Thu Apr 30 08:53:35 AM CEST 2026

Stop Secretly Translating the Web

I have been anxiously tracking a UPS package for the past two weeks. To make a long story short, I have been waiting for a package to clear customs and escape UPS warehouse hell, all while trying to fix its delivery address, so I don't have to travel from Trondheim to Stavanger to pick it up. When the tracker started updating with the same information every day, "Warehouse scan, Oslo Norway", I started worrying if there was something wrong.

So, I did what most people do when they want to find some (hopefully) real human made content on the web,¹ and searched for "UPS på lager reddit".² The results seemed promising, plenty of people with the same experience as me, also people from Norway. I wonder how long their packages were stuck in Oslo. Does it mean they are clearing it with customs? Would calling customer service result in any of my questions being answered?

I start reading a post, but after a minute of reading I start noticing signs that I just got epically pranked. One person talking about their packages always getting stuck at the Louisville terminal, another explaining how their packages always get delivered the same day or the next day if it's not "from out of state". I look at the URL to confirm my suspicions. I'm on the UPS subreddit, being served a page fully translated from English to Norwegian. Search result snippet, title, post, and comments, all automatically translated.

This has been a grievance of mine for some time now. I get served automatically translated YouTube titles, Reddit posts, SEO slop websites, even YouTube videos get automatic machine translated audio tracks. These translations are always annoying, but they are especially frustrating whenever I am trying to find information that is specifically Norwegian. If you are from the US you probably don't have to think about it often, but the default assumption that us foreigners have to make is that most content on the web is US-specific. This can be annoying, but it's also understandable and predictable. I have navigated the internet with this knowledge my whole life, and if I ever needed to access some Norway-specific information, I would just search for it in Norwegian.

But, this rubric no longer works as it used to. Now you have to be on the lookout for sites luring you into clicking their automatically translated posts. Reddit is a big offender of this. I expect most websites that pop up from a search to be LLM generated garbage, so who cares if they also translate it, but there is something about translating user-submitted content on a forum site feels especially gross.

I don't dislike translation of content on the internet. In fact, I often use it to access information in languages that I don't read, be it a French article, or a Chinese forum post. I can also imagine that it is a necessity for people browsing the web that don't know English. What I don't like is when it is done without asking me, especially when there is no clear way of telling that it is translated!

Theoretically, both Reddit and YouTube allow you to disable their automatic translation dis-service.³ That is until they randomly reset your preference, change its location / implementation, or simply remove it in the future. If the web was a nice place, all of this would be handled at the browser level, where each person could decide when and what to translate. Most browsers can already do this today, and Google Translate has been able to translate websites for over 20 years. But, the great minds in Silicon Valley have also decided to build it directly into their websites,⁴ in the most annoying way possible. Hopefully all of this will get better eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.

1. Norwegian for "UPS in warehouse reddit".↩
2. Sadly, even this trick will probably stop working at some point due to the large influx of LLM generated content. I have already stopped trusting reviews of products on Reddit.↩
3. If you actually don't want to see automatically translated Reddit posts, they don't seem to work on old.reddit.com. Even when you add the translate query parameter, e.g. ?tl=fr, it is just ignored. As for search results, using duckduckgo or SearXNG both don't seem to give these crappy translated Reddit results. The only reason I was getting them was because I was using Google search on my phone, which I have now replaced with my SearXNG instance.↩
4. Probably to get in front of more people on search engines, but what isn't about fighting for your attention on the modern web.↩