That is one of my biggest annoyances. - Bret Taylor

Prediction based on usage? - Jeremy Dunck

BTW, I bookmarked http://translate.google.com/transla... for that reason. - Bret Taylor

Good point. It could have taken the destination language from browser preferences too (I hate it when they - Google products - do it, but they do it for interface language sometimes anyway) - בייַ מיר ביסטו שיין

@bret: Thanks for the tip! - בייַ מיר ביסטו שיין

@Alex - Isn't that the point of browser preferences, though? - Scott of Two Countries

Maybe Detect Language is resource intensive and they do it to reduce overhead. - Daniel Shaw

When I asked someone on the team, they said it was because there were still some issues with language detection in a few cases, so they were staying with the most popular language pair as default. - Alex Power

I guess it's related to usage as others said, as for myself most of the times I used Google Translate was for Spanish to English. - Amit Morson

@maplestar: Scott, in the ugly situations when one's forced to bump Russian prio to be able to write Cyrillic e-mails via Outlook WebAccess, and gets 'localized' web sites as a side effect - I'm not sure it's quite THAT point people had in mind when developing the whole idea :) - בייַ מיר ביסטו שיין

They could at least save the most recent language pair in a cookie (or provide an option to do that). - Ionut

@bleys @onu ditto - I'm tired already to switch all time from de-facto standard in California to my local Scandinavian-to-English/Russian needs :-/ - A.T.

saved bookmark...thanks Bret! - Susan Beebe

I hate this and I speak Spanish. - Adriana

Even if detect language is buggy (which it certainly is with short queries) it should go to the last language used. I live in a German speaking country and the "most popular" pair is irrelevant. I need german to english every time. - Kenny Stoltz from twhirl

Plus some translation really hurt my eyes! "Likes" ---> "Gustos"??? WTF?! - Jordi Soler

Que? - Chris Loft

Easy to change: I will decipher the meanings. http://translate.google.com/transla.... Click on link or you will not see what I'm talking about. ...hl=en (choices text in English); ...sl=en (From English); ...=ru# (To Russian). Bookmark this page. I love the swap button. - Bob

Mine defaults to detect language. - Sam Pullara

@bret That was a great tip. Just the other day I was trying to figure out what the heck language this piece of text was in. - Ted Gilchrist

The translate buttons default to "any => yours" (useful): http://translate.google.com/transla.... - Michael Herf

My least favorite translate behavior: if you accidentally try to translate something from, say, English to English, translate will give you an error, rather than just redirecting to the page. So punitive. - Michael Herf

Welcome to Texas :D - Josh Haley from iPhone

mine defaults to french, we-weeee - chaz2b

Fried Babelfish: Don't let the name fool you, it uses Google Translate. Defaults to detect language -> English, but source is included and if you feel like changing it you can. Has 2 tabs, so you can have 2 language pairs ready for translating back & forth between 2 languages without having to keep switching the settings. http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums... - April Russo (app103)