17 ms·

Stop Guessing Languages Based on IP Address

308 points by kristopolous 10y ago

homero 10y ago
Last time I couldn't even find a way to get back to Google.com. It was constant redirects.
- jsnell 10y ago
  https://google.com/ncr https://google.com/ncr (ncr == no country redirect). It'll also set a cookie that'll prevent the redirects in the future.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    Except that somehow it doesn't work reliably. This problem hits me every time, I know about /ncr, so I visit it, and then it works for a while. Until it doesn't. It's beyond frustrating.
    - slig 10y ago
      https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com seems to work better than /ncr for me
  - bhrgunatha 10y ago
    Google stopped respecting 'ncr' quite a long time ago. If it does still work for you it's a lucky coincidence. I've used ncr previously but it stopped working.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Query in Duck Duck Go, add a "!g" somewhere for it to query Google.
makecheck 10y ago
Whenever you travel far away, it’s a good idea to “pre-Google” a few important things and physically store the results. And, install a translation app. You just never know if your connection will be reliable or reinterpreted in some way. It is also useful to have a blocker because occasionally you can deal with problems by blocking offending domain references. For instance, pages might “not load” due to font server access issues but realistically you can kill those and see the page anyway.
4ad 10y ago
Google is very bad at this but some sites are much worse. There are sites which plain refuse to speak English to me at any costs. No option, no nothing. Some sites insist that if I do business with them, I must do through the local website. Fine, I can buy from your German website... if you speak to me in English. There is zero reason to assume that if you force me to use your German website I speak German. No reason whatsoever. Look, if you want to have region specific websites, go for it, even though I will hate it. Just don't redirect me to the one you think I need. Let me make the choice. And especially don't do it if there's no way for me to get back to the one I wanted in the first place (looking at you Osprey). And if you force me to use your region specific website don't assume that everyone who is forced to visit your German website speaks German. It's also frustrating that automatic browser translation very often breaks the checkout process (not to mention the privacy aspect of it). Of course the nail in the coffin is when a region specific website won't work with a credit card that is outside that region. Although usually that happens in the United States, where fortunately website do speak English but won't take my European credit cards. This is all very simple, if you do nothing at all, you don't fuck up the user experience. It's great. Every little helpful "improvement" you make is a mistake.
- slig 10y ago
  Udacity, for instance, doesn't let me choose English anymore and is very frustrating.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
MatthewWilkes 10y ago
There are a few bad implementations of Accept Language parsing out there too. BrowseHappy is one, it gets the weighting wrong and displays the wrong language a lot.
Mark2Moore 10y ago
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photon-torpedo 10y ago
For Google, I often find myself smuggling a "hl=en" into the query parameters. This works on almost all Google services, and is quicker than finding out where the language switcher is hidden in the UI.
- bhrgunatha 10y ago
  I've been complaining about this for a long time now. I wrote a small greasemonkey script to add hl=en to all except a select few google locations. They are the most egregious. Unfortunately for us the industry has chosen to go with IP address determines language and it's getting more and more common. I DO have accept language configured in my browser and I also DO understand that statistically many people's browsers are mis-configured. NO. I'm not leaving my browsers logged in to every site in the internet. We'll forever be tilting at windmills.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- superasn 10y ago
  Not sure if it works now but by just visiting https://www.google.com/ncr https://www.google.com/ncr is enough to disable all localization settings instantly.
  - quantum_magpie 10y ago
    Not all of their pages support the ncr. For example maps.google.com/ncr 404's. And without the /ncr I get redirected to .co.jp where there is no visible option to change the language unless I sign in.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    No, that localizes to American, with useless, stupid Fahrenheit and miles. Another common problem.
  - frik 10y ago
    /ncr stopped working in Dec 2015. Google broke it, and hasn't fixed it. They new parameters that do the same thing are a lot longer :( http://searchengineland.com/google-ncr-no-country-redirection-feature-stop-working-but-google-may-bring-it-back-239381 http://searchengineland.com/google-ncr-no-country-redirectio... Despite the positive worded arricle, apparently Google hasn't brougt /ncr back yet.
cooper12 10y ago
Does anyone else find it a bit problematic that documentation, which should mainly be descriptive, is taking an ideological stance? It's one thing to describe known bugs around an implementation, but reading the MDN docs on accept-header, it's pretty clearly advocating against using accept-header. How can a web-reference justify recommending against standards? I understand it's not meant as the canonical reference doc, but that's pretty much how it ends up being used and I think Mozilla should be more conscious of the position of its docs. (I personally find MDN much easier on the eyes and useful with its compatibility tables and examples)
- kristopolous 10y ago
  Although not obvious, MDN is a wiki with a pretty level-headed and healthy community. I've done numerous edits that were well-received so I say feel free to change it.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    Ah, that is a reasonable suggestion. I would but unfortunately I don't feel technically competent to do so. (I'm more the type of programmer who would rely on MDN rather than write anything on it) It's too bad there's no discussion page like other wikis have. Under the feeback tab in the navbar, there is "report a content problem", but that requires filing a bugzilla. Don't get me wrong, overall I'm quite satisfied with the quality of MDN (it's so much better than w3schools which I was using before), it's just the tone of this particular article.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      MDN articles aren't supposed to be just flat descriptions of "Feature X does Y. To use feature X, place the following code in..." MDN is supposed to be an educational resource that can teach people what different bits of technology are for, when and why they can be used, etc., and so it's appropriate -- if there is a common problem with something -- to mention the problem. And though I didn't write that article (but I did work on MDN's software platform during my time at Mozilla), I largely agree that Accept-Language simply doesn't work, and some other sort of in-page UI is far more reliable. There's a reason why MDN will do content negotiation, but also shows a drop-down of languages an article is available in and uses language identifiers in URLs, after all.
antoineMoPa 10y ago
Polyglot problem: when Google Chrome always asks you to translate the page but you just want to read it in the original language and you are too lazy to disable the popup.
- rochellle 10y ago
  Also, this happens when the page isn't even in a foreign language, but the majority of words are not dictionary words, and there's a sparse overlap of one or two words which statistically correlate with a misspelling of a similar words in some language outside your currently chosen locale.
  - slededit 10y ago
    How often does that happen to you?
- int_19h 10y ago
  Although after you do it a few times, it asks if you want to permanently disable translation for that language.
- laaph 10y ago
  I had this with facebook. I'd like to see things in their original language, but I'm not perfectly fluent in two languages that I'd like to see in their original language, so I have the choice to "autotranslate" or not have a translation button at all. I turned off the autotranslate button because one day I was reading a facebook post that made no sense at all, and it turned out it was a very poor translation and facebook didn't show me the original text. But now, I don't even get the button for translate, even though my spanish isn't the best and sometimes it's very helpful for me. So it goes...
nolemurs 10y ago
So, I may be wrong about this, but my guess is that a lot of non English speakers browsers are not sending the "Accept-Language" header with the correct language. Getting that language right requires configuration that most users can't/won't do, so it's only going to be right if the system defaults do that, and I think it's pretty likely that a lot of users will be getting the wrong language. If the above is true, then it almost certainly makes more sense for these large international sites to just ignore the header and send the correct language for a given country. Some travelers may be inconvenienced, but a much larger number of users will benefit.
- cesarb 10y ago
  Firefox automatically sets the Accept-Language header based on the user interface language (or at least it should; see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640). It's probably the same for other browsers. However, mismatches between the user language and the interface language are probably more common than one would think. Here in Brazil at least, I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    > I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese. I'm curious why. Do users not know how to change the user interface language? Or did they learn how to use the computer from, say, an English reference and are now just accustomed to an English user interface?
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      Short answer: because translations used to suck, especially error messages, so if you had a problem you would end up with an error message that was indecipherable and non-googlable
      - Manishearth 10y ago
exabrial 10y ago
Please, this, yes. That and location. I don't live in St Louis, but Google swears I do and there's no way to change that setting in Google news. I've emailed their product team but they're also never wrong.
- Consultant32452 10y ago
  This may be outdated. I just opened Goole News and on the right hand side just below the weather widget thing there's a place where you can change the location it's providing you news for. Changing the location not only updated the weather widget but also the local news stories.
  - exabrial 10y ago
    Amazingly enough even when you do that, it still insists on showing me 'Local News' from St Louis.
    - moyix 10y ago
      For a long while the only place I could find to change my home location in google was their (now defunct) movie showtimes page :p
- netsharc 10y ago
  Google News detected my location (Munich) and set the local news source to show news from there, but I guess they didn't have any partnerships with the news providers except one that offered real estate market updates. It was amusing in the beginning to read that a big investment company bought some office block, but it annoyed me so I set it to give me news about Saudi Arabia instead, so I can ignore it.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    It’s the same in many places, I get a handful of German sources on Google News, and then only random things that some sports newspaper writes about an athlete from my city, or articles about US towns with the same name.
peterwwillis 10y ago
Counter argument: American sites should try supporting a language other than English. Many EU sites have multiple languages sorted into different flags up at the top of the page. Ours do not.
- sk5t 10y ago
  Like most things, this is ordinarily not done when the economics do not appear to support doing it.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  In the US, the local, state, and international language is the same thing.
- toast0 10y ago
  Using flags for language isn't really a great pattern. It kind of works if you only support a few languages, but when you support a lot you get into tough issues where many flags relate to a single language and many languages relate to a single flag. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...
- spacehunt 10y ago
  Please, don't use flags unless you want to bring politics into it.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    its a visual representation of a language that often conveys information to people whom speak an unknown tongue. Given an array of choices people may be able to pick out the graphic quicker.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      Would you like to not be allowed to do business in China? All you have to do is use the flag of the Republic of China to indicate traditional Chinese. Use names of languages, localized into those languages, for the selection. Or if you must save space, use two-letter language codes.
watter 10y ago
Google Maps also does something like this. Open a maps tab in Winnipeg and it will show you downtown Calgary if the ISP is Shaw Communications. Twitter even started recommending I follow former Prime Minister Stephen Harper because he represented a Calgary riding. I don't live in either of these cities.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Also, however you discover my language, don't autotranslate your contents into it if you don't have a translation (and worse, hide the way to disable it). If I can't read anything you have, I'll ask my browser to translate, you don't need to bother.
- nraynaud 10y ago
  Haha, the MS C# docs are just infuriating. There are things I absolutely don't want to see translated, and language docs are one of those.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Keep in mind that in many cases, translation isn't done because the market demands it, but rather because either the country laws, or government regulations for software sold to the public sector do.
    - netsharc 10y ago
      Some apps and sites, like iTunes Store, do this with the license agreement, since they like to pretend the document has legal power, it has to be presented in one of the country's officially recognised languages. So like the article, someone only understanding English in Germany signing up for iTunes has to accept a legal agreement in a language they don't understand...
- Manishearth 10y ago
  Oh god. Yeah. You know how YouTube sometimes asks you questions instead of an ad? I once got a super shitty romanized one in my language. The romanization was atrocious. It might have been the "official" way to romanize things, but nobody in India uses that, so it's not useful like that. It was a shitty machine romanization of a shitty machine translation. It took me a minute to even understand wtf was going on. To me, it was gibberish and it wanted an action from me, so I was stuck staring at it. I realized it was some Indic language, but I wasn't even sure which for a while, that's how bad it was. It took me like five minutes to decipher it. It contained crap like "vhid'io" (video) and "sa'ina apa" (sign up), which are English words transliterated into Marathi and then back, for some stupid reason. Whoever made that had no idea whatsoever what they were doing. Romanizations are not preferred in India. People may use them whilst chatting but that's just because learning a new keyboard is hard. These romanizations are significantly different and more readable. All speakers of the language who can read romanizations can read the script, so the script is very much preferred. This was in Mumbai, where plenty of folks do not even speak that language. While Google may have guessed my language from the fact that it knows everything, I've noticed YouTube showing Marathi ads on anyone's computer in Mumbai, so it probably was a geolocation based decision.
einrealist 10y ago
What I also hate are recommendations based on my IP / location without any chance of changing it. The example that bugs me most: Spotify. Why can't I just pick a country and get recommendations for it?!
- jbg_ 10y ago
  I have basically the reverse problem. I happened to set my Spotify account up when I was in Germany, and all my recommendations are forever for Germany and in German, no matter where I am, with no option to change it.
ziikutv 10y ago
Thanks! For fuck sakes, using VPNs sometimes is a pain in the butt due to localization. Edit: Although I understand localization is important, but perhaps we should favor English - an international language - over a localized one. Of course, one would say, it being international does not mean well adopted. Perhaps, we can use some sort of constants to assume a Country's acceptability of English and first make English the first choice; having localization as an option. Interesting Anecdote: When I was a tiny little kid in India, we were forced to use the English version of Google so that we learn English as well as Computers at the same time. Sure Localization is more user friendly (and hence I understand it being there) but it is not a standard. After not surfing the web (or visiting other pages), 99% [1] of the applications/programs on the computer are not localized. [1]: Bullshit number.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > 99% [1] of the applications/programs on the computer are not localized. I just took a survey of the apps in my dock - 8 out of 12 third party apps are localized into the UI language of my computer (Japanese). This is on the Mac though, things might be more dire on Windows.
  - ziikutv 10y ago
    Dire indeed.
Manishearth 10y ago
No, not everyone who uses browsers will actually go through settings and deal with this. Plenty of folks run browsers without the default language changed (it's a nontrivial procedure!), and they'd likely not look for the language tweaking UI. The browser UI language isn't actually too important -- all the important buttons these days are icons. The language you see Google in is more important. Some UX could certainly be designed around this. Google could default to Accept-Language and say "Did you want Google in Language X" (in the IP detected language) in a bubble, with a link that triggers the language-setting UI (somehow). Or it could default to IP detection with an API for the reverse. The current situation of far too many people sending flawed `Accept-Language "en-US,en;q=0.5"` headers will have to be worked around somehow. Google already suggests English when it detects that you've changed the language you use (I'm not sure if it suggests english when you are logged out and switch locations, or if it perhaps suggests whatever your Accept-Language is)
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  I try to avoid Chrome but in the past I've used it to search with Google. I'll get "local" Spanish language results which Chrome then promptly offers to translate to English.
- nv-vn 10y ago
  Imagine if the first time you opened your browser it had a big grid of flags/languages to choose from. This would be trivial to get users the right Accept-Language. You could even have it do this every time you open the browser if the computer is used by multiple people.
  - spacehunt 10y ago
    You are assuming the site would remember what language the users have told it to use. YouTube, even after all these years, forgets this every 3 days, even when I'm still logged in. But it doesn't forget what ads to shove to me though.
    - int_19h 10y ago
bluerobotcat 10y ago
When visiting websites from Belgium, one frequently occurring annoyance is that websites will serve you content in French. This happens even when you're in the Dutch speaking region (this should be easy to detect since the ISPs are different between regions). It's frustrating because many Dutch speakers can understand English better than French. It would even happen for websites that support English, French, and Dutch, such as Skype.com (can't test if it's still happening though).
- hyperman1 10y ago
  Seconded. Country is probably (but hard to guess) 55% Dutch,35% French, 5% German, 5% Other , and language is a sensitive topic. English has become some sort of neutral zone. Even so, lots of sites have a 'they'll speak french and like it' attitude, sometimes even without a way to switch to even English.
xmichael99 10y ago
I've lived in Costa Rica for 10+ years, yes I speak spanish fluently, but I would much much prefer to read the site in english. My favorite is Dell.com, wow they fight so hard to send me to dell.cr, even when I use a VPN they've gone out of their way to pay for services to redirect me to Dell.CR..
- averagewall 10y ago
  A country specific site isn't the same as a language. Often they're doing business with people from that country. The US site might not be able to trade with somebody in Costa Rica. Different way of accepting money, different laws, etc. The problem there is that each country's site tends to be only in one language. Ideally they would have every combination of language and country, with language being a choice and country not.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    That's great but consider this: I'm a US citizen traveling in Costa-Rica right now and I want to buy a Dell computer that I'm gonna pay in US dollars to be delivered at my home in the US when I get back, now I can't because I'm redirected to the .cr website that has different ways. The issue here is making assumptions on the human and her intention based on the computer and its network supposed location.
Hasknewbie 10y ago
The real sin here is not just the geoIP, but the patronizing "we will decide for you, lowly user" tone of many sites: they do not just inflict you with an arbitrary language, but make it difficult or impossible to undo. If you take an UI decision on the user's behalf, then you acknowledge you could be wrong and always offer an option or drop-down menu (at the top of the page, not hidden anywhere else) to correct it, to me that's just basic UX.
- spacehunt 10y ago
  It gets more condescending than this. For example, nobody treats what we speak here daily as a language at all, and instead shoves what they think we understand down our throat.
kartickv 10y ago
On the topic of language, a problem I have in India is that many OSs, apps and sites don't understand that both "color" and "colour" are okay in India. It's more a question of style whether you use the US or British or US spelling, and I don't want my spell-checker enforcing style. Neither is really wrong, like "colur" would be. macOS, iOS and Android all get this wrong, insisting on "correcting" color to colour. This happens in both native and web apps. I tried to work around this by adding English (US) as a secondary language, which fixes the issue in iOS but not macOS or Android. A couple of other related points: it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane. Another problem with language is that many developers think of I18N as a checklist item to be ticked off. They still use American English like "way to go". Leave the Americanisms out of it, if you want your non-American users to feel welcome, as opposed to, "This isn't for you". Americans will also understand if "way to go" was replaced by "congrats" or "congratulations".
- timr 10y ago
  "it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane." Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious. In Japan, the romaji/english and the native map indexes seem to be entirely disjoint (and partially incomplete) sets of data. If your language is english you can search for things by name in romaji and find them, but not find them when searching in hiragana or kanji! The opposite also occurs (searching for things that have english names is frequently problematic). They also do terrifically irritating things like rendering map kanji at microscopic sizes, then re-rendering them smaller when you (silly user!) have zoomed the map to make them big enough to read. And the design of the trip-planner interface is so confusing as to be borderline unusable.
  - csydas 10y ago
    > Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious. Google's handling of the language issue in general is pretty atrocious. On my iPhone which is too old for any plugins and such on Mobile Safari, I can't do an image search quickly without a modal popping up and asking if I want to switch to English or stay in Russian. (US Expat in Russia, phone is all in english) On my laptop, it doesn't even give me the option to change the language if I'm not logged into Google at the time, even though my laptop is in English as well. It's been a major point of annoyance to not have the ability to really control what languages are served to you when it seems to me that it would be a pretty conscious decision to have your computer in X language when your IP is from a country where X isn't the primary language. The reasons I've heard for using IP instead of Accept-Language just seem like exceptions to the rule rather than the more common rule, but of course I'm just an outsider looking in on this one and don't have any data to really back that. And to have it absolutely every time on my phone (no cache clearing) is also frustrating, regardless of whether I log in or not. It's not even so much about the different expected language; I understand Russian well enough to use the site and different functions. It's getting a nag every single time I want to do a quick search for something that is frustrating and that for everything else that gets stored about my browsing habits that they can't seem to remember that the last 30 times they asked me, I switched to English because I wanted results in English. Why a simple toggle like DuckDuckGo has isn't used is beyond me as well. The site language is english, if I want russian local results, I just toggle the region switch for Russia at the top. Or I can isolate where I want my targeted results from. It just seems like a huge oversight from Google on this one that should absolutely be something they don't falter on.
sulam 10y ago
In the last three weeks I've been in five different countries and each time this happened with every major site. Super frustrating! Thankfully this is an aberration and I don't usually travel much. By the way, the time zone situation is even worse -- at least I can usually find an English link. Good luck figuring out if you have a conflict with a meeting scheduled while you're in Romania but you're going to be in Mexico when it happens. It's all manual all the way.
- jbg_ 10y ago
  I don't understand the time zone issue. Even the macOS included Calendar app with time zone support switched on makes this a complete non-issue, and Google Calendar handled it pretty well when I used to use it too. I travel basically continuously, scheduling meetings in multiple time zones all the time, and as long as you enter the correct time zone when creating the event, everything works perfectly.
  - sulam 10y ago
    you have to know what the correct time zone is. That's a manual task.
    - jbg_ 10y ago
      No - on macOS Calendar you just type the city name (or a nearby city).
id122015 10y ago
most annoying is Google News when I dont want local news. Also YouTube
- mrweasel 10y ago
  Most annoying to me is Wikipedia. It is almost never the case that I would prefer the Danish article over the English. Yes, Danish is my native language, but why would I want a 10 line article in Danish, when there's a 5 page article available in English. It's not that I don't appreciate all the hard work the Danish authors put into the articles/translations, but I'm still left with an lower quality because of an assumption made by the Wikipedia site. Of cause the problem is that even being able to weighting my preferred language won't help, because some sites I want in Danish, and some I would prefer to have in English, even if a Danish translation is available.
  - Grue3 10y ago
    Why wouldn't you go straight to en.wikipedia.org? If you use a per-language site, Wikipedia never redirects you.
interfixus 10y ago
Even were it not a matter of privacy and principle, I should be avoiding most of Google for this kind of idiocy. On the rarer and rarer occasions when I am somehow forced into using their services, they invariably insist on force-feeding me my native language, however much I may be running a thoroughly English language computing environment, including an English language browser with a purely English Accept-Language setting. Same went - until recently - for Play Store access in Android, and I believe it still does if I access the Play Store web interface, at least as far as comments are concerned. Google is not the only offender, but by far the worst that I know of. [Typo edited]
vbernat 10y ago
Switzerland has 3 official languages and geoIP is not good enough to determine in which part of Switzerland you are. I always get pages in German despite being in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Even when traveling abroad I get the problem since mobile connections are now tunneled to your home country. In France, I get German pages!
- nift 10y ago
  Sorry if this gets too nitpicky according to Google you officially have 4 :)
  - charriu 10y ago
    While this is technically true, the fourth one is basically on life support. I wouldn't expect to find software or even many websites using it.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      I hope you guys keep it on life support for a little while longer. Dying or not, it has a nice distinctive sound to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtMP7Nw0E3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtMP7Nw0E3g
  - OJFord 10y ago
    > The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian and Romansh. All but Romansh maintain equal status as official languages at the national level within the Federal Administration of the Swiss Confederation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland
    - jwilk 10y ago
      Non-mobile version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland
- 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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martin-adams 10y ago
So in the Google example, if I travel from the UK to Germany with Brisish English as my language. Should I get google.co.uk, or google.de but in English? I can see a few problems, such as some results not having English pages and possibly not being able to use local search.
nottorp 10y ago
It's not only languages. I used to check my weather at weather.com, but they decided to give me weather by default based on my IP address. They remember what locations I checked before, but they don't care and give me the geolocation result first. Guess what, they're getting the country right, but they're a couple hundred kilometers off, which makes the weather information useless. And back to the article topic, I'm in the camp that absolutely hates localized software. Translations are a lot more verbose than English and/or simply sound ridiculous. Please keep your site in English when you present it to me.
bigbugbag 10y ago
"Stop guessing languages based on IP address" misses the target by going a bit too far. IMHO it should be "Stop guessing languages", because that's the root cause of this issue. It stems from making assumptions on the human and her intentions based on the computer settings or network location. We know better than that. Problem is design is made based on metrics and tracking, and things are tailored to the largest user base and the rest is an afterthought. The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. Tackling this in an almost universal way is not that easy and obvious, but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.
- kartan 10y ago
  > Stop guessing languages Thank you. That is it. As the world goes global, who speaks what gets impossible to guess. I had a friend from Barcelona (Spain), that lives in Sweden, temporarily relocated to Shangai. To guess his preferred language is impossible. Sometimes he can prefer to read something in English to send it to colleagues. Other times he is more comfortable reading Spanish, or maybe Catalan. But can also want to read in Chinese, as sometimes it is better to read the original language - even with a very low understanding of it - than to read a really bad translation. > The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. To show every user of your website a long list of languages each time you get a visit is overkilling. I understand that a website will show by default a reasonably guessed language, it is going to work for 90% of your users, but changing to any other language should be fast and easy. The worse I have seen is websites that don't allow you to change the language, so you are trapped for whatever guess they did.
- patrick_haply 10y ago
  > The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags The whole point of the blog was that the browser already has asked the user that question in the sense that it defaults to the system language setting, i.e. the first things you do on a computer when you open it for the first time. > but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website. I don't understand. What you're proposing as a solution (asking visitors their language on first entry) is essentially the fallback scenario for guessing incorrectly. I try to think of the number of different websites I visit and thinking of every single one asking me for a language preference makes me feel not good about using the web. Right now, the worst case scenario is when chrome automatically detects that the website doesn't match my language and gives me a popup asking me if I want to translate.
a_imho 10y ago
Irritating and frankly it is worse experience than not guessing at all. I'm yet to understand why someone puts resources into it. On the other hand I found the best indicator for me is my keyboard settings, I usually want to consume content in the language I'm currently writing, but still far from perfect.
unhammer 10y ago
Oh yes, this is such a nuisance! * When you download Firefox from Norway, you get the Norwegian version, with the right Accept-Language header setting by default. * When you buy a computer with Windows or MacOS in Norway, it's localised to Norwegian – IE/Edge/Safari presumably sets the right Accept-Language header. Linux users get to choose language during install. * Looking at Piwik stats from a site mostly used by people in Norway, I see mostly "Norwegian Bokmål" as Browser Language (10x as much as English). Dominant browsers are 1. Chrome 2. Safari 3. Firefox 4. IE. So the browsers seem to be doing the right thing. So even without fancy UI asking what languages you know, Accept-Language seems to be correctly set (at least for Norwegians). So why are sites using the more complicated and less precise geoip guess?
- shouldbworking 10y ago
  I worked at a place that used neither the header or geo-ip. Multi language capability was a check box for a client and they never specified how it needed to work, so it was implemented in the most haskish way possible. The app was not localizable, it was using an obsolete platform and third party widget library. So.... We made a handler that piped the HTML output to a parser which attempted to identify the visible text on the page and translated it using a dictionary. The only way to choose a language was a small drop down on the top of the page that was always in English, and since it was implemented so badly usually you had to leave and return to the site for the translator to start working(caching issues).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Manishearth 10y ago
  And when you download Firefox from Maharashtra (a state in India), you do not get the Marathi version. It is non trivial to enable Marathi (you need to download a language pack addon, folks who need this may not be technically sound enough or speak enough English to figure this out). Marathi is the 19th most spoken language in the world, with more than 14 times as many speakers as Norwegian. What I say for Firefox was true for all browsers last I checked. So "at least for Norwegians" is correct; this doesn't generalize well at all. To be fair, Google in India defaults to English anyway (it's complicated -- might have been a sensible choice in the past since you could assume that folks who use the net know English, but it is probably exclusionary now that everyone is coming online). But I'm sure what I said for Marathi works for many other languages.
cbit 10y ago
there is more then .de in europe and german is not german for example: you have 3 complete different countrys which all speak german .DE .AT .CH you need to handle taxes, currencys, even some special characters like: ß street = strasse (CH) = straße (DE,AT) until they dont implement "choose youre country" on setup of any browser there will not be a replacement for GEOIP
- int_19h 10y ago
  > until they dont implement "choose youre country" on setup of any browser there will not be a replacement for GEOIP There's "choose your country" on setup of your OS, and your browser is perfectly capable of picking that setting up and communicating it to the browser - there's a standard protocol for that.
planetjones 10y ago
I wrote an article about the very same subject 3 years ago. Little has been done to make it better: http://www.planetjones.co.uk/blog/27-04-2014/web-internationalization-often-inconsistent.html http://www.planetjones.co.uk/blog/27-04-2014/web-internation...
Clownshoesms 10y ago
One single language makes sense. Until we get Teilhard's unity. Or something similar. Or Julian May's. The Pliocene saga was an interesting read I thought.
anothercomment 10y ago
I hate accept language. Google keeps pushing me to the German site, and there seem to be a million places where I might have to configure my computer to make it do the right thing. My OS is actually set to English, so I don't know where the German redirect of Google comes from. What is so difficult about sending me the US site if I go to google.com, and the German site if I go to google.de? That is really the only language selector I need. Likewise, other pages should simply have an explicit URL for another language, that I can memorize if I prefer that language.
- datenwolf 10y ago
  > I hate accept language. Did you actually read the article? Because the whole article is basically a rant about how the non-use of the Accept-Language header is causing the trouble you have.
  - anothercomment 10y ago
    I read the article - it mentions that few people configure their browsers properly. I brought up my personal experience as unpleasant, because of the accept headers. Also it is not obvious how to configure the browser properly. I am German living in Germany, but prefer to do my computing in English. Apparently that confuses any web sites. All I want is to have an English site when I type in google.com. If I want to search in German, I can go to google.de. What could be simpler than that? All the other stuff is confusing and annoying. It's also not really "restful"-ish, is it? I think it would preferable to give the same site as a result of opening an URL, not change it depending on mysterious parameters. How is a non-geek even to find out about the accept-headers? Say I know nothing about Computers, go to Google.com and suddenly I am forwarded to Google.de. How do I solve the problem?
Moeg 10y ago
A great annoyance in Finland is the Google maps enforcing minority language on everyone, a lot of the place names are in Swedish even though app and everything else is in Finnish, there's no option to change this either.
- ekns 10y ago
  Even weirder still, in my experience, is that Google Maps randomly displays the names as Finnish sometimes, and randomly displays them in Swedish other times.
steinuil 10y ago
A bit off-topic, but I'm italian and despite my best efforts to use english as system language on my Windows installation, I still catch some programs using italian. Where do they even get it from? Date and currency formatting settings? Timezone? I'm baffled.
- shouldbworking 10y ago
  Keyboard input language maybe? Is the Italian keyboard layout different?
skummetmaelk 10y ago
The rise of the internet was a great chance at making the world speak a common language, whatever language that might be. Instead we decided to localize it to avoid making people feel uncomfortable. Localization is such a pain in the ass. When you are abroad you always get the the wrong language and many business sites try to force you into using a specific domain that does not even support english. Try reading dell.com in Europe. I see so many people using mac OS and windows localized to their own small language with a few million speakers, making it effectively impossible for them to get support online when googling instructions is impossible because menu items you have to click do not have the same descriptions in different languages. What is even worse is that sites like youtube have started automatically translating video titles into whatever language it thinks I want. Even if the translations were correct, which they never are, why in the world would I want them to be translated? Localization needs to die and it cannot go fast enough.
- keldaris 10y ago
  Not sure why this got downvoted - it's a perfectly valid personal opinion and, albeit expressed rather strongly, doesn't seem to violate any HN guidelines. Have an upvote.
haspok 10y ago
Let's not forget the case of multilingual websites where one version may have significantly less or different content than the other. Example: I visited a Swiss website recently that displayed itself in German by default (I'm in the UK), and also offered an English version with a warning that it is lacking in content and is not up to date. So probably the choice of the language should be a combination of user preference AND website preference.
- atemerev 10y ago
  I live in Geneva, Switzerland, and I am tired of websites automatically switching to German (even Google). Geneva is in the French-speaking part of the country. Switzerland is trilingual. I prefer English, French is also fine, but switching to German while nobody here even speaks it...
  - Merovius 10y ago
    > Switzerland is trilingual. *quadrolingual Don't forget about that pesky Romansh ;)
gkya 10y ago
Maybe browsers should have an initial "choose your languages" popup that shows up after install. Then Accept-Language settings would become more correct and the need for weird guessing games would disappear.
Kenji 10y ago
It's much worse on Xbox One. You have to change your country to something like the USA to be able to even SELECT English (the option doesn't exist for non-English speaking countries). And if you do that you can no longer pay because payment options are locked down by country, so you have to switch back to your original country to buy something. How can Microsoft blunder so horribly? How can anyone even conceive of the idea that people only speak their own language in their country? It is maddening.
Merovius 10y ago
I don't know. I'm annoyed by sites doing that too, but I don't think the author appreciates the complexity of the issue. Two examples: They choose Google search results as an example; but when I'm in the Netherlands, I definitely don't want them to exclude the website of a Restaurant or Tourist attraction from the results, just because I don't speak Dutch. That's what Google Translate is for, after all. On the other hand, when I Google for Recipes, maybe don't show me Dutch results even if I'm in the Netherlands; I might be able to have them translated, but I think there are enough English or German recipes for Tomato Sauce too that wouldn't need to go through this extra layer of indirection. So there definitely is a correlation between language settings and Geography - in some cases. I'm also dissatisfied with Accept-Language. For example, I speak both English and German well enough that there isn't a huge difference in comprehension. If I just set Accept-Language to English and German with q=1, and visit pages of a German, a US and a Spanish University (assuming all three of them have all languages available), they should behave very differently. Now, let's complicate things by throwing politics into the mix; choose the wrong language or show the wrong results and suddenly you are offending one subset of people or the other. Languages, Countries, Politics and Humans in general are inherently messy and complicated. If you see a problem that has to do with any of those and you start a sentence with "just do X", then it is very likely that your Engineering brain is oversimplifying things (and also, FWIW, you are showing your privilege in not having to consider that other people might work very differently).
soneil 10y ago
The problem is that it's surprisingly difficult to make accept-language negotiation actually work (unless users specifically dig into their configuration and make it so, no browser I've tried gets this right out of the box) Lets take a reasonable scenario - the wikipedia articles for Birmingham (UK). In English, the article is as fleshed out as you'd expect, for the second-largest city in the UK. In Slovak, there's a couple of pretty pictures, and two sentences. A user arrives with the header "Accept-Language: sk-SK,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6". Which article to I send them? The 'naive' approach is to send them the two-line summary in Slovak. Their preference is Slovak, I have Slovak, let's do this. Easy. The 'weighted' approach is score my available translations, decide that, eg, my English article has a weight of '1' (it's the best translation of this material I have), my Slovak article has a weight of 0.2 (it's a pretty crap translation). Content weight * User weight gives me 0.8 for my English article (1 * 0.8), and 0.2 (1 * 0.2) for my Slovak article. So I deliver the English article - the user has expressed that English is "pretty good", and I can deliver much better content in English. As a programmer, I love this approach, it saves delivering poor translations to users who don't need them. Now, the reality. The user has sent en_US;q=0.8 not because they speak a single word of English, but because Chrome will by default, send the OS environment as 1st preference, en_US as second, and en as third. Being clever failed. Any time we have to admit that our translations are not made equal, accept-language (or rather, current browsers' default configurations of it) is simply too naive.

308 points by kristopolous 10y ago

homero 10y ago

Last time I couldn't even find a way to get back to Google.com. It was constant redirects.

jsnell 10y ago
https://google.com/ncr https://google.com/ncr (ncr == no country redirect). It'll also set a cookie that'll prevent the redirects in the future.
- 4ad 10y ago
  Except that somehow it doesn't work reliably. This problem hits me every time, I know about /ncr, so I visit it, and then it works for a while. Until it doesn't. It's beyond frustrating.
  - slig 10y ago
    https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com seems to work better than /ncr for me
- bhrgunatha 10y ago
  Google stopped respecting 'ncr' quite a long time ago. If it does still work for you it's a lucky coincidence. I've used ncr previously but it stopped working.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Query in Duck Duck Go, add a "!g" somewhere for it to query Google.

makecheck 10y ago

Whenever you travel far away, it’s a good idea to “pre-Google” a few important things and physically store the results. And, install a translation app. You just never know if your connection will be reliable or reinterpreted in some way. It is also useful to have a blocker because occasionally you can deal with problems by blocking offending domain references. For instance, pages might “not load” due to font server access issues but realistically you can kill those and see the page anyway.

4ad 10y ago

Google is very bad at this but some sites are much worse. There are sites which plain refuse to speak English to me at any costs. No option, no nothing. Some sites insist that if I do business with them, I must do through the local website. Fine, I can buy from your German website... if you speak to me in English. There is zero reason to assume that if you force me to use your German website I speak German. No reason whatsoever. Look, if you want to have region specific websites, go for it, even though I will hate it. Just don't redirect me to the one you think I need. Let me make the choice. And especially don't do it if there's no way for me to get back to the one I wanted in the first place (looking at you Osprey). And if you force me to use your region specific website don't assume that everyone who is forced to visit your German website speaks German. It's also frustrating that automatic browser translation very often breaks the checkout process (not to mention the privacy aspect of it). Of course the nail in the coffin is when a region specific website won't work with a credit card that is outside that region. Although usually that happens in the United States, where fortunately website do speak English but won't take my European credit cards. This is all very simple, if you do nothing at all, you don't fuck up the user experience. It's great. Every little helpful "improvement" you make is a mistake.

slig 10y ago
Udacity, for instance, doesn't let me choose English anymore and is very frustrating.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

MatthewWilkes 10y ago

There are a few bad implementations of Accept Language parsing out there too. BrowseHappy is one, it gets the weighting wrong and displays the wrong language a lot.

Mark2Moore 10y ago

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photon-torpedo 10y ago

For Google, I often find myself smuggling a "hl=en" into the query parameters. This works on almost all Google services, and is quicker than finding out where the language switcher is hidden in the UI.

bhrgunatha 10y ago
I've been complaining about this for a long time now. I wrote a small greasemonkey script to add hl=en to all except a select few google locations. They are the most egregious. Unfortunately for us the industry has chosen to go with IP address determines language and it's getting more and more common. I DO have accept language configured in my browser and I also DO understand that statistically many people's browsers are mis-configured. NO. I'm not leaving my browsers logged in to every site in the internet. We'll forever be tilting at windmills.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
superasn 10y ago
Not sure if it works now but by just visiting https://www.google.com/ncr https://www.google.com/ncr is enough to disable all localization settings instantly.
- quantum_magpie 10y ago
  Not all of their pages support the ncr. For example maps.google.com/ncr 404's. And without the /ncr I get redirected to .co.jp where there is no visible option to change the language unless I sign in.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  No, that localizes to American, with useless, stupid Fahrenheit and miles. Another common problem.
- frik 10y ago
  /ncr stopped working in Dec 2015. Google broke it, and hasn't fixed it. They new parameters that do the same thing are a lot longer :( http://searchengineland.com/google-ncr-no-country-redirection-feature-stop-working-but-google-may-bring-it-back-239381 http://searchengineland.com/google-ncr-no-country-redirectio... Despite the positive worded arricle, apparently Google hasn't brougt /ncr back yet.

cooper12 10y ago

Does anyone else find it a bit problematic that documentation, which should mainly be descriptive, is taking an ideological stance? It's one thing to describe known bugs around an implementation, but reading the MDN docs on accept-header, it's pretty clearly advocating against using accept-header. How can a web-reference justify recommending against standards? I understand it's not meant as the canonical reference doc, but that's pretty much how it ends up being used and I think Mozilla should be more conscious of the position of its docs. (I personally find MDN much easier on the eyes and useful with its compatibility tables and examples)

kristopolous 10y ago
Although not obvious, MDN is a wiki with a pretty level-headed and healthy community. I've done numerous edits that were well-received so I say feel free to change it.
- cooper12 10y ago
  Ah, that is a reasonable suggestion. I would but unfortunately I don't feel technically competent to do so. (I'm more the type of programmer who would rely on MDN rather than write anything on it) It's too bad there's no discussion page like other wikis have. Under the feeback tab in the navbar, there is "report a content problem", but that requires filing a bugzilla. Don't get me wrong, overall I'm quite satisfied with the quality of MDN (it's so much better than w3schools which I was using before), it's just the tone of this particular article.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    MDN articles aren't supposed to be just flat descriptions of "Feature X does Y. To use feature X, place the following code in..." MDN is supposed to be an educational resource that can teach people what different bits of technology are for, when and why they can be used, etc., and so it's appropriate -- if there is a common problem with something -- to mention the problem. And though I didn't write that article (but I did work on MDN's software platform during my time at Mozilla), I largely agree that Accept-Language simply doesn't work, and some other sort of in-page UI is far more reliable. There's a reason why MDN will do content negotiation, but also shows a drop-down of languages an article is available in and uses language identifiers in URLs, after all.

antoineMoPa 10y ago

Polyglot problem: when Google Chrome always asks you to translate the page but you just want to read it in the original language and you are too lazy to disable the popup.

rochellle 10y ago
Also, this happens when the page isn't even in a foreign language, but the majority of words are not dictionary words, and there's a sparse overlap of one or two words which statistically correlate with a misspelling of a similar words in some language outside your currently chosen locale.
- slededit 10y ago
  How often does that happen to you?
int_19h 10y ago
Although after you do it a few times, it asks if you want to permanently disable translation for that language.
laaph 10y ago
I had this with facebook. I'd like to see things in their original language, but I'm not perfectly fluent in two languages that I'd like to see in their original language, so I have the choice to "autotranslate" or not have a translation button at all. I turned off the autotranslate button because one day I was reading a facebook post that made no sense at all, and it turned out it was a very poor translation and facebook didn't show me the original text. But now, I don't even get the button for translate, even though my spanish isn't the best and sometimes it's very helpful for me. So it goes...

nolemurs 10y ago

So, I may be wrong about this, but my guess is that a lot of non English speakers browsers are not sending the "Accept-Language" header with the correct language. Getting that language right requires configuration that most users can't/won't do, so it's only going to be right if the system defaults do that, and I think it's pretty likely that a lot of users will be getting the wrong language. If the above is true, then it almost certainly makes more sense for these large international sites to just ignore the header and send the correct language for a given country. Some travelers may be inconvenienced, but a much larger number of users will benefit.

cesarb 10y ago
Firefox automatically sets the Accept-Language header based on the user interface language (or at least it should; see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640). It's probably the same for other browsers. However, mismatches between the user language and the interface language are probably more common than one would think. Here in Brazil at least, I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  > I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese. I'm curious why. Do users not know how to change the user interface language? Or did they learn how to use the computer from, say, an English reference and are now just accustomed to an English user interface?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Short answer: because translations used to suck, especially error messages, so if you had a problem you would end up with an error message that was indecipherable and non-googlable
    - Manishearth 10y ago

exabrial 10y ago

Please, this, yes. That and location. I don't live in St Louis, but Google swears I do and there's no way to change that setting in Google news. I've emailed their product team but they're also never wrong.

Consultant32452 10y ago
This may be outdated. I just opened Goole News and on the right hand side just below the weather widget thing there's a place where you can change the location it's providing you news for. Changing the location not only updated the weather widget but also the local news stories.
- exabrial 10y ago
  Amazingly enough even when you do that, it still insists on showing me 'Local News' from St Louis.
  - moyix 10y ago
    For a long while the only place I could find to change my home location in google was their (now defunct) movie showtimes page :p
netsharc 10y ago
Google News detected my location (Munich) and set the local news source to show news from there, but I guess they didn't have any partnerships with the news providers except one that offered real estate market updates. It was amusing in the beginning to read that a big investment company bought some office block, but it annoyed me so I set it to give me news about Saudi Arabia instead, so I can ignore it.
- kuschku 10y ago
  It’s the same in many places, I get a handful of German sources on Google News, and then only random things that some sports newspaper writes about an athlete from my city, or articles about US towns with the same name.

peterwwillis 10y ago

Counter argument: American sites should try supporting a language other than English. Many EU sites have multiple languages sorted into different flags up at the top of the page. Ours do not.

sk5t 10y ago
Like most things, this is ordinarily not done when the economics do not appear to support doing it.
kristopolous 10y ago
In the US, the local, state, and international language is the same thing.
toast0 10y ago
Using flags for language isn't really a great pattern. It kind of works if you only support a few languages, but when you support a lot you get into tough issues where many flags relate to a single language and many languages relate to a single flag. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...
spacehunt 10y ago
Please, don't use flags unless you want to bring politics into it.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  its a visual representation of a language that often conveys information to people whom speak an unknown tongue. Given an array of choices people may be able to pick out the graphic quicker.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Would you like to not be allowed to do business in China? All you have to do is use the flag of the Republic of China to indicate traditional Chinese. Use names of languages, localized into those languages, for the selection. Or if you must save space, use two-letter language codes.

watter 10y ago

Google Maps also does something like this. Open a maps tab in Winnipeg and it will show you downtown Calgary if the ISP is Shaw Communications. Twitter even started recommending I follow former Prime Minister Stephen Harper because he represented a Calgary riding. I don't live in either of these cities.

marcosdumay 10y ago

Also, however you discover my language, don't autotranslate your contents into it if you don't have a translation (and worse, hide the way to disable it). If I can't read anything you have, I'll ask my browser to translate, you don't need to bother.

nraynaud 10y ago
Haha, the MS C# docs are just infuriating. There are things I absolutely don't want to see translated, and language docs are one of those.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Keep in mind that in many cases, translation isn't done because the market demands it, but rather because either the country laws, or government regulations for software sold to the public sector do.
  - netsharc 10y ago
    Some apps and sites, like iTunes Store, do this with the license agreement, since they like to pretend the document has legal power, it has to be presented in one of the country's officially recognised languages. So like the article, someone only understanding English in Germany signing up for iTunes has to accept a legal agreement in a language they don't understand...
Manishearth 10y ago
Oh god. Yeah. You know how YouTube sometimes asks you questions instead of an ad? I once got a super shitty romanized one in my language. The romanization was atrocious. It might have been the "official" way to romanize things, but nobody in India uses that, so it's not useful like that. It was a shitty machine romanization of a shitty machine translation. It took me a minute to even understand wtf was going on. To me, it was gibberish and it wanted an action from me, so I was stuck staring at it. I realized it was some Indic language, but I wasn't even sure which for a while, that's how bad it was. It took me like five minutes to decipher it. It contained crap like "vhid'io" (video) and "sa'ina apa" (sign up), which are English words transliterated into Marathi and then back, for some stupid reason. Whoever made that had no idea whatsoever what they were doing. Romanizations are not preferred in India. People may use them whilst chatting but that's just because learning a new keyboard is hard. These romanizations are significantly different and more readable. All speakers of the language who can read romanizations can read the script, so the script is very much preferred. This was in Mumbai, where plenty of folks do not even speak that language. While Google may have guessed my language from the fact that it knows everything, I've noticed YouTube showing Marathi ads on anyone's computer in Mumbai, so it probably was a geolocation based decision.

einrealist 10y ago

What I also hate are recommendations based on my IP / location without any chance of changing it. The example that bugs me most: Spotify. Why can't I just pick a country and get recommendations for it?!

jbg_ 10y ago
I have basically the reverse problem. I happened to set my Spotify account up when I was in Germany, and all my recommendations are forever for Germany and in German, no matter where I am, with no option to change it.

ziikutv 10y ago

Thanks! For fuck sakes, using VPNs sometimes is a pain in the butt due to localization. Edit: Although I understand localization is important, but perhaps we should favor English - an international language - over a localized one. Of course, one would say, it being international does not mean well adopted. Perhaps, we can use some sort of constants to assume a Country's acceptability of English and first make English the first choice; having localization as an option. Interesting Anecdote: When I was a tiny little kid in India, we were forced to use the English version of Google so that we learn English as well as Computers at the same time. Sure Localization is more user friendly (and hence I understand it being there) but it is not a standard. After not surfing the web (or visiting other pages), 99% [1] of the applications/programs on the computer are not localized. [1]: Bullshit number.

kalleboo 10y ago
> 99% [1] of the applications/programs on the computer are not localized. I just took a survey of the apps in my dock - 8 out of 12 third party apps are localized into the UI language of my computer (Japanese). This is on the Mac though, things might be more dire on Windows.
- ziikutv 10y ago
  Dire indeed.

Manishearth 10y ago

No, not everyone who uses browsers will actually go through settings and deal with this. Plenty of folks run browsers without the default language changed (it's a nontrivial procedure!), and they'd likely not look for the language tweaking UI. The browser UI language isn't actually too important -- all the important buttons these days are icons. The language you see Google in is more important. Some UX could certainly be designed around this. Google could default to Accept-Language and say "Did you want Google in Language X" (in the IP detected language) in a bubble, with a link that triggers the language-setting UI (somehow). Or it could default to IP detection with an API for the reverse. The current situation of far too many people sending flawed `Accept-Language "en-US,en;q=0.5"` headers will have to be worked around somehow. Google already suggests English when it detects that you've changed the language you use (I'm not sure if it suggests english when you are logged out and switch locations, or if it perhaps suggests whatever your Accept-Language is)

MichaelGG 10y ago
I try to avoid Chrome but in the past I've used it to search with Google. I'll get "local" Spanish language results which Chrome then promptly offers to translate to English.
nv-vn 10y ago
Imagine if the first time you opened your browser it had a big grid of flags/languages to choose from. This would be trivial to get users the right Accept-Language. You could even have it do this every time you open the browser if the computer is used by multiple people.
- spacehunt 10y ago
  You are assuming the site would remember what language the users have told it to use. YouTube, even after all these years, forgets this every 3 days, even when I'm still logged in. But it doesn't forget what ads to shove to me though.
  - int_19h 10y ago

bluerobotcat 10y ago

When visiting websites from Belgium, one frequently occurring annoyance is that websites will serve you content in French. This happens even when you're in the Dutch speaking region (this should be easy to detect since the ISPs are different between regions). It's frustrating because many Dutch speakers can understand English better than French. It would even happen for websites that support English, French, and Dutch, such as Skype.com (can't test if it's still happening though).

hyperman1 10y ago
Seconded. Country is probably (but hard to guess) 55% Dutch,35% French, 5% German, 5% Other , and language is a sensitive topic. English has become some sort of neutral zone. Even so, lots of sites have a 'they'll speak french and like it' attitude, sometimes even without a way to switch to even English.

xmichael99 10y ago

I've lived in Costa Rica for 10+ years, yes I speak spanish fluently, but I would much much prefer to read the site in english. My favorite is Dell.com, wow they fight so hard to send me to dell.cr, even when I use a VPN they've gone out of their way to pay for services to redirect me to Dell.CR..

averagewall 10y ago
A country specific site isn't the same as a language. Often they're doing business with people from that country. The US site might not be able to trade with somebody in Costa Rica. Different way of accepting money, different laws, etc. The problem there is that each country's site tends to be only in one language. Ideally they would have every combination of language and country, with language being a choice and country not.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  That's great but consider this: I'm a US citizen traveling in Costa-Rica right now and I want to buy a Dell computer that I'm gonna pay in US dollars to be delivered at my home in the US when I get back, now I can't because I'm redirected to the .cr website that has different ways. The issue here is making assumptions on the human and her intention based on the computer and its network supposed location.

Hasknewbie 10y ago

The real sin here is not just the geoIP, but the patronizing "we will decide for you, lowly user" tone of many sites: they do not just inflict you with an arbitrary language, but make it difficult or impossible to undo. If you take an UI decision on the user's behalf, then you acknowledge you could be wrong and always offer an option or drop-down menu (at the top of the page, not hidden anywhere else) to correct it, to me that's just basic UX.

spacehunt 10y ago
It gets more condescending than this. For example, nobody treats what we speak here daily as a language at all, and instead shoves what they think we understand down our throat.

kartickv 10y ago

On the topic of language, a problem I have in India is that many OSs, apps and sites don't understand that both "color" and "colour" are okay in India. It's more a question of style whether you use the US or British or US spelling, and I don't want my spell-checker enforcing style. Neither is really wrong, like "colur" would be. macOS, iOS and Android all get this wrong, insisting on "correcting" color to colour. This happens in both native and web apps. I tried to work around this by adding English (US) as a secondary language, which fixes the issue in iOS but not macOS or Android. A couple of other related points: it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane. Another problem with language is that many developers think of I18N as a checklist item to be ticked off. They still use American English like "way to go". Leave the Americanisms out of it, if you want your non-American users to feel welcome, as opposed to, "This isn't for you". Americans will also understand if "way to go" was replaced by "congrats" or "congratulations".

timr 10y ago
"it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane." Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious. In Japan, the romaji/english and the native map indexes seem to be entirely disjoint (and partially incomplete) sets of data. If your language is english you can search for things by name in romaji and find them, but not find them when searching in hiragana or kanji! The opposite also occurs (searching for things that have english names is frequently problematic). They also do terrifically irritating things like rendering map kanji at microscopic sizes, then re-rendering them smaller when you (silly user!) have zoomed the map to make them big enough to read. And the design of the trip-planner interface is so confusing as to be borderline unusable.
- csydas 10y ago
  > Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious. Google's handling of the language issue in general is pretty atrocious. On my iPhone which is too old for any plugins and such on Mobile Safari, I can't do an image search quickly without a modal popping up and asking if I want to switch to English or stay in Russian. (US Expat in Russia, phone is all in english) On my laptop, it doesn't even give me the option to change the language if I'm not logged into Google at the time, even though my laptop is in English as well. It's been a major point of annoyance to not have the ability to really control what languages are served to you when it seems to me that it would be a pretty conscious decision to have your computer in X language when your IP is from a country where X isn't the primary language. The reasons I've heard for using IP instead of Accept-Language just seem like exceptions to the rule rather than the more common rule, but of course I'm just an outsider looking in on this one and don't have any data to really back that. And to have it absolutely every time on my phone (no cache clearing) is also frustrating, regardless of whether I log in or not. It's not even so much about the different expected language; I understand Russian well enough to use the site and different functions. It's getting a nag every single time I want to do a quick search for something that is frustrating and that for everything else that gets stored about my browsing habits that they can't seem to remember that the last 30 times they asked me, I switched to English because I wanted results in English. Why a simple toggle like DuckDuckGo has isn't used is beyond me as well. The site language is english, if I want russian local results, I just toggle the region switch for Russia at the top. Or I can isolate where I want my targeted results from. It just seems like a huge oversight from Google on this one that should absolutely be something they don't falter on.

sulam 10y ago

In the last three weeks I've been in five different countries and each time this happened with every major site. Super frustrating! Thankfully this is an aberration and I don't usually travel much. By the way, the time zone situation is even worse -- at least I can usually find an English link. Good luck figuring out if you have a conflict with a meeting scheduled while you're in Romania but you're going to be in Mexico when it happens. It's all manual all the way.

jbg_ 10y ago
I don't understand the time zone issue. Even the macOS included Calendar app with time zone support switched on makes this a complete non-issue, and Google Calendar handled it pretty well when I used to use it too. I travel basically continuously, scheduling meetings in multiple time zones all the time, and as long as you enter the correct time zone when creating the event, everything works perfectly.
- sulam 10y ago
  you have to know what the correct time zone is. That's a manual task.
  - jbg_ 10y ago
    No - on macOS Calendar you just type the city name (or a nearby city).

id122015 10y ago

most annoying is Google News when I dont want local news. Also YouTube

mrweasel 10y ago
Most annoying to me is Wikipedia. It is almost never the case that I would prefer the Danish article over the English. Yes, Danish is my native language, but why would I want a 10 line article in Danish, when there's a 5 page article available in English. It's not that I don't appreciate all the hard work the Danish authors put into the articles/translations, but I'm still left with an lower quality because of an assumption made by the Wikipedia site. Of cause the problem is that even being able to weighting my preferred language won't help, because some sites I want in Danish, and some I would prefer to have in English, even if a Danish translation is available.
- Grue3 10y ago
  Why wouldn't you go straight to en.wikipedia.org? If you use a per-language site, Wikipedia never redirects you.

interfixus 10y ago

Even were it not a matter of privacy and principle, I should be avoiding most of Google for this kind of idiocy. On the rarer and rarer occasions when I am somehow forced into using their services, they invariably insist on force-feeding me my native language, however much I may be running a thoroughly English language computing environment, including an English language browser with a purely English Accept-Language setting. Same went - until recently - for Play Store access in Android, and I believe it still does if I access the Play Store web interface, at least as far as comments are concerned. Google is not the only offender, but by far the worst that I know of. [Typo edited]

vbernat 10y ago

Switzerland has 3 official languages and geoIP is not good enough to determine in which part of Switzerland you are. I always get pages in German despite being in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Even when traveling abroad I get the problem since mobile connections are now tunneled to your home country. In France, I get German pages!

nift 10y ago
Sorry if this gets too nitpicky according to Google you officially have 4 :)
- charriu 10y ago
  While this is technically true, the fourth one is basically on life support. I wouldn't expect to find software or even many websites using it.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    I hope you guys keep it on life support for a little while longer. Dying or not, it has a nice distinctive sound to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtMP7Nw0E3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtMP7Nw0E3g
- OJFord 10y ago
  > The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian and Romansh. All but Romansh maintain equal status as official languages at the national level within the Federal Administration of the Swiss Confederation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland
  - jwilk 10y ago
    Non-mobile version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland
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martin-adams 10y ago

So in the Google example, if I travel from the UK to Germany with Brisish English as my language. Should I get google.co.uk, or google.de but in English? I can see a few problems, such as some results not having English pages and possibly not being able to use local search.

nottorp 10y ago

It's not only languages. I used to check my weather at weather.com, but they decided to give me weather by default based on my IP address. They remember what locations I checked before, but they don't care and give me the geolocation result first. Guess what, they're getting the country right, but they're a couple hundred kilometers off, which makes the weather information useless. And back to the article topic, I'm in the camp that absolutely hates localized software. Translations are a lot more verbose than English and/or simply sound ridiculous. Please keep your site in English when you present it to me.

bigbugbag 10y ago

"Stop guessing languages based on IP address" misses the target by going a bit too far. IMHO it should be "Stop guessing languages", because that's the root cause of this issue. It stems from making assumptions on the human and her intentions based on the computer settings or network location. We know better than that. Problem is design is made based on metrics and tracking, and things are tailored to the largest user base and the rest is an afterthought. The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. Tackling this in an almost universal way is not that easy and obvious, but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.

kartan 10y ago
> Stop guessing languages Thank you. That is it. As the world goes global, who speaks what gets impossible to guess. I had a friend from Barcelona (Spain), that lives in Sweden, temporarily relocated to Shangai. To guess his preferred language is impossible. Sometimes he can prefer to read something in English to send it to colleagues. Other times he is more comfortable reading Spanish, or maybe Catalan. But can also want to read in Chinese, as sometimes it is better to read the original language - even with a very low understanding of it - than to read a really bad translation. > The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. To show every user of your website a long list of languages each time you get a visit is overkilling. I understand that a website will show by default a reasonably guessed language, it is going to work for 90% of your users, but changing to any other language should be fast and easy. The worse I have seen is websites that don't allow you to change the language, so you are trapped for whatever guess they did.
patrick_haply 10y ago
> The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags The whole point of the blog was that the browser already has asked the user that question in the sense that it defaults to the system language setting, i.e. the first things you do on a computer when you open it for the first time. > but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website. I don't understand. What you're proposing as a solution (asking visitors their language on first entry) is essentially the fallback scenario for guessing incorrectly. I try to think of the number of different websites I visit and thinking of every single one asking me for a language preference makes me feel not good about using the web. Right now, the worst case scenario is when chrome automatically detects that the website doesn't match my language and gives me a popup asking me if I want to translate.

a_imho 10y ago

Irritating and frankly it is worse experience than not guessing at all. I'm yet to understand why someone puts resources into it. On the other hand I found the best indicator for me is my keyboard settings, I usually want to consume content in the language I'm currently writing, but still far from perfect.

unhammer 10y ago

Oh yes, this is such a nuisance! * When you download Firefox from Norway, you get the Norwegian version, with the right Accept-Language header setting by default. * When you buy a computer with Windows or MacOS in Norway, it's localised to Norwegian – IE/Edge/Safari presumably sets the right Accept-Language header. Linux users get to choose language during install. * Looking at Piwik stats from a site mostly used by people in Norway, I see mostly "Norwegian Bokmål" as Browser Language (10x as much as English). Dominant browsers are 1. Chrome 2. Safari 3. Firefox 4. IE. So the browsers seem to be doing the right thing. So even without fancy UI asking what languages you know, Accept-Language seems to be correctly set (at least for Norwegians). So why are sites using the more complicated and less precise geoip guess?

shouldbworking 10y ago
I worked at a place that used neither the header or geo-ip. Multi language capability was a check box for a client and they never specified how it needed to work, so it was implemented in the most haskish way possible. The app was not localizable, it was using an obsolete platform and third party widget library. So.... We made a handler that piped the HTML output to a parser which attempted to identify the visible text on the page and translated it using a dictionary. The only way to choose a language was a small drop down on the top of the page that was always in English, and since it was implemented so badly usually you had to leave and return to the site for the translator to start working(caching issues).
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Manishearth 10y ago
And when you download Firefox from Maharashtra (a state in India), you do not get the Marathi version. It is non trivial to enable Marathi (you need to download a language pack addon, folks who need this may not be technically sound enough or speak enough English to figure this out). Marathi is the 19th most spoken language in the world, with more than 14 times as many speakers as Norwegian. What I say for Firefox was true for all browsers last I checked. So "at least for Norwegians" is correct; this doesn't generalize well at all. To be fair, Google in India defaults to English anyway (it's complicated -- might have been a sensible choice in the past since you could assume that folks who use the net know English, but it is probably exclusionary now that everyone is coming online). But I'm sure what I said for Marathi works for many other languages.

cbit 10y ago

there is more then .de in europe and german is not german for example: you have 3 complete different countrys which all speak german .DE .AT .CH you need to handle taxes, currencys, even some special characters like: ß street = strasse (CH) = straße (DE,AT) until they dont implement "choose youre country" on setup of any browser there will not be a replacement for GEOIP

int_19h 10y ago
> until they dont implement "choose youre country" on setup of any browser there will not be a replacement for GEOIP There's "choose your country" on setup of your OS, and your browser is perfectly capable of picking that setting up and communicating it to the browser - there's a standard protocol for that.

planetjones 10y ago

I wrote an article about the very same subject 3 years ago. Little has been done to make it better: http://www.planetjones.co.uk/blog/27-04-2014/web-internationalization-often-inconsistent.html http://www.planetjones.co.uk/blog/27-04-2014/web-internation...

Clownshoesms 10y ago

One single language makes sense. Until we get Teilhard's unity. Or something similar. Or Julian May's. The Pliocene saga was an interesting read I thought.

anothercomment 10y ago

I hate accept language. Google keeps pushing me to the German site, and there seem to be a million places where I might have to configure my computer to make it do the right thing. My OS is actually set to English, so I don't know where the German redirect of Google comes from. What is so difficult about sending me the US site if I go to google.com, and the German site if I go to google.de? That is really the only language selector I need. Likewise, other pages should simply have an explicit URL for another language, that I can memorize if I prefer that language.

datenwolf 10y ago
> I hate accept language. Did you actually read the article? Because the whole article is basically a rant about how the non-use of the Accept-Language header is causing the trouble you have.
- anothercomment 10y ago
  I read the article - it mentions that few people configure their browsers properly. I brought up my personal experience as unpleasant, because of the accept headers. Also it is not obvious how to configure the browser properly. I am German living in Germany, but prefer to do my computing in English. Apparently that confuses any web sites. All I want is to have an English site when I type in google.com. If I want to search in German, I can go to google.de. What could be simpler than that? All the other stuff is confusing and annoying. It's also not really "restful"-ish, is it? I think it would preferable to give the same site as a result of opening an URL, not change it depending on mysterious parameters. How is a non-geek even to find out about the accept-headers? Say I know nothing about Computers, go to Google.com and suddenly I am forwarded to Google.de. How do I solve the problem?

Moeg 10y ago

A great annoyance in Finland is the Google maps enforcing minority language on everyone, a lot of the place names are in Swedish even though app and everything else is in Finnish, there's no option to change this either.

ekns 10y ago
Even weirder still, in my experience, is that Google Maps randomly displays the names as Finnish sometimes, and randomly displays them in Swedish other times.

steinuil 10y ago

A bit off-topic, but I'm italian and despite my best efforts to use english as system language on my Windows installation, I still catch some programs using italian. Where do they even get it from? Date and currency formatting settings? Timezone? I'm baffled.

shouldbworking 10y ago
Keyboard input language maybe? Is the Italian keyboard layout different?

skummetmaelk 10y ago

The rise of the internet was a great chance at making the world speak a common language, whatever language that might be. Instead we decided to localize it to avoid making people feel uncomfortable. Localization is such a pain in the ass. When you are abroad you always get the the wrong language and many business sites try to force you into using a specific domain that does not even support english. Try reading dell.com in Europe. I see so many people using mac OS and windows localized to their own small language with a few million speakers, making it effectively impossible for them to get support online when googling instructions is impossible because menu items you have to click do not have the same descriptions in different languages. What is even worse is that sites like youtube have started automatically translating video titles into whatever language it thinks I want. Even if the translations were correct, which they never are, why in the world would I want them to be translated? Localization needs to die and it cannot go fast enough.

keldaris 10y ago
Not sure why this got downvoted - it's a perfectly valid personal opinion and, albeit expressed rather strongly, doesn't seem to violate any HN guidelines. Have an upvote.

haspok 10y ago

Let's not forget the case of multilingual websites where one version may have significantly less or different content than the other. Example: I visited a Swiss website recently that displayed itself in German by default (I'm in the UK), and also offered an English version with a warning that it is lacking in content and is not up to date. So probably the choice of the language should be a combination of user preference AND website preference.

atemerev 10y ago
I live in Geneva, Switzerland, and I am tired of websites automatically switching to German (even Google). Geneva is in the French-speaking part of the country. Switzerland is trilingual. I prefer English, French is also fine, but switching to German while nobody here even speaks it...
- Merovius 10y ago
  > Switzerland is trilingual. *quadrolingual Don't forget about that pesky Romansh ;)

gkya 10y ago

Maybe browsers should have an initial "choose your languages" popup that shows up after install. Then Accept-Language settings would become more correct and the need for weird guessing games would disappear.

Kenji 10y ago

It's much worse on Xbox One. You have to change your country to something like the USA to be able to even SELECT English (the option doesn't exist for non-English speaking countries). And if you do that you can no longer pay because payment options are locked down by country, so you have to switch back to your original country to buy something. How can Microsoft blunder so horribly? How can anyone even conceive of the idea that people only speak their own language in their country? It is maddening.

Merovius 10y ago

I don't know. I'm annoyed by sites doing that too, but I don't think the author appreciates the complexity of the issue. Two examples: They choose Google search results as an example; but when I'm in the Netherlands, I definitely don't want them to exclude the website of a Restaurant or Tourist attraction from the results, just because I don't speak Dutch. That's what Google Translate is for, after all. On the other hand, when I Google for Recipes, maybe don't show me Dutch results even if I'm in the Netherlands; I might be able to have them translated, but I think there are enough English or German recipes for Tomato Sauce too that wouldn't need to go through this extra layer of indirection. So there definitely is a correlation between language settings and Geography - in some cases. I'm also dissatisfied with Accept-Language. For example, I speak both English and German well enough that there isn't a huge difference in comprehension. If I just set Accept-Language to English and German with q=1, and visit pages of a German, a US and a Spanish University (assuming all three of them have all languages available), they should behave very differently. Now, let's complicate things by throwing politics into the mix; choose the wrong language or show the wrong results and suddenly you are offending one subset of people or the other. Languages, Countries, Politics and Humans in general are inherently messy and complicated. If you see a problem that has to do with any of those and you start a sentence with "just do X", then it is very likely that your Engineering brain is oversimplifying things (and also, FWIW, you are showing your privilege in not having to consider that other people might work very differently).

soneil 10y ago

The problem is that it's surprisingly difficult to make accept-language negotiation actually work (unless users specifically dig into their configuration and make it so, no browser I've tried gets this right out of the box) Lets take a reasonable scenario - the wikipedia articles for Birmingham (UK). In English, the article is as fleshed out as you'd expect, for the second-largest city in the UK. In Slovak, there's a couple of pretty pictures, and two sentences. A user arrives with the header "Accept-Language: sk-SK,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6". Which article to I send them? The 'naive' approach is to send them the two-line summary in Slovak. Their preference is Slovak, I have Slovak, let's do this. Easy. The 'weighted' approach is score my available translations, decide that, eg, my English article has a weight of '1' (it's the best translation of this material I have), my Slovak article has a weight of 0.2 (it's a pretty crap translation). Content weight * User weight gives me 0.8 for my English article (1 * 0.8), and 0.2 (1 * 0.2) for my Slovak article. So I deliver the English article - the user has expressed that English is "pretty good", and I can deliver much better content in English. As a programmer, I love this approach, it saves delivering poor translations to users who don't need them. Now, the reality. The user has sent en_US;q=0.8 not because they speak a single word of English, but because Chrome will by default, send the OS environment as 1st preference, en_US as second, and en as third. Being clever failed. Any time we have to admit that our translations are not made equal, accept-language (or rather, current browsers' default configurations of it) is simply too naive.