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My personal frustration is that when things do get localized, the localization is sometimes outright wrong. Like, the person who's doing the localization didn't
by gcp 9y ago
My personal frustration is that when things do get localized, the localization is sometimes outright wrong. Like, the person who's doing the localization didn't even do basic fact checking on what language a country speaks.
I'd rather have access to the US English pages (which are useful) than a language I don't speak (which makes it clear your products are made by doofuses).
Also why on earth does no-one respect Accept-Language and uses GeoIP instead? Do people in SV just never travel?
- Semaphor 9y agoYeah, I remember when EA's origin started. German IP? Well here is the website in German. The only way you can change it is using a VPN and connecting to a us or UK server. I think it took them a year to let you at least choose which language you want. At least if you wanted English, other languages still weren't available.
- bowlofpetunias 9y ago> what language a country speaks It starts with assuming country equals language. And even when they figure that out, they still use GeoIP. Try using various online services in the Brussels region for a laugh. It's ridiculous that internally operating corporations like Google or Facebook still haven't figured that shit out.
- gcp 9y agoYes, I should have written languages, my idea was that if they'd look it up they'd see it's plural for huge parts of the world, but nobody bothers. There's also the basic problem that just because people in country X speak Y and Z doesn't mean a user connecting with an IP that seems to originate from X necessarily speaks Y or Z.
- Eridrus 9y agoIs Accept-Language widely and correctly sent by browsers? I've seen some pretty weird Accept-Language strings getting sent by UAs, but I don't really know how accurate they are compared to GeoIP + Account Settings.
- onli 9y agoAll the big browsers do send a proper Accept-language string. It is configurable and uses OS settings as default. One can't really go wrong with that. Discovering Accept-Language was a small revelation. I had no idea on how to do the localization of a web project of mine, geo-ip sounded ridiculous to me (not configurable). And there it was, a sound solution already provided by the browser.
- phn 9y agoI don't know about accuracy, but please, put Accept-Language in front of location/GeoIP. It is frustrating when Google redirects to the country I'm in. I still speak the same languages even if I'm traveling!
- Eridrus 9y agoBut that's the thing, browsers regularly send Accept-Language, if it's overall less accurate than ip geolocation, then it's hard to prefer it.
- phn 9y agoWell, it generally mimics your OS settings, so why is it inaccurate? The worst case is pages displaying in the same language as the rest of my computer.
- Eridrus 9y agoThere's a long tail of mobile browsers out there. I also don't know how many people have OS settings that differ from their real language preference due to poor OS support for their language (e.g. what this article talks about - how many users run en-US to get features that Win10/Android/etc doesn't do well in their language) I mean, there are reasonable arguments either way here IMO and without actual data, e.g. how often users change their language from one or the other, it's hard to know what is better in the long tail. And obviously users should be able to change their preference if we get it wrong.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]