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My take on internationalization is that I want to see less of it. I am Russian living in Switzerland, where people speak French, (Swiss) German, Italian and Ro

My take on internationalization is that I want to see less of it. I am Russian living in Switzerland, where people speak French, (Swiss) German, Italian and Romansh. I often travel to Barcelona, where people speak Catalan and Spanish. I don’t want any of these languages, I want all sites in English. This is hard to achieve, as nearly everybody uses geolinked internationalization. It is awful. Especially here in Switzerland — almost every site tries to show me the German version by default (most of Swiss cantons are German-speaking, but mine speaks French). Please just use English. Or if you must, enable language selection in users profile, do not try to detect it from geographic location.

avar 8y ago
This is a good idea in theory, but completely unworkable in practice. Most users do not have the skills or know-how to navigate whatever Accept-Language setting their device is exposing. But yeah, sites should have a way to sticky it once you have a profile and log in etc., but most users aren't going through that path for most sites.
- jfoucher 8y ago
  In Firefox: Preferences -> Language and appearance -> Language
  - Tomte 8y ago
    Exactly. That's too complicated for a large portion of browser users. I'm not kidding and I'm not dissing them. They shouldn't have to fiddle with language settings. That's a tech failure.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      Isn't the default value whatever the OS is set to? Your "average user" shouldnt need to fiddle anyway.
    - gnud 8y ago
      What is actually a tech failure, is assuming I understand Spanish if I happen to be in Spain. That sort of ham-handed, short-sighted approach drives me nuts. You only need "fiddling with language settings" if you want something other than how your operating system is configured.
      - cmg 8y ago
        Google actually did this at one point. I was in the Netherlands when I signed up for Google+. I don't speak Dutch and hadn't changed any of my language settings - the only way they knew was via my IP address. The UI was mostly in English, but all my circles (or whatever they were called) were named in Dutch.
        JoeMalt 8y ago
        I get the weirdest language bugs with Google: - The info box on the right hand side of the search results intermittently shows up in German - A suggested event (a football match) in the UK (where I am) had both team's names transliterated into Cyrillic - An airport on Maps consistently shows up in either French or Finnish (or both!)
    - blotter_paper 8y ago
      If this is too complicated, it is the fault of the user agent. That's a different issue than whether a website should respect a requested language if it is available. You're arguing that the user agents are flawed, so we should have flawed content delivery to compensate. This is how flaws get folded into systems and magnified over time. Just fix whatever flaws exist in the user agents, language selection based on http headers is a pretty good solution for the half of the problem it covers.
- ip26 8y ago
  Presumably they wouldn't have to. If they are running en-US Windows, they get en-US websites. If they are running fr-CH Windows, that's the websites they get. You don't really have to worry that someone running ja Windows can't read Japanese. (Of course, you'd still expose the option to change this from the inherited default in the browser's preferences)
  - avar 8y ago
    Yes you do. Plenty of people using an OS in whatever language can barely speak a word of that language. Most commonly they'll use an English OS for whatever reason and want to browse websites in their local language. This is why you'll find that a lot of website language detection tends to discount English specifically. I.e. if your Accept-Language is "en" in France they'll probably give you French, but if it's e.g. Japanese in France they might think that's a "real" setting and give you Japanese. Or, as I'm sure a lot of non-English speaking technical users here can attest to, they like to use an English OS UI on their laptop or phone, but speak the local language and want browsing a local website to just work. Non-technical users do that too, but have no idea how to tweak their Accept-Language independently from their OS language. Really, do armchair commentators here think that programmers at major websites like Google that have enough data to know how people are likely to switch languages from the default haven't thought of just implementing what's literally the most simple thing you can do, which is to obey Accept-Language?
    - jakub_g 8y ago
      BTW. I accidentally discovered that in case of accessing google.com from non-English speaking country, `en-US` is treated as non-reliable (probably because many devices have this set as default), whereas `en-IE` for example is treated as reliable. Also appending any non-English language after `en-US` does the trick AFAIR. Basically `en-US`-only Accept-Language seems to be treated as "perhaps default language of a device and user didn't change it, we should not rely on it" and IP-based localization is applied in that case ("in France? ok show French version").
- sk5t 8y ago
  In approaching 100% of cases the operating system pesters you to set a language+locale during setup, and the browser propagates that via Accept-Language. The advanced use case is the user who wishes a set of > 1 weighted language ranges; e.g. de-DE most preferred, then English in any culture, then Latin American Spanish.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  Doesn't the browser pick up the OS language setting? That's going to be correct for most users. And browsers could make the override easily discoverable in preferences (at least on MacOS, app preferences are in a standard place from the user's perspective: File -> Preferences).
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    Tiny correction, the standard is actually `AppName` → Preferences under macOS X.
  - groby_b 8y ago
    That's actually not correct for most users. Most well-known case is India, where the OS language is usually set to 'English' for $REASONS, but people still prefer content in Hindi. (Or Urdu) Guessing what language a user actually speaks is not straightforward.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      What are the reasons? It still doesn't make sense to use the same behaviour in Europe, where in my experience the OS language is almost always the preferred language of the user. (Especially on a mobile.)
      - hyperman1 8y ago
        In my experience, most European sites will/should consider 'English' as default/unset/unknown. So when in German,y, if the header says French, give French . If the header says English (US or UK), give German.
        Symbiote 8y ago
        What am I supposed to do, as a native English speaker living in Denmark? I've tried en and en,da, but I almost always get Danish in Denmark and the local language if I travel.
- throwaway34241 8y ago
  How is having a significant number of users be served the wrong language for every site they visit, then having to navigate and create a profile and set the language for each site individually in a different way, in any way an acceptable solution either? If for historical reasons Accept-Language needs to pass through the OS locale, which is wrong and can't be changed, why not just standardize an optional User-Requested-Language(s) header, that only appears if the user explicitly sets it in the browser? The current solution is awful and improving it doesn't seem like rocket science but there seems to be zero interest in fixing it. Stuff like this is why closed platforms like Facebook probably have a brighter future than the open web.
jfoucher 8y ago
I never understood why sites try to do geo based localization. Every browser in capable of setting the requested language in the request headers so why not use that ? Technically much simpler as well. And the user can just change the browser preferences and all sites would magically switch to the right language. Hey I can dream right ?
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  A number of reasons I work for major conglomerate which has over 200 brands and operates in getting on for 200 countries. In the USA for one brand they sell different products to the UK than the USA for another brand they use a different brand entirely in the USA to the rest of the world. There are also legal reasons why you might need to geo target.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    That displays different content, but the Accept-Language header (with locale specialization) isn't about the content, its about the language the content is displayed in.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    That’s not localization, though. That’s market segmentation based on location detection, which is a different thing, strictly speaking. I mean, they could still show me the UK-only site if they determine that I am in the UK, but show me the UK site in German, with German units, dates and time codes, etc., because that’s what my browser might tell them that I prefer.
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Have you any idea how much work that is and how many things can go wrong I might have a dozen or more locales / languages and if you then want to see any locale in any language that's a huge amount of different urls Ok so you want German content in the UK do I show you the German locale and products legally available in Germany? the UK locale and products legally available in the UK translated into German? And do I age gate you based on German law or English what happens if I show you a BOGOF offer do I obey German law or English What happens if google messes up. What happens if your in Quebec and I accidently show you an illegal competition What T&C's do I show you
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zdragnar 8y ago
Geographic location is incredibly ineffective anyway depending on your ISP and other factors. Rather than defaulting to English, why not default to whatever the browser's OS is set to? At least for JS apps, there's navigator.languages, and there's an Accept-Language header for both language and locale for standard server-rendered plain ol' websites. Geographic location really does seem like the worst possible option to use.
- atemerev 8y ago
  Yet Google, Microsoft and Apple use it. :( At least with Google, you can usually log in to your profile and set it to English; with Microsoft and Apple, you are out of luck.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That's one big problem on the web, IMO. Google in particular does a lot of things that are questionable UX-wisely, to put it charitably, and then a lot of web shops try to copy those things without giving them any critical thought.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  Is it really the worst possible option? It’s often a pretty good guess, and accept-language is similarly unreliably set and can be fiddled with by intermediaries. Navigator.language doesn’t help you until you’ve already served and run JavaScript. The right solution I think is to make a reasonable guess and then allow the user to control it. None of these guesses are going to work for everybody on their own.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    I'm unaware of any intermediaries that fiddle with accept-language, so I can't really speak to how reliable it is. I can say that due to the ISP I use geolocation typically gets my location wrong by somewhere between 650 - 1600 km (400 and 1000 miles).
- cdtwoaway 8y ago
Kim_Bruning 8y ago
Presumably you'd be fine with Russian too, but by the sound of it you've given up on ever seeing THAT. ;-) (personally English is also often first choice, especially for tech documentation. Translations often seem to be an afterthought and can be pretty random. You need to translate randomly picked words back to the original jargon as best you can and hope you didn't miss anything. )
- davnicwil 8y ago
  Yeah tech documentation is a really interesting edge case for translation, as a good chunk of it will be new vocab and/or simply invented vocab for most native English speakers reading it anyway, so it's actually a pretty philosophical question about language itself if/how that stuff can be translated to other languages at all.
Kurtz79 8y ago
This is fromt he point of view of someone that is fluent in English. I assure you that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, etc... this is true but for a small percentage of the population. It makes no business sense for a company not to localize a website or a service, if your market has a substantial number of non-English speakers. But yes, for my own convenience (unironically), I wish that every website had a base English version that you could access with a single click. For example I was looking at some Microsoft webpage with troubleshooting or API information (can't remember). By default it was shown traslated based on my location, but there was a prominent "Read this in English" switch at the top. Top marks.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The problem is not the localization. It's choosing the default language based on anything other than explicit info provided by user-agent - that is, URL and Accept-Language, in that order.
- sametmax 8y ago
  French here. Yes, the english level is terrible in my country. Unfortuntly, translation is imperative if you want to enter the market. Which sucks, because it's a huge waste. There is not benefit to it: a UI is not like a book, you don't lose some quality in translation. In fact, most UI are worse once translated because english is a short and to the point language, which is what you want for buttons and menus.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  How many people in France have their computer / browser set to English, but don't understand English? I could see that being more common in the early 2000s, when it was probably easier to find a pirate version of Windows in English, but now...?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I can't speak about France, but my experience in the U.S. is that recent immigrants who can't speak English still set their computers to English. For some it's because they're so used to the non-English versions of web pages being so bad or abbreviated that having an English page they can half read is often better than the truncated "good enough" version provided in their native tongue.
xorand 8y ago
It's because a huge number of people just discovered the net and they don't surf as we are used to, like they don't search as we do etc. I don't want to sound elitist, many of them don't have the experience of it. They are going to repeat all behaviors and fall in all traps since we were new on the net. I see this in the way my kids use their phones.
K0nserv 8y ago
I use a VPN for all traffic, using an exit server in Finland. I don't speak a word of finnish. I have chatted with people who work on internationalization about IP based detection. The explanation I've always heard is that `Accept-Language` is all but useless. For a significant number of users the value is, incorrectly, `en-US`. Because of how unreliable `Accept-Language` is, IP based detection is unfortuantely has a much lower false positive rate.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  In general, I expect a web site, if it's available in more than one language, to offer me a menu where I pick the language I want. It's easy to do and it works for everyone. Usually the languages will also be accompanied by a little flag for extra non-ambiguity. See the "Change region" menu at the top of https://www.nintendo.com https://www.nintendo.com, or the obvious "English" selector amidst the gibberish at the top of https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ . Given how easy and robust this is... what exactly is the problem with using Accept-Language as your first guess? Maybe if more sites honored Accept-Language, users would start setting it.
  - K0nserv 8y ago
    You still have to pick a default region/language unless you want to force the user to make a selection before they get anywhere which is a mess UX-wise
    - Technetium_Hat 8y ago
      Ikea still uses such a landing page if you go directly to ikea.com .
- pinum 8y ago
  If it's specifically that value that's a problem then I'd suggest the following heuristic: Use geolocation if `Accept-Language` is `en-US`, otherwise respect the header. Technical users in Switzerland/Japan/wherever who want to see English pages can set their header to "en-GB" or "en-AU" to avoid getting caught in the heuristic. Edit: I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, of course- l10n isn't my job and I don't want to be this guy https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
infimum 8y ago
I live in Switzerland too and especially Youtube never seems to know whether to serve me ads in German, French or Italian (even though Google should know I almost exclusively consume English content). So I can sometimes watch several videos in a row, where I get served the same ad in a different language.
- deleted 8y ago
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- Svip 8y ago
  But don't ads on YouTube follow the more classic advertisement 'demographics', where location is more relevant than language? And it may just be cheaper and easier to just target all of Switzerland?
- Leherenn 8y ago
  This is where I feel a bit better about targeted advertising, if they're not able (as in at least not cheaply enough to be worth it) to serve me an ad in a language I understand, they still have a long way to go. And that's in Switzerland where people have a lot of disposable income and thus must be more attractive to advertisers than most places, despite being relatively small.
sveme 8y ago
Yes! When I head to docs.microsoft.com they show me a really bad machine-translated site of the C# API. And it is hard to change to the original English site. I am a software developer; I know English, thank you very much!
- w-m 8y ago
  One of the few things where Google Search is really awful for me personally. I've set it up to get search results in German (country of residence) and English (everything else). But I haven't found a way to communicate to it that for anything technical, I have a very strong preference for the English results. If I search for "std::vector", I get https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the first result and https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the second. The German translation is just awful and completely trips you up if you know English. I don't understand why it keeps pushing them up.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    My previous job had me traveling between Germany and China; during that time, Google's ridiculous localization of search results was becoming unbearable. I ended up permanently overriding my default search engine to point to this URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s. (It broke auto-suggesting search terms in the omnibar, but the actual search results are again sane.)
  - AnabeeKnox 8y ago
    Me too. I've had to start using DuckDuckGo, NOT for privacy reasons, but it get around Google's lunatic forced geolocated search.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    You cut to the core of the problem; user-preferred language for content is arbitrarily context-dependent.
    - 8y ago
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sametmax 8y ago
My pet peeve is when I have an application crash and the error message has been translated. Now googling it is extra fun, not to mention bug reporting. Fortunatly with Linux, I usually can get the proper message with "LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8" if I can, and desire, repeat the exact same error. Now I understand that this is done for openess and diversity. But technical terms should not be translated. I'm french, and I accept that english has won as the business language, and the IT language. Let's move on. Honestly, we are wasting humanity potential for not having a common language. I really, really wish we would all learn english as the second language, and that all laws, forms, labels and signs would be translated to english everywhere (as an addition to the local lang, not a replacement). It's an imperfect language, but it won half of the world, and the other half will have an easier time learning it that us learning theirs. Plus it has a very simple alphabet, and is already used for science, business and international politics. At this stage, I would gladly agree for all the french books and movies being burned and lost forever if it means one language, any language really, becomes magically the main one for humanity. We have too many communication problems. But since magic doesn't exist, what about getting off the ego train and just adopt the imperfect status quo and make something awesome with it for a change ?
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  English in terms of number of speakers has already reached the point where the number of ESL speakers outstrips the number of native ones by a good margin. The simple alphabet is a plus. I wish the spelling wasn't so godawful.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Yeah but I don't know any language used by hundred of millions of people that doesn't have many gotchas. Could be worse. The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D
    - CPLX 8y ago
      > The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D You're saying this like it isn't already happening.
Gibbon1 8y ago
I think your comment is kinda funny. Reminds me of California, a lot of effort goes into to providing public services in languages people best understand[1]. Not the local language or the default language of country of origin. Someone from South America might not actually speak Spanish. They might speak Quechua for instance. Brings up the point, 'internationalization' as a concept is utterly broken. People speak languages not countries. Also very likely that the non default language users may also be most in need. Probably should be a list of falsehoods programmers think about language. [1] Local school district I think at one time listed 43 languages.
retromario 8y ago
Yes, as an English speaker living in Germany, this is also something that drives me up the wall, but has also gotten better recently. My personal favorites, the cream of the crop: * Netflix: full site in English, subtitles (and audio tracks) for all shows available in German, English and several other languages. Only a few edge cases where the source (written) material appearing on-screen has already been hard-translated in. * Amazon: will let you turn on full English experience, up to and including...English speaking support (both written and verbal). This is truly the cream of the crop in terms of quality of experience. I really appreciate any German-oriented site that offers English as a possible language in spite of knowing my location. And if somewhere on your servers you already have English available, you would be silly to not make that available world-wide (where it makes sense). Of course, these are two of the biggest tech companies, so perhaps that speaks to the cost of internationalization.
- Markoff 8y ago
  pff this is nothing, German and English are quite similar languages, try living as foreigner in China, very enjoyable experience online /s
zebraflask 8y ago
Sounds more like you'd prefer an agreed upon lingua franca.
avip 8y ago
The worse offender here is nba.com, which Geo-redirects you to some local TV channel based on X-Forwarded-For header.
WalterBright 8y ago
My original compilers had error messages in English, German, French, and Japanese. It was a fair amount of work to make that work. I was pretty proud of it. Turns out that I couldn't find anyone who ever used the non-English messages. Everyone preferred the English messages, because everything else with programming was in English. So I abandoned worry about that, and haven't heard anything about it since. (Though the compiler uses UTF-8 strings for all text.)
- blattimwind 8y ago
  One problem with the translated GCC messages was that GCC didn't use error numbers at the time (still doesn't, I think, I didn't notice anyway), so it was basically impossible to reference the error except by full error message. MSVC on the other hand always includes a warning/error number, so there less issues talking about a particular error independent of language.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Since I gave up on translated error messages, using search and the error message string works fine (much better than a catalog of error codes).
iagooar 8y ago
> Please just use English Excuse me, sir. I would rather prefer it to always be German. Or French. Or Spanish. Or Italian. Not everybody speaks English, so it's perfectly fine to try and guess the person's language first - and allow to change it later. Also, once the UK has left the EU, English is not even going to be an official language here anymore - so I can see no reason why English should be the default in Europe.
- not2b 8y ago
  Ireland isn't leaving, so English will still be an official language.
  - iagooar 8y ago
    Not true - each European country can only choose one language - and Ireland chose Gaelic, since Britain chose English ;)
NicoJuicy 8y ago
You are an edge case. Go to the site in English, remove the root URL from your history. So it always suggests the English version ( URL) of the website. Best practise of a website ( eg. Google) don't suggest redirection based on an IP, which means a correct URL or cookie would suffice in most cases

avar 8y ago

This is a good idea in theory, but completely unworkable in practice. Most users do not have the skills or know-how to navigate whatever Accept-Language setting their device is exposing. But yeah, sites should have a way to sticky it once you have a profile and log in etc., but most users aren't going through that path for most sites.

jfoucher 8y ago
In Firefox: Preferences -> Language and appearance -> Language
- Tomte 8y ago
  Exactly. That's too complicated for a large portion of browser users. I'm not kidding and I'm not dissing them. They shouldn't have to fiddle with language settings. That's a tech failure.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    Isn't the default value whatever the OS is set to? Your "average user" shouldnt need to fiddle anyway.
  - gnud 8y ago
    What is actually a tech failure, is assuming I understand Spanish if I happen to be in Spain. That sort of ham-handed, short-sighted approach drives me nuts. You only need "fiddling with language settings" if you want something other than how your operating system is configured.
    - cmg 8y ago
      Google actually did this at one point. I was in the Netherlands when I signed up for Google+. I don't speak Dutch and hadn't changed any of my language settings - the only way they knew was via my IP address. The UI was mostly in English, but all my circles (or whatever they were called) were named in Dutch.
      - JoeMalt 8y ago
        I get the weirdest language bugs with Google: - The info box on the right hand side of the search results intermittently shows up in German - A suggested event (a football match) in the UK (where I am) had both team's names transliterated into Cyrillic - An airport on Maps consistently shows up in either French or Finnish (or both!)
  - blotter_paper 8y ago
    If this is too complicated, it is the fault of the user agent. That's a different issue than whether a website should respect a requested language if it is available. You're arguing that the user agents are flawed, so we should have flawed content delivery to compensate. This is how flaws get folded into systems and magnified over time. Just fix whatever flaws exist in the user agents, language selection based on http headers is a pretty good solution for the half of the problem it covers.
ip26 8y ago
Presumably they wouldn't have to. If they are running en-US Windows, they get en-US websites. If they are running fr-CH Windows, that's the websites they get. You don't really have to worry that someone running ja Windows can't read Japanese. (Of course, you'd still expose the option to change this from the inherited default in the browser's preferences)
- avar 8y ago
  Yes you do. Plenty of people using an OS in whatever language can barely speak a word of that language. Most commonly they'll use an English OS for whatever reason and want to browse websites in their local language. This is why you'll find that a lot of website language detection tends to discount English specifically. I.e. if your Accept-Language is "en" in France they'll probably give you French, but if it's e.g. Japanese in France they might think that's a "real" setting and give you Japanese. Or, as I'm sure a lot of non-English speaking technical users here can attest to, they like to use an English OS UI on their laptop or phone, but speak the local language and want browsing a local website to just work. Non-technical users do that too, but have no idea how to tweak their Accept-Language independently from their OS language. Really, do armchair commentators here think that programmers at major websites like Google that have enough data to know how people are likely to switch languages from the default haven't thought of just implementing what's literally the most simple thing you can do, which is to obey Accept-Language?
  - jakub_g 8y ago
    BTW. I accidentally discovered that in case of accessing google.com from non-English speaking country, `en-US` is treated as non-reliable (probably because many devices have this set as default), whereas `en-IE` for example is treated as reliable. Also appending any non-English language after `en-US` does the trick AFAIR. Basically `en-US`-only Accept-Language seems to be treated as "perhaps default language of a device and user didn't change it, we should not rely on it" and IP-based localization is applied in that case ("in France? ok show French version").
sk5t 8y ago
In approaching 100% of cases the operating system pesters you to set a language+locale during setup, and the browser propagates that via Accept-Language. The advanced use case is the user who wishes a set of > 1 weighted language ranges; e.g. de-DE most preferred, then English in any culture, then Latin American Spanish.
alistairSH 8y ago
Doesn't the browser pick up the OS language setting? That's going to be correct for most users. And browsers could make the override easily discoverable in preferences (at least on MacOS, app preferences are in a standard place from the user's perspective: File -> Preferences).
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  Tiny correction, the standard is actually `AppName` → Preferences under macOS X.
- groby_b 8y ago
  That's actually not correct for most users. Most well-known case is India, where the OS language is usually set to 'English' for $REASONS, but people still prefer content in Hindi. (Or Urdu) Guessing what language a user actually speaks is not straightforward.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    What are the reasons? It still doesn't make sense to use the same behaviour in Europe, where in my experience the OS language is almost always the preferred language of the user. (Especially on a mobile.)
    - hyperman1 8y ago
      In my experience, most European sites will/should consider 'English' as default/unset/unknown. So when in German,y, if the header says French, give French . If the header says English (US or UK), give German.
      - Symbiote 8y ago
        What am I supposed to do, as a native English speaker living in Denmark? I've tried en and en,da, but I almost always get Danish in Denmark and the local language if I travel.
throwaway34241 8y ago
How is having a significant number of users be served the wrong language for every site they visit, then having to navigate and create a profile and set the language for each site individually in a different way, in any way an acceptable solution either? If for historical reasons Accept-Language needs to pass through the OS locale, which is wrong and can't be changed, why not just standardize an optional User-Requested-Language(s) header, that only appears if the user explicitly sets it in the browser? The current solution is awful and improving it doesn't seem like rocket science but there seems to be zero interest in fixing it. Stuff like this is why closed platforms like Facebook probably have a brighter future than the open web.

jfoucher 8y ago

I never understood why sites try to do geo based localization. Every browser in capable of setting the requested language in the request headers so why not use that ? Technically much simpler as well. And the user can just change the browser preferences and all sites would magically switch to the right language. Hey I can dream right ?

C1sc0cat 8y ago
A number of reasons I work for major conglomerate which has over 200 brands and operates in getting on for 200 countries. In the USA for one brand they sell different products to the UK than the USA for another brand they use a different brand entirely in the USA to the rest of the world. There are also legal reasons why you might need to geo target.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  That displays different content, but the Accept-Language header (with locale specialization) isn't about the content, its about the language the content is displayed in.
- teddyh 8y ago
  That’s not localization, though. That’s market segmentation based on location detection, which is a different thing, strictly speaking. I mean, they could still show me the UK-only site if they determine that I am in the UK, but show me the UK site in German, with German units, dates and time codes, etc., because that’s what my browser might tell them that I prefer.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    Have you any idea how much work that is and how many things can go wrong I might have a dozen or more locales / languages and if you then want to see any locale in any language that's a huge amount of different urls Ok so you want German content in the UK do I show you the German locale and products legally available in Germany? the UK locale and products legally available in the UK translated into German? And do I age gate you based on German law or English what happens if I show you a BOGOF offer do I obey German law or English What happens if google messes up. What happens if your in Quebec and I accidently show you an illegal competition What T&C's do I show you

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zdragnar 8y ago

Geographic location is incredibly ineffective anyway depending on your ISP and other factors. Rather than defaulting to English, why not default to whatever the browser's OS is set to? At least for JS apps, there's navigator.languages, and there's an Accept-Language header for both language and locale for standard server-rendered plain ol' websites. Geographic location really does seem like the worst possible option to use.

atemerev 8y ago
Yet Google, Microsoft and Apple use it. :( At least with Google, you can usually log in to your profile and set it to English; with Microsoft and Apple, you are out of luck.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  That's one big problem on the web, IMO. Google in particular does a lot of things that are questionable UX-wisely, to put it charitably, and then a lot of web shops try to copy those things without giving them any critical thought.
mattnewton 8y ago
Is it really the worst possible option? It’s often a pretty good guess, and accept-language is similarly unreliably set and can be fiddled with by intermediaries. Navigator.language doesn’t help you until you’ve already served and run JavaScript. The right solution I think is to make a reasonable guess and then allow the user to control it. None of these guesses are going to work for everybody on their own.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  I'm unaware of any intermediaries that fiddle with accept-language, so I can't really speak to how reliable it is. I can say that due to the ISP I use geolocation typically gets my location wrong by somewhere between 650 - 1600 km (400 and 1000 miles).
cdtwoaway 8y ago

Kim_Bruning 8y ago

Presumably you'd be fine with Russian too, but by the sound of it you've given up on ever seeing THAT. ;-) (personally English is also often first choice, especially for tech documentation. Translations often seem to be an afterthought and can be pretty random. You need to translate randomly picked words back to the original jargon as best you can and hope you didn't miss anything. )

davnicwil 8y ago
Yeah tech documentation is a really interesting edge case for translation, as a good chunk of it will be new vocab and/or simply invented vocab for most native English speakers reading it anyway, so it's actually a pretty philosophical question about language itself if/how that stuff can be translated to other languages at all.

Kurtz79 8y ago

This is fromt he point of view of someone that is fluent in English. I assure you that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, etc... this is true but for a small percentage of the population. It makes no business sense for a company not to localize a website or a service, if your market has a substantial number of non-English speakers. But yes, for my own convenience (unironically), I wish that every website had a base English version that you could access with a single click. For example I was looking at some Microsoft webpage with troubleshooting or API information (can't remember). By default it was shown traslated based on my location, but there was a prominent "Read this in English" switch at the top. Top marks.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
The problem is not the localization. It's choosing the default language based on anything other than explicit info provided by user-agent - that is, URL and Accept-Language, in that order.
sametmax 8y ago
French here. Yes, the english level is terrible in my country. Unfortuntly, translation is imperative if you want to enter the market. Which sucks, because it's a huge waste. There is not benefit to it: a UI is not like a book, you don't lose some quality in translation. In fact, most UI are worse once translated because english is a short and to the point language, which is what you want for buttons and menus.
Symbiote 8y ago
How many people in France have their computer / browser set to English, but don't understand English? I could see that being more common in the early 2000s, when it was probably easier to find a pirate version of Windows in English, but now...?
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I can't speak about France, but my experience in the U.S. is that recent immigrants who can't speak English still set their computers to English. For some it's because they're so used to the non-English versions of web pages being so bad or abbreviated that having an English page they can half read is often better than the truncated "good enough" version provided in their native tongue.

xorand 8y ago

It's because a huge number of people just discovered the net and they don't surf as we are used to, like they don't search as we do etc. I don't want to sound elitist, many of them don't have the experience of it. They are going to repeat all behaviors and fall in all traps since we were new on the net. I see this in the way my kids use their phones.

K0nserv 8y ago

I use a VPN for all traffic, using an exit server in Finland. I don't speak a word of finnish. I have chatted with people who work on internationalization about IP based detection. The explanation I've always heard is that `Accept-Language` is all but useless. For a significant number of users the value is, incorrectly, `en-US`. Because of how unreliable `Accept-Language` is, IP based detection is unfortuantely has a much lower false positive rate.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
In general, I expect a web site, if it's available in more than one language, to offer me a menu where I pick the language I want. It's easy to do and it works for everyone. Usually the languages will also be accompanied by a little flag for extra non-ambiguity. See the "Change region" menu at the top of https://www.nintendo.com https://www.nintendo.com, or the obvious "English" selector amidst the gibberish at the top of https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/ . Given how easy and robust this is... what exactly is the problem with using Accept-Language as your first guess? Maybe if more sites honored Accept-Language, users would start setting it.
- K0nserv 8y ago
  You still have to pick a default region/language unless you want to force the user to make a selection before they get anywhere which is a mess UX-wise
  - Technetium_Hat 8y ago
    Ikea still uses such a landing page if you go directly to ikea.com .
pinum 8y ago
If it's specifically that value that's a problem then I'd suggest the following heuristic: Use geolocation if `Accept-Language` is `en-US`, otherwise respect the header. Technical users in Switzerland/Japan/wherever who want to see English pages can set their header to "en-GB" or "en-AU" to avoid getting caught in the heuristic. Edit: I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, of course- l10n isn't my job and I don't want to be this guy https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/

infimum 8y ago

I live in Switzerland too and especially Youtube never seems to know whether to serve me ads in German, French or Italian (even though Google should know I almost exclusively consume English content). So I can sometimes watch several videos in a row, where I get served the same ad in a different language.

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Svip 8y ago
But don't ads on YouTube follow the more classic advertisement 'demographics', where location is more relevant than language? And it may just be cheaper and easier to just target all of Switzerland?
Leherenn 8y ago
This is where I feel a bit better about targeted advertising, if they're not able (as in at least not cheaply enough to be worth it) to serve me an ad in a language I understand, they still have a long way to go. And that's in Switzerland where people have a lot of disposable income and thus must be more attractive to advertisers than most places, despite being relatively small.

sveme 8y ago

Yes! When I head to docs.microsoft.com they show me a really bad machine-translated site of the C# API. And it is hard to change to the original English site. I am a software developer; I know English, thank you very much!

w-m 8y ago
One of the few things where Google Search is really awful for me personally. I've set it up to get search results in German (country of residence) and English (everything else). But I haven't found a way to communicate to it that for anything technical, I have a very strong preference for the English results. If I search for "std::vector", I get https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://de.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the first result and https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector as the second. The German translation is just awful and completely trips you up if you know English. I don't understand why it keeps pushing them up.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  My previous job had me traveling between Germany and China; during that time, Google's ridiculous localization of search results was becoming unbearable. I ended up permanently overriding my default search engine to point to this URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s. (It broke auto-suggesting search terms in the omnibar, but the actual search results are again sane.)
- AnabeeKnox 8y ago
  Me too. I've had to start using DuckDuckGo, NOT for privacy reasons, but it get around Google's lunatic forced geolocated search.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  You cut to the core of the problem; user-preferred language for content is arbitrarily context-dependent.
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sametmax 8y ago

My pet peeve is when I have an application crash and the error message has been translated. Now googling it is extra fun, not to mention bug reporting. Fortunatly with Linux, I usually can get the proper message with "LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8" if I can, and desire, repeat the exact same error. Now I understand that this is done for openess and diversity. But technical terms should not be translated. I'm french, and I accept that english has won as the business language, and the IT language. Let's move on. Honestly, we are wasting humanity potential for not having a common language. I really, really wish we would all learn english as the second language, and that all laws, forms, labels and signs would be translated to english everywhere (as an addition to the local lang, not a replacement). It's an imperfect language, but it won half of the world, and the other half will have an easier time learning it that us learning theirs. Plus it has a very simple alphabet, and is already used for science, business and international politics. At this stage, I would gladly agree for all the french books and movies being burned and lost forever if it means one language, any language really, becomes magically the main one for humanity. We have too many communication problems. But since magic doesn't exist, what about getting off the ego train and just adopt the imperfect status quo and make something awesome with it for a change ?

Baeocystin 8y ago
English in terms of number of speakers has already reached the point where the number of ESL speakers outstrips the number of native ones by a good margin. The simple alphabet is a plus. I wish the spelling wasn't so godawful.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Yeah but I don't know any language used by hundred of millions of people that doesn't have many gotchas. Could be worse. The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D
  - CPLX 8y ago
    > The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D You're saying this like it isn't already happening.

Gibbon1 8y ago

I think your comment is kinda funny. Reminds me of California, a lot of effort goes into to providing public services in languages people best understand[1]. Not the local language or the default language of country of origin. Someone from South America might not actually speak Spanish. They might speak Quechua for instance. Brings up the point, 'internationalization' as a concept is utterly broken. People speak languages not countries. Also very likely that the non default language users may also be most in need. Probably should be a list of falsehoods programmers think about language. [1] Local school district I think at one time listed 43 languages.

retromario 8y ago

Yes, as an English speaker living in Germany, this is also something that drives me up the wall, but has also gotten better recently. My personal favorites, the cream of the crop: * Netflix: full site in English, subtitles (and audio tracks) for all shows available in German, English and several other languages. Only a few edge cases where the source (written) material appearing on-screen has already been hard-translated in. * Amazon: will let you turn on full English experience, up to and including...English speaking support (both written and verbal). This is truly the cream of the crop in terms of quality of experience. I really appreciate any German-oriented site that offers English as a possible language in spite of knowing my location. And if somewhere on your servers you already have English available, you would be silly to not make that available world-wide (where it makes sense). Of course, these are two of the biggest tech companies, so perhaps that speaks to the cost of internationalization.

Markoff 8y ago
pff this is nothing, German and English are quite similar languages, try living as foreigner in China, very enjoyable experience online /s

zebraflask 8y ago

Sounds more like you'd prefer an agreed upon lingua franca.

avip 8y ago

The worse offender here is nba.com, which Geo-redirects you to some local TV channel based on X-Forwarded-For header.

WalterBright 8y ago

My original compilers had error messages in English, German, French, and Japanese. It was a fair amount of work to make that work. I was pretty proud of it. Turns out that I couldn't find anyone who ever used the non-English messages. Everyone preferred the English messages, because everything else with programming was in English. So I abandoned worry about that, and haven't heard anything about it since. (Though the compiler uses UTF-8 strings for all text.)

blattimwind 8y ago
One problem with the translated GCC messages was that GCC didn't use error numbers at the time (still doesn't, I think, I didn't notice anyway), so it was basically impossible to reference the error except by full error message. MSVC on the other hand always includes a warning/error number, so there less issues talking about a particular error independent of language.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Since I gave up on translated error messages, using search and the error message string works fine (much better than a catalog of error codes).

iagooar 8y ago

> Please just use English Excuse me, sir. I would rather prefer it to always be German. Or French. Or Spanish. Or Italian. Not everybody speaks English, so it's perfectly fine to try and guess the person's language first - and allow to change it later. Also, once the UK has left the EU, English is not even going to be an official language here anymore - so I can see no reason why English should be the default in Europe.

not2b 8y ago
Ireland isn't leaving, so English will still be an official language.
- iagooar 8y ago
  Not true - each European country can only choose one language - and Ireland chose Gaelic, since Britain chose English ;)

NicoJuicy 8y ago

You are an edge case. Go to the site in English, remove the root URL from your history. So it always suggests the English version ( URL) of the website. Best practise of a website ( eg. Google) don't suggest redirection based on an IP, which means a correct URL or cookie would suffice in most cases