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andaitoday at 1:41 AM3 repliesview on HN

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak).

So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please."

I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Time to fix it but it's still there.


Replies

jahllertoday at 6:52 AM

> If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

not necessarily. i often prompt Claude in German and then see the reasoning happening in English. of course it will eventually reply in German, but that does not mean that the tooling in the background was using German.

lobochrometoday at 6:33 AM

Same for me - I mostly ask stuff in English but sometimes add specific terms or names in Japanese as needed. My Japanese is intermediate, but it will often switch immediately and reply only and entirely in Japanese. I'm pretty sure they have a system prompt with hairline triggers for foreign languages BECAUSE of the overrepresentation of English in the training corpora.

apple2026today at 2:49 AM

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