Olga:
Google services many no longer work. Sites are methodically blocked.
That might be one reason why you believe that the "West" is 30 years behind Russia. You've bought your government's propaganda and you're unable to check for yourself whether it is true.
They want to leave only the Runet, they follow the example of North Korea.
It sounds like Russia is 30 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to basic human rights.
I understand that the people are not the government. But you all let this happen.
I am interested in something else: it seems to be believed that in the West everything is advanced in the field of various technologies and services. But then why did our Russian Yandex take care of its users so that they do not have to translate foreign texts themselves, and no one else has such a function?
Clearly, all of us can translate your posts just fine. But when there's one person posting, it should not be necessary for 30 other people to all have to independently translate that person's posts. The polite thing to do would be for that one person to translate once and post in the language that everybody else is using.
I don't believe that it's beyond your ability to do that.
Some kind of Middle Ages are happening there in the West.
You really need to get out more. Do they let you out?
Okay, you don't want to see a Russian, but what if tomorrow a Chinese person writes to you in his language, or someone else?
Then we'll tell her the same thing we're telling you.
If I was going to post on a discussion board where all the participants used Mandarin, then I would have the courtesy to translate my posts into Mandarin before posting.
Yandex, if I'm not mistaken, has 67 built-in languages that translate automatically, and you don't have a single one.
I'm confident that plugins or similar exist that would allow automatic translation on all of the most commonly-used web browsers.
Your browser is set up to translate into Russian automatically by default because Russian is, comparatively, a little-used language on the internet. Most of the pages you see from outside Russia will not be in Russian.
In yandex, it is possible to change the target language for automatic translation. By default, the target language in Russia is Russian, unsurprisingly.
And you reproach me for having to translate my texts.
No. We reproach you because you refuse to use the language that practically everybody else on this forum uses, thus creating extra work for anybody who wants to read your posts.
That's poor etiquette, Olga. Don't you realise that?
But the world has changed in three decades. Now people communicate more with each other, travel more to different countries, and it turns out that the West is 30 years behind the rest of the world in this area.
It sounds like you have some delusions about "the West".
Here, you have an opportunity to learn some things about what "the West" is actually like, from people who live there. Why not take the opportunity to expand your horizons a little? Connect with some facts, rather than just propaganda.
You don't have to be constantly trying to prove that Russia is superior to "the West", Olga. We understand that your people are in a difficult situation at the moment. Most of us hope that you can get yourselves out of it, eventually. In the meantime, those of us who are lucky enough to live in countries that do not censor the internet are able to look around and compare nations based on facts we can find for ourselves, rather than based on what our governments tell us. In many cases, we can even visit other nations and see for ourselves.
You've been reading this forum for long enough to have picked up that nobody here believes that "the West" is perfect. Most of us here (but not all) think that the US government is on the wrong track at the moment and that its President is a criminal. But such problems are fixable in the West.
In addition, I noticed that the English that users use on this site is significantly different from the English that we were taught in school. I believe that we were taught literary English, and there is a lot of slang, various specific words and expressions, and without the AI, which knows and understands all these subtleties, I would hardly understand you.
I am also sure that you use slang and figures of speech in your writing that are unfamiliar to us and sometimes inaccurately translated. Online translators are far from perfect.
Apart from some basics of the alphabet, I personally know almost no Russian, so I can't compare the Russian that is taught in my country to the Russian that is spoken in yours. However, I did learn French at school and I am aware that the French I was taught back then was more formal than the French that is commonly spoken in Francophone countries around the world. When I watch French films or TV, I don't understand everything that is being said, although I can often follow parts of what is said. Generally, I do much better reading French texts, which usually have far less slang and figures of speech and shorthand contructions in them than the spoken language typically has.