translation from Japanese -> Russian breaks the font

[mitchell228]

web translation nicovideo.jp works fine on the main page except the ui and video pages. Russian text becomes extremely wide. This doesn't happen in English. I already tried disabling the cache.

[vitonsky]

It looks the problem is site uses font that does not work well with target language.
Linguist change pages as minimal as possible by its design. This is why Linguist do not change fonts.

Do you have ideas how robust solution could look like?

[mitchell228]

none yet. Chrome's built-in translator works without this problem.

[vitonsky]

@mitchell228 share some example page to debug a problem.

Also share name and version of your OS and browser where this problem occurs.

[mitchell228]

every video page.
win 10 22H2 and google chrome

disabling font-family helps, but I don’t know how to save this state

and to break the fonts on the main\search page, disable it

html {
    font-family: "メイリオ", "Meiryo", verdana, "ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3", "Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro", Osaka, "ＭＳ Ｐゴシック", "MS PGothic", Sans-Serif;

[vitonsky]

I've tried to reproduce behaviour on win11 and latest chrome on page https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm45547186

It seems embedded chrome translator makes changes in DOM. It wraps text nodes via font tags

This approach is dangerous for page consistency, since may lead to layout shifts and to complete page destruction.

However your use case show us the trade off - do not interrupt in page design and make translated text unreadable or change page design and risk to break web page, but try to make text readable for user.

The second option actually more dangerous than it sounds, because we can't ensure the text will render fine in all cases and pages. We will have a lot of bugs like "On site X it does not work" plus new bugs like "Linguist breaks the layout on YouTube" and similar.

The potential solution could be to introduce an option like "Allow to change web pages". This option would be disabled by default. When user will enable this option, Linguist would change HTML and CSS on page for translated segments.

Specifically this option would be useful to

• Override a font family
• Override a text direction style (rtl or ltr depends on target language features)

If we would introduce such button would be nice to introduce some discovery mechanism for end users, to prevent confusion. For example Linguist could detect problems on page and suggest to enable this feature on page (difficult in implementation) or we could add some checkbox in popup with page translation.

User would click popup and see a checkbox "Allow to change web pages" beside the "Translate page" button.

[mitchell228]

NicoVideo Font-2025-11-02.user.js

generated all sorts of nasty things using AI. script for Tampermonkey, somehow it works and ok