)

As far as I know, Android does not offer this level of granularity to change accept-languages in the regular UI. However, there is a workaround with changing the OS languages.

For a workaround:
To get similar behavior on Android OS, if you add "English" to the list of preferred system languages, it should give you similar behavior and not show the icon. Android settings -> Search "language" -> Select "Languages and Input" -> Preferred Language -> "Add a Language" -> Add "English". Once English is added, reorder the languages in your order of preference. By doing this, it will indicate to Firefox that English is a known user language, and it won't put the icon on the toolbar.

This is quite problematic on my phone given it's quite small and it takes quite a lot of space, way more when the reader button is also there, leaving barely 10 characters visible, and a good percentage of websites I visit are in English.

Yes, I can see this could be quite problematic! I'll copy a few UI/UX experts on this bug to help raise visibility to this issue. Would you mind sharing a screenshot, so we can review this scenario from a design perspective as well?

Right now, there are only translation settings to directly control "offering" (by "offering" we meen the popup, not showing on the toolbar icon). Not showing the icon on the toolbar is implicitly decided.

Comment 2

[Alejandro]

Attachment: Translate + Reader toggles on my screen

Comment 3

[Alejandro]

Yes, I do have English in accepted languages on desktop, was going to mention that but I thought the offering part was more important because of how I understood it at the time.

I've attached a screenshot with both translate and reader buttons now.

Thanks for the workaround, I didn't know you could select multiple languages in Android for the whole system!