45 ms·

Don't set the language of your website based on user location

• johnnyo 6y ago
  This is only a good suggestion if all the other people in Germany that want German content have their browser languages correctly configured. My guess is that they don’t, and this fix would hurt more users than it helps.
  • oxguy3 6y ago
    Why wouldn't people have their language set correctly? Usually your browser language defaults to your system language, and presumably when you bought your computer, you selected your preferred language during the initial setup. If you had your browser set incorrectly, you would probably have dealt with that problem immediately when you saw all the menus and such in an unfamiliar language. Perhaps some multilingual users might have one of their secondary language(s) set instead of their primary/preferred one, but at least it'll be a language they speak. More importantly, even if the user has their browser screwed up, it's something that can be easily fixed on their end. But on sites that set language based on location, there isn't such an easy fix available; short of relocating or using a VPN, people in OP's situation are kinda screwed.
    • johnnyo 6y ago
      I don't run a German website, so I can't give you exact numbers, but in my experience, software can often default to something like 'en-US' in a variety of cases where you might not expect it to. This is especially common in poorly localized tools. For example, a poorly implemented browser component inside some other tool or phone app might not properly set this value, and instead default to en-US. Switching to the proposed method might fix the author's problem, but create a bunch of problems for other users in other scenarios.
  • turnipla 6y ago
    Why wouldn’t Germans have their “browser languages configured correctly?” German is well supported by software. If Germans want German content, they’ll have their OS set to use German. Filipinos on the other hand would be a better example: Their software is likely to be in English but surely they prefer reading Tagalog or Cebuano. - - As a traveler, I’m thoroughly annoyed by being shown websites in the local language, but that would be perfectly fine if it was easy for me to change the language. Sadly though changing the language often means having to learn what “Settings, Language, <language name>” looks like in the current country.
    • johnnyo 6y ago
      I don't run a German website, so I can't give you exact numbers, but in my experience, software can often default to something like 'en-US' in a variety of cases where you might not expect it to. This is especially common in poorly localized tools. For example, a poorly implemented browser component inside some other tool or phone app might not properly set this value, and instead default to en-US. Switching to the proposed method might fix the author's problem, but create a bunch of problems for other users in other scenarios.
      • imedadel 6y ago
        Not sure about German-speaking countries, but in Francophone countries, everything is in French. Even if the default is English, the user would insist on switching to the French version.
• pier25 6y ago
  God I hate this. Show me your website based on the language of my browser, or in English. Period. Yes, I live in Mexico, and yes I speak Spanish, but no I don't want to see your terrible translation.
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    I find it rare, have you configured the language used by the browser when it request pages? It's different from the language user interface.
• turnipla 6y ago
  Yes and no. I’m in Switzerland, please follow my browser language. Don’t guess whether I speak Swiss, French, Italian, etc I’m in Laos, my OS is in English. Please show me Laotian. However, do make it easy for anyone to change the language. I shouldn’t have to hunt the settings page when traveling.
  • DXA9zE 6y ago
    Why would you want to see Laotian? Agree with the op. Not only do I regularly struggle with location-based internationalization, sometimes I can't even /see/ pages depending on location. Tried to find the product page for new google ear buds thing (in Korea) and they refuse to even display it. Of course, setting up local ssh tunnel to ec2 machine based in US takes < 60sec but it's still annoying.
    • turnipla 6y ago
      > Why would you want to see Laotian? Statistically speaking, Laotian users speak Laotian. As a traveler, I’m the minority. Regarding the rest, I feel you. They can guess whatever language as long as they make it easy to change it, without unnecessary redirection games. Apple.com is relatively good with this: > Hey I see you’re in Thailand, maybe you want to check out the Thai site.
      • DXA9zE 6y ago
        I thought you were suggesting that you would prefer to see Laotian despite OS/browser language settings, nvm
  • mrweasel 6y ago
    Exactly, there isn't really a right answer. In my case: I want Danish, if and only IF the site is a Danish website. If you're not a Danish website, I would like English, even though a Danish version may be available. Of cause that bad advise for many sites, because basically my request is that sites like Linkedin or Facebook just drops localization, but that's not what my mom wants.
• JonRB 6y ago
  I experienced this a lot while growing up in a country with ~4 national languages - I spoke one of them well, but sadly only about 20% of the population speak it, so most websites will default to using the bigger national language (~70% pop) regardless of what your computer is set to. It's really not that hard to find the language switcher on most websites, but it's still a bit annoying.
  • jaflo 6y ago
    Switzerland?
    • JonRB 6y ago
      Yep! I grew up in French-speaking Switzerland.
  • 1bc29b36f623ba8 6y ago
    Yeah, it's annoying as hell. I especially despise when sites force me to manually select another country from a list, in order to get an interface in my native language. The country selection itself is trivial, but often the content will be geo-specific as well, and you might end up with things like the wrong currency and so on.
    • Spivak 6y ago
      Ahh the “is it the US or British flag next to English” problem. I’m genuinely surprised that there’s not a falsehoods article that includes things like: * The mapping between languages and countries is 1-1. * Every language has a mother single mother country. * “English” refers to a single language. * “US English” is good enough for all English speakers. * US English is well defined and refers to a single language. * You can partition a map into areas for which there is a single reasonable default language. And so on.
      • JimDabell 6y ago
        It (long) predates "falsehoods" style articles, but this article is pretty commonly cited: http://jkorpela.fi/flags.html http://jkorpela.fi/flags.html
• vidanay 6y ago
  Could be worse....every few months, my corporate VPN decides I am at HQ in Switzerland, even though I am still in the US. Ich spreche kein Deutsch.
• imedadel 6y ago
  G Suite does this and never saves my preferences! I'm in Tunisia and the business language is French. My PC and my browser are both set to English. Yet, Google insists on showing me the Arabic page! Not only that, but their translation is terrible. Plus, since Arabic is not the business language here, most of the terms used on their site are quite ambiguous to most Tunisian users. Ugh.
• Sevaris 6y ago
  One of the many reasons why I hate modern websites. They try to be too clever and try to guess what language I want, despite my OS and browser being set to en-US. And then make it particularly difficult to change the language manually in a persistent way. Why even bother with region settings if they're not going to be respected by websites or, hell, even games. I've noticed that if I have my system language set to English and my region set to German, some games will default to German. Which is annoying, but particularly infuriating when some games don't even provide an in-game language select, instead forcing me to Google for the right config file I need to change. And the only reason why I sometimes have my region set to German? There's no other way to change the MS/Xbox store region. Actually, it's not just websites I hate. A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.
  • PunksATawnyFill 6y ago
    Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF!
    • greenknight 6y ago
      my other pet peeve.... stop hi-jacking my scroll wheel and converting it to 'smooth scroll'. i dont want crappy animations, you have content, i have a method of scrolling, let me control how i do this.
      • theprotocol 6y ago
        Smooth scroll that snaps to set scroll levels is absolutely infuriating. I question the psychological integrity of anyone who thinks it's a good idea; how much of a control freak must you be to want to micromanage people's scrolling?
      • hnick 6y ago
        And 90% of the time, smooth scroll isn't.
      • jamil7 6y ago
        Are people still doing this?! Haven't seen it in a while but it was one of the worst web trends of the last few years.
• tluyben2 6y ago
  Yes, please! It is incredibly annoying, especially when it is hard to find the button to change it. Google seems a big offender; I have to fix it many times. Very weird as they also present localised ads which I cannot read...
• woutr_be 6y ago
  This is one of my main pain points with a lot of websites, including Google. I live in Hong Kong, and it constantly keeps setting itself in Chinese. Quite a few websites do this, even though my browser is set to English. Worst of all, even when I set Google to English, the OAuth popups remain in Chinese with no option to change.
  • AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    My favorite was getting a recaptcha in Thai when logging into LinkedIn during my first week in Chiangmai.
• vivekv 6y ago
  Yes Completely agree. I live in India - we have 30 + languages. I speak and read 3 of them.. So most of the time when sites try this, I am struggling.
• m463 6y ago
  I have a theory that if there are many ways to do something, but one retrieves more data about the user, that way will win. For example, cisco webex turns on 24/7 microphone access "to find nearby displays". this could be a funding model - if your app can plausibly access (contacts, location, microphone, camera, photo library, ...) then it should get more funding (because you can slap on an advertising SDK to "coincidentally" extract more user data)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dylanowen 6y ago
    Your theory sounds reasonable but in the case of webex it's using ultrasound put out from the displays to figure out which room you're in. https://help.webex.com/en-us/WBX89838/What-is-Cisco-Intelligent-Proximity-Content-Sharing https://help.webex.com/en-us/WBX89838/What-is-Cisco-Intellig...
    • Spivak 6y ago
      Like this kind of feature should really be “only when I click the scan button” but I have to say it’s pretty neat in practice. Short distance data channels that solve the “two computers physically next to each other can’t communicate frustration” are always welcome in my book.
    • m463 6y ago
      See, you will enable it. it is plausible why you should give over microphone access. (meanwhile I can also add an advertising sdk to listen for nearby television advertisements or recognize nearby music to "add value")
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• sn41 6y ago
  Yeah, this is pretty horrible. Many applications try to be friendly and show a Hindi webpage just because you are in India or in particular, Northern India. India has around 25 major languages, and people from all over the country work in all parts of the country, so assuming Hindi as the default language for every person currently present in North India is not correct. Language is a sensitive issue in several parts of India. Why not be polite and ask the user for language preference first?
  • theawless 6y ago
    Seriously. I'm a Hindi speaker living in South India and I keep getting Google search results. Facebook also thinks I must understand the language.
• beshrkayali 6y ago
  Some websites (Mozilla) doesn't even show a language change option on all of their deep link, which is annoying on a whole new level.
  • dingo_bat 6y ago
    Some websites show the link but if you change the language it goes to the home page.
• gield 6y ago
  Belgian here. This has gotten considerably better over the years. 10-15 years ago, it felt like every website threw a 2-sided dice to decide between Dutch and French. Even though I'm in the Dutch-speaking part, and not particularly close to the French-speaking part (for Belgian standards).
  • roelschroeven 6y ago
    Still happens. Even worse, there are sites that still think French is the only language in Belgium. Sometimes they offer French and English for Belgium, even though they do have a Dutch-language site if you choose the Netherlands instead of Belgium. I don't understand where they get their info on languages in Belgium. For those who don't know: in a long gone past, any official business in Belgium was done in French, even though about half of the population spoke Dutch. But that's long gone, and certainly dates from long before the rise of the world wide web. These days we have three official languages: Dutch, spoken by about 40% of the population; French, about 40%; German, less than 1%. EDIT: Example: Nvidia's site. Opens in French for me, and the "Select your location" page has only "Belgique (Belgium)" for Belgium, which links to a site in French. For our Dutch neighbors in the Netherlands they do have a site in Dutch. I don't even understand why they don't just offer a language choice instead of a location/language choice. The specs and drivers for a video card are the same whether the card is in Belgium or in the USA or anywhere else.
  • steerablesafe 6y ago
    > 2-sided dice A coin?
• julianlam 6y ago
  Why does setting the language based on location even happen? It seems like far more work to do that instead of just checking the `Accept-Language` header. When I did it, I just mapped the browser language to our languages and called it a day, no complaints so far. So far as I know, most browsers send that header in.
  • latchkey 6y ago
    That's exactly what should happen, the problem is a lot of sites don't do that. I'm US, living in Vietnam and half the time the Facebook login screen turns up with Vietnamese and no way to change the language. If anything, this forced me to learn those 'login' words in Vietnamese.
    • realusername 6y ago
      I can confirm having the exact same issue, Facebook isn't alone though. Google also tries to be clever and fails hard. There's only one way to get the preferred user language, it's to check the Accept-Language header, anything else will fail, please don't try to be clever.
    • yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
      I'm British and also living in Vietnam currently, and this has also been my experience. Also, if I'm in Thailand all the Google search results are returned with timestamps converted to Buddhist calendar years. Genius. Is it unreasonable of me to be less tolerant of this brokenness when it comes from companies with all the money in the world, and also all the highest paid developers in the world? Imagine being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, but not being able to follow a basic HTTP specification. Insane.
• jacknews 6y ago
  Yes this is super annoying, especially if you're in a country with it's own alphabet, and the 'change language' menu item is written in that script which you can't read. Google maps, for example.
• andrewstuart 6y ago
  Just this morning I was getting annoyed about exactly this. If I want the Australian site I'll go to the .au domain name. If I go to .com then I want the global/USA site. It is SO annoying when going to .com redirects to .au Maybe this is what happens when companies stockpile so many developers that they have more than they need - everything that can be written does get written.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    But then what do you do for some of my relatives who are not making that decision based on the domain and then get made when they can't get the .com stuff in Canada?
    • bald42 6y ago
      I think amazon makes this right. If you go to a amazon.com page it shows you the actual page but also asks you if you would rather go to your local amazom.whatever site.
• sfj 6y ago
  Who do all of the commentors who are complaining about this think they are talking to? The HN comment system isn't a direct line to God, you know?
  • marakv2 6y ago
    Haha, maybe were all hoping other devs will notice and remember next time this comes up?
    • sfj 6y ago
      I think there is enough collective whining on the internet that this little impromptu choir is going to get drowned out...
• zerof1l 6y ago
  On a related note, always leave the text on the page as an actual text. Don't put it into an image. This gives visitors a chance to easily translate the text. I've had this horrible experience so many times in a foreign country. Somewhat ironically most of the time those would be governmental websites or some important announcements. If you've made this fancy image that looks like a brochure and you must put it on a website and you can't be bothered making it in HTML with text, at least write all the text on the image in alt attribute or under the image.
  • akiselev 6y ago
    I think this goes back to the early days of web development. Before we could add fonts with CSS @include and had to write progressive websites (yay 800x600), everyone who wished to use custom or platform specific fonts had to generate images with that text using a php script or some such. Since government IT is chronically underfunded (IMO) and the web hit critical mass late 90s/early 2000s - long before best practices or new technologies could be widely disseminated - most of them are stuck in that time period because that's when they were first forced to support the web.
• est31 6y ago
  Microsoft is doing this as well. I google something in english, find an english MSDN entry with english title and preview, but when I click on the link, the language changes to German. I'm a native German speaker but having read about technical topics almost exclusively in english for years, I'm just much more comfortable in english now. What makes it even worse is that often it's not properly translated, but just Microsoft's translation machine applied to the English version. The result isn't very good. And even if it were manually translated, the result would likely end up a mixture of english and German. German is a very nice language, as is english, but what I absolutely hate is the mix of the two, also called denglisch.
  • taneq 6y ago
    At one point Windows 10 used to use your keyboard layout to choose your local language. So as an Aussie I was stuck choosing between spellcheck telling me 'colour' and 'flavour' were wrong, or having to deal with a UK keyboard layout. It seems fixed now but it was really annoying.
  • Swizec 6y ago
    One day I was visiting Austria when I used my mobile browser to find something on Google. The results came back in German. Ok fine whatever, don’t really speak German but did enough in high school to muddle through. Proba localization, will turn back when I go home. 2 years later and Google on my phone remains German. This is my life now ... at least I get to practice a little german I guess
    • mynegation 6y ago
      Not a language, but hotels.com was quoting me prices to North American hotels in Rupias months after my visit to India.
      • moepstar 6y ago
        Same for Tripadvisor after being in Mexico - all Hotel prices have been in Pesos for a while (had to manually change it back)
• s9w 6y ago
  God yes.. in particular Google is horrible with this. They have the interface language and the search language as different setting, both default to German if you're in Germany. Have you tried using German google? It's abysmal. Try googling for Any piece of open source Software. You'll end up at a third party clickbait website that offers an infested download (often chip.de). That's why many Germans end up with horribly infected PCs.
  • gmueckl 6y ago
    Chip.de is a reputable site. I see your argument for going tonthe primary source of a software and this is what I always try to do. But I don't get your hate. They don't repackage things the way Sourceforge tried to or anything like that. So all the downloads I made from their site were maybe outdated, but they were all genuine.
    • s9w 6y ago
      I stand corrected if that changed. I definitely remember that they offered some own binary downloader in the past (might have been a decade though). SEE EDIT At the very least they should not be the first hit if you search for the program name. I don't get how that could possibly change with language selection. edit: Inkscape results in a "Inkscape - CHIP-Installer.exe" download with my antimalware immediately sprinting to my rescue.
      • gmueckl 6y ago
        Whoa, I cannot reproduce that. I don't doubt your report, but I see a completely different behavior. When I want to download Inkscape for Windows, I get a zip file. When I download GIMP for Windows, I seem to get a genuine installer with the same size and filename as what is offered on gimp.org. I didn't download these files on Windows, though.
        • rndgermandude 6y ago
          I can reproduce this easily. I went to their website[1], and clicked the prominent Download button[2]. Next to that button it says "Sicherer Download" (secure download). The executable file downloaded is not the original installer but the a binary with their chip icon and signed by Chip GmbH. Running that "installer" then asked me if I wanted an amazon desktop icon (with their affiliate link in it, I am sure), and clicking just Next asked me again if I wanted it because I "did not make a selection". Then it offered to "block annoying ads" (the irony!) by installing Opera (again asking me again when I clicked next). Then it finally downloaded something. Says that something was checked by Kaspersky. The download progress screen also asked me if my PC was slow, and if I wanted to call some "free" number to have experts check my computer for free(!) (via Teamviewer or telephone, wat). And if I did call those experts, I'd even get a free McAfee license! (what do Kaspersky, who scanned the download, think about that?). The "free" number is actually a number somewhere in Frankfurt am Main, so it's not actually toll free as far as I can tell; if I am correct, this would be a direct violation of German law which states that ads giving you a number to call have to correctly state the charges associated with a call. I eventually ended up with a .zip file that contains the actual Inkscape installer. Or rather installers; it contained both the 32 bit and 64 bit installers. Those installers are not launched automatically by the way. So the usual "unsavvy" user will end up with two files in a zip with no idea what to do next. So the Chip "installer" is just for displaying those ads, pushing their crapware, but will not actually help you install the software you wanted. Here are some screenshots https://imgur.com/a/tyIopku https://imgur.com/a/tyIopku . And rather on-topic it displayed the UI as a mix of English and German because I was using an English language Windows Sandbox... If you just want the zip without the adware "installer", you have to click the regular "Manuelle Installation" link (far less prominently featured than the crapware button), then again click something, and then it will download the same zip without the "installer". [1] https://www.chip.de/downloads/Inkscape_15274752.html https://www.chip.de/downloads/Inkscape_15274752.html [2] https://i.imgur.com/Bn2GU3A.png https://i.imgur.com/Bn2GU3A.png [3] https://imgur.com/a/tyIopku https://imgur.com/a/tyIopku
• kiliancs 6y ago
  So many websites do this. It's been very frustrating for years. I have everything set up to Catalan or otherwise English, but so many websites decide they should force me into their Spanish version. I don't even live in a Spanish-speaking country. I get it, you see Catalan and think, hey, we don't have Catalan, but we can offer Spanish! Well, not all Catalan speakers live in Spain. Catalan has been spoken for centuries in other areas. Consider the case of my kids who read and speak Catalan and English, but not Spanish.
  • enriquto 6y ago
    I'm in the exact same situation and it is terribly infuriating! As a good thing, this has somewhat forced me out of google search and now I get to enjoy duckduckgo which does not seem to pull this kind of shit on you.
• deanmkenzey 6y ago
  And stop disallowing me to paste into password fields please. I use Keepass.. ..ever tried to enter by hand secure passwords like this: cw-ZY~!$m=#3RM4",Y9Mpcd\_!+z;FN]p They actually trying to force me to use more insecure passwords.
  • peteretep 6y ago
    I'd like Apple's App Store review process to turn down apps that do this or don't allow 1Password integration
  • cessor 6y ago
    Three things: - YES, you are 100% right - Keepass has a Ctrl+V mode, which pretends to type into username / password fields char by char. maybe this feature can give you peace of mind - Still, you are right, the website shouldn't make assumptions on how you handle passwords
  • vidarh 6y ago
    I ended up writing a custom browser extension to handle one particularly annoying login process for a site I need to use regularly that in addition to asking for password asks for several other pieces of information on a "1st character of ..., 3rd character of ..." type basis. It's infuriating.
• Raed667 6y ago
  Youtube has this "feature" where it translates video titles for me (and it is always horrible). I feel like it never occurred to them that a person could speak more than one language.
  • alpaca128 6y ago
    Ah yes, that's horrible. No matter if the user couldn't understand a word in the video itself if he needed that translation, let's just deceive him by showing him a badly translated video title in the wrong language. Meanwhile I have to set the site to dark mode and English again multiple times a year because Google struggles to persistently store this simple user setting.
    • liziwizi 6y ago
      Ow, yes, the translated titles are so confusing. You think you're getting a video in your language, but no, you don't. It's just a badly translated title and captions. And don't get me started on those captions! Youtube, please stahp! Why do you keep forcing these? I don't want them, stop pushing them. Whenever we use Chromecast with multiple people, Youtube enables the auto-translated captions. So, we turn it off, next video youtube turns it on again, we turn it off again, next vid, it's there again. arrgghhhhhh
      • glandium 6y ago
        The youtube app recently got awful wrt caption. It always enables them now, so I end up disabling them manually. But then if there's an ad in the middle of the video, after the ad, they're back! And that's with subtitles being disabled in the app settings!
  • innocenat 6y ago
    Is that feature auto? I mean, I find that it is almost always require the uploader to approve the language. Human translator can be horrible too.
    • 6y ago
• Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  aliexpress had the worst version I had ever seen. I clicked on a link to the French site and got the french version, then I tried to find a way to switch it, saw nothing (couldnt access the footer due to infinite scroll) so I went to the .com version and it was still in french. Cleared my cookies for that site and it was STILL in french for the main page on the .com domain. No idea _what_ they were doing, must have been browser fingerprinting or saving it by IP address. I was not logged in.
• pabs3 6y ago
  The browser vendors don't make it easy to change the browser language (and especially not on a per-site basis) so users are unlikely to be able to change the language if it is wrong, so if decide to use the browser language instead of the location, please also have an option in your site to set a cookie that overrides the browser settings. You can even do this on completely static HTML-only websites that don't use JavaScript or server-side code. Debian is an example of this: https://www.debian.org/intro/cn#override https://www.debian.org/intro/cn#override https://salsa.debian.org/dsa-team/mirror/dsa-puppet/-/raw/master/modules/roles/templates/apache-www.debian.org.erb https://salsa.debian.org/dsa-team/mirror/dsa-puppet/-/raw/ma...
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    > The browser vendors don't make it easy to change the browser language In Firefox it's in the first page of the settings: Tools > Options > Language and appearance, there you can change the language of the UI and the preferred language for displaying pages.
    • ken 6y ago
      I have my Firefox "Language and Appearance" language set to "English (United States)". I'm not sure why this setting even exists, because the operating system also has a language setting, which I've also set to "English (US)". Yet somehow, some parts of my Firefox UI are still in Japanese. Nobody has ever been able to explain why, or how to fix it. I don't understand why a web browser (or any application) needs a custom language setting, much less a prominent one. It's just one more place that can fail.
      • account42 6y ago
        > I don't understand why a web browser (or any application) needs a custom language setting, much less a prominent one. It's just one more place that can fail. For entertainment including games I want them to be in the original languaugage they were developed in (if it's one I can speak fluently) even if that differs from my system language (which differs from my native language (which at many points in my life has differed from the default language for my location)). I don't personally have a reason to have a different language for my browser UI though, but perhaps someone else does. However I agree that the default for application languages should be "use the system default" - not whatever was the system default at installation time or some other fixed language.
• cstuder 6y ago
  Minor pet peeve of mine: Some websites put the language selector on the bottom of the page. I usually first look it up on the top right. Then I go back to editing to URL before scrolling all the way down. (And hoping it doesn't use infinite scrolling...)
• bonestamp2 6y ago
  Agreed, location should not be the primary way to decide which language is served up, but it's also not as simple as the article suggests. I have been building web apps for a couple decades and have some that operate in dozens of languages. My best practise is to only look at your region when your selected language has regional variations. However, that's true for most of the popular languages which is why it isn't as easy as the article suggests. For example, your browser's language is set to English. Cool. But, are you in America or somewhere else? Oh you're in Canada, no problem neighbour. Spanish? Are you in Mexico or Spain? Don't worry, I'll give you the appropriate version of our Spanish translations then. French? You in Canada or France? Portuguese, Brazil or Portugal? Not to mention, when you're operating in a lot of languages, and your application is in active development, you're constantly sending out copy for translation. Different translators have different turnaround times and they don't always make it into the release schedule. So, what happens when a translation is missing in a particular language? First we fall back to another region for the same language, then we fall back to English. American English to be specific -- that's the language the developers and product managers write in so there's always an American English translation. Then, we also allow the user to override their browser settings and pick whichever language they want. That is saved to their user profile so wherever they're logged in they'll get the language they have set for our applications. So ya, we give you your configured language whenever possible. But asking us to ignore region is not ideal for most users either.
  • moepstar 6y ago
    The procedure you describe sounds like the sane thing to do / to me :)
  • marcus_holmes 6y ago
    >> For example, your browser's language is set to English. Cool. That's where this example should stop. Your site should then serve me English, because that's the language I've told you that I understand. Why are you changing it based on my location? Why are you serving an English-speaking tourist in Mexico "the appropriate version of our Spanish translations" when their browser just fucking told you THEY WANTED THE ENGLISH VERSION?!!
• alpaca128 6y ago
  Microsoft Visio set itself to English on my computer even though its (Microsoft Windows) system language was set to German. The reason? It didn't recognise the region-specific language setting "German (Austria)". There was no way of setting or changing the program language other than reinstalling the whole thing with a different system language set.
• lazerlapin 6y ago
  He's missing the why they're doing this. Tons of websites are server-rendered, which means the decision of which language to show has to be made upfront: at the time of the first HTTP request, so before sending the page to the user. And we don't know the user's language preferences until we reach the browser and can execute some JavaScript. If we do as he suggest, it would paradoxically lead to the very behavior he is criticizing in the post: page loads default (e.g english), (then reads user preferences with JS, e.g german), then reloads to show german instead. So why pre-populating the page with the langage the users in that particular country are most likely to wanna use a bad 'default'? Would it be worth it to rather worsen their experience by forcing all german users to load english first, and then repaint the page with german? I think only SPAs could afford to implement the whole thing based on user local preferences without major UX drawbacks.
  • marticode 6y ago
    > we don't know the user's language preferences until we reach the browser and can execute some JavaScript This is untrue: the HTTP "Accept-Language" header tells the server what language the browser wants to get, right before any request get served. There is no need for Javascript.
    • lazerlapin 6y ago
      Alright, fair enough
  • robjan 6y ago
    Your browser sends an accept-language request header so JavaScript isn't needed to determine the wanted language. My browser sends "en-GB" in this header but Google always defaults to Chinese because I am using a Hong Kong IP.
• nounaut 6y ago
  Surprisingly many sites also change the content and layout of the site completely. Nvidia for instance turns from a site with company news and a clear path to download your drivers on the US site, to essentially an online store as it defaults to Swedish. The link to download drivers is then moved from the top of the site to the very bottom, where a link to the UK download site is discretely placed.
• cientifico 6y ago
  What should I do if I have different markets? Should I translate all the markets to all languages? In my experience, the problem is different. Company X does not want to translate into different languages, different markets. For example: Apple, Microsoft, Samsung. Amazon video. If you want to see German available products or prices, it have to be in German.
• Agentlien 6y ago
  Nintendo is the one that bothers me the most. Their website defaults to your local language and if you switch they throw up a huge overlay warning that your language doesn't match your location and wouldn't you rather switch back?
• Pmop 6y ago
  I couldn't agree more. When I began to use the internet to read, learn and communicate with people, I eventually found the anglophone community to be bigger and wiser. Also, any content would have its counterpart written in English, which was more detailed and better at explaining the concept. So, now a big chunk of the concepts I know I've learned by reading works written in English. One of the consequences is that every time I need to search for something, I'm not going to write the query in my native language. In this regard, Google wants to be helpful in advance and will rank up results written in my native language, which isn't helpful at all since I'll take longer to understand something written in the former, specially if it's something complex. I switched to DuckDuckGo. Also, now many documentation websites will try to serve their content based on your location. I'm always clicking around.
  • ithkuil 6y ago
    I have the same experience, I use exclusively English to search and read the internet (and also set English as the language on all my devices, forcing it also on my wife's phone, not least because it makes it easier to search for error messages and related solutions). That said, I found it sufficient to switch Google to English and I didn't have to ditch that search engine just because of that reason alone (you might have other good reasons to do it though). I think I used https://google.com/?hl=en https://google.com/?hl=en to set the language; but since it remembers that setting honestly I have no idea if it's still the way to switch languages
    • account42 6y ago
      Google will regularly forget your language setting if you're not logged in.
• kristopolous 6y ago
  I did a writeup about this 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238 ... I thought "ok, that's it! Things will change now! done and done!" well ok, alright, I only fantasized it...
• aiibe 6y ago
  This also applies to currencies. I'd rather have a popup modal that tells me I can choose another currency later. By default leave it set to USD.
  • chakerb 6y ago
    Yes, please. I don't mind even if you set it it by location, but at least provide me a way to change it manually. I live in a north African country, but I get the currency set to south Africa (looking at you origin) without the ability to override!
    • shultays 6y ago
      Not being able to override it part sounds intentional since those stores has regional prices and they don't want people to change currency/region easily.
• swebs 6y ago
  Google is the absolute worst with this. I have to remember to put ?hl=en to the end of every URL for every product they own.
  • adrianh 6y ago
    Have they ever provided a public explanation for their fundamental incompetence here? There’s got to be a good reason, right...?
    • watwut 6y ago
      They are bad at anything user interface related in general. There is no reason to assume good reason.
  • tpmx 6y ago
    I think their logic is roughly speaking this: If the Accept-Language header matches "en-*", ignore that. Instead use geoip to try to guess a language. If the Accept-Language header is something else, use that. There's probably some cookie/Google-ID-based heuristics going on too. Please just give us a UI language selector. Don't leave us with something half-baked that works great for 90% of the users and leaves the remaining people perplexed. People do know multiple languages, and want to search for stuff in other languages too, sometimes. (Yes, it does seem like the UI language is influencing the search results, too.)
• makach 6y ago
  Don't assume any language based on your location. It's a personal preference whatever language you want to use, please respect and allow for me to use the language I am comfortable with. There is only so much EXCEL formula translation I can cope with pr. week.
• FraKtus 6y ago
  I am living in Belgium exactly on the linguistic border. My side of the road is French, the other size is Dutch. Almost all Belgium web sites are in Dutch and google ads keep showing me ads in Dutch that are irrelevant. I try to train google ads but there is no option to say don't show me ads with this language...
  • Onanymous 6y ago
    It could be much worse. I for one often get web sites open in French...
    • dirkf 6y ago
      Same thing here. I'm in Flemish Brabant, very close to the Antwerp border. Google Maps geoip puts me even more north. I have an English browser and OS (granted, with some Belgian regional settings). Yet a lot of web sites choose to show their French version as default. And to top it off the language switch is often hidden away in some bottom corner so it takes you way too long to find it. Give me back my old internet!
• RedShift1 6y ago
  nvidia.com always lands me on their french homepage even though I speak Dutch, live in the Dutch speaking part of my country and have my browser preferred language set to English.
• mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago
  If this affected the language only. I had a creditcarma US account. But when in Canada, they automatically redirect you to creditcarma canada, which has a completely different user database. So there was no way to log into my account, apart from using a VPN and selecting a US IP address.
  • pedrogpimenta 6y ago
    Ugh... (that's the most I can add :)
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    This makes me wonder if Quebec uses the comma as a decimal separator as in France? That could yield to some serious mishaps.
• jjp 6y ago
  Depending on your website market you also shouldn't set language based on browser preferences, but should be user selectable. I've spent years working with desktops builds from US-based IT teams that have then been deployed globally (so language is US and paper size is letter). And then access control is added over the top to prevent end-users changing those settings because when they get it wrong it causes excessive support calls.
• egorfine 6y ago
  Absolutely. Not only stop showing me cyrillic letters when I click on a clearly english page; but also please bear in mind that sometimes you cannot guess which language is correct. Some countries have troubles identifying even their own language, like mine.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  I've been saying this for years. Every browser offer to configure a whole set of preferred languages, including dialects and the order of preference. Every website should respect that choice (unless they didn't have time to implement more than one language at all).
• yarinr 6y ago
  While annoying, I don't even care about websites setting the wrong language as default. What I absolutely HATE, though, is websites and apps that FORCE you to view them in a certain language, based on either location or on OS locale. Google Maps is the worst. I live in Israel, so I obviously want to see street names in Hebrew. My Android device locale is set to English (Because that's the way I prefer, and I also rather not see everything flipped because of the RTL nature of Hebrew). This FORCES me to view street names in English, and there simply NO WAY around it other than changing the device language. It has been this way for years, and it's painful. Why not just let us modify the language on per-app basis?
  • yosito 6y ago
    I'm an American with Hungarian roots. I spend a lot of time in Hungary and I'm currently trying to learn Hungarian. I hate that Google Maps translates all of the local names into my device language, making it impossible to navigate by local names. I've tried setting my phone's default language to Hungarian. That worked well a decade ago when I was learning Spanish. But since my phone is associated with my Google account, as soon as I set my phone to Hungarian, a bunch of other apps suddenly assume I want Hungarian, even when I'm on my desktop. Once while traveling in Thailand, I set my phone to Hungarian for practice, and suddenly Jira on my desktop was in Hungarian. I switched the language back to English on my phone, and Jira still assumed I wanted Hungarian. If you don't know anything about Hungarian, it's a very difficult language to navigate in if you don't speak it because it shares almost no roots with Latin or Germanic languages. It took me weeks to figure out how to get my Jira back into English.
  • boomlinde 6y ago
    I think maps is a specialty case where optionally displaying location names in their native language and script regardless of locale settings may be a useful feature overall. I certainly don't think it should be location based.
• Normille 6y ago
  Yandex Browser has been serving me up random websites in Russian for years now. I don't know what algorithm it's using to do so. My system language, browser language and Yandex profile language are all set to UK English and I'm located in the UK. So it's quite a feat of getting it completely wrong, for the browser to still think I might want to see the Russian versions of so many sites!
  • aembleton 6y ago
    If you go to http://myhttpheader.com/ http://myhttpheader.com/ and look at 'Accept Language' what value does it give? On Firefox I get `en-GB,en;q=0.5`. Maybe Yandex is serving up ru-ru to websites
    • Normille 6y ago
      Nope. Accept language[s]are as expected: en-GB,en;q=0.9,ga;q=0.8,es;q=0.7 I could be wrong. This is a complete guess, but my suspicion is that Yandex Browser is doing some very lazy checking of a user's language preferences and defaults to Russian if the visited site is not available in the user's preferred language[s]and user hasn't got 'en-US' defined as a fallback. [My language preference are set to: English UK > Irish > Spanish > English]
• tduberne 6y ago
  There is worse: websites that redirect you to the homepage in your detected language, rather than the same page in "your" language if it exists, or the original if not. I often have this problem with web shops with my wife, who has a different mother tongue: she sends me a link to eg. a piece of furniture she likes, and all I can see is the homepage of the bloody shop, with no clear way to just say "show me the damn page I asked for". Another fun experience was a short text on an airline website (cannot remember which one) which ended being in 3 different languages, sometimes switching in the middle of a paragraph, depending on whether it was using the language of my location, my browser or my OS. At least that was fun.
  • furyg3 6y ago
    Man this happens all the time, especially for products (which I kind of understand). I was doing some research on camping equipment. Google leads me to a US page. But since I'm in NL, it redirects me to an NL domain, which is a totally different site. That site, of course, doesn't have that page, so I get dumped on their main homepage.
  • woutr_be 6y ago
    Kind of unrelated, but I'm unable to shop on Amazon because of this. As soon as I click on an Amazon link anywhere on the web, it opens the mobile app and enters this weird redirection loop where it keeps asking me if I want to switch to my local Amazon store.
    • 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 6y ago
      Uninstall the app?
• ungerik 6y ago
  Also love those Chinese e-commerce websites that use automated translations based on location for every text on their website, even on product names...
• scotty79 6y ago
  Site language while I'm there is one thing but Czech language adverts followed me around for quite a while after I came back home after a few day trip to Czech Republic.
• joeythegod 6y ago
  True
• sgt 6y ago
  What's worse is Facebook's automatic translations of things you post in a different language. Depending on language, the quality is terrible. And if language X is translated into language Z, bypassing English, it's usually even worse.
• nottorp 6y ago
  Related: Android and iOS, change your spell checkers to accept multiple languages in the same phrase. Lots of people mix English with their native language, and how about, say, Belgium where they speak 3-4 languages regularly?
• nickcw 6y ago
  I guess this begs the question of why this is so widespread? Is it common for users to have the language preferences of their browsers misconfigured? If so then I can see why this is common practice. If not then we should stop using the users' location. Are there any stats anywhere on how likely a user is to have their language preference configured in their browser / OS correctly?
  • ACS_Solver 6y ago
    My feeling is that it's very rare for people to configure their preferred language in the browser. It's a setting buried somewhere in the menus, and anecdotally I would say most people don't even know such a setting exists. I suspect that, for the vast majority of people, their preferred language list is the default, which is then one entry, the same as the browser's UI language.
  • marcosdumay 6y ago
    > Is it common for users to have the language preferences of their browsers misconfigured? At the last millennium it was. Just like some people are still complaining that HTTPS is too CPU intensive, because it used to require a visible share of the cycles of a 486.
• K0nserv 6y ago
  I've always been annoyed at this too, especially when I was using a VPN with an exit node in Finland even though I don't speak Finnish myself. I've asked localisation experts about this and the answer I've gotten is that `Accept-Langauge` and other signals that are available to provide a hint as to the user's preferred language are teribble. For most people they are incorrectly set to some form of English(en-US, en-GB) even though this is not what the user wants. For this reason the IP/geolocation method is preferred, it also generates false negatives but per the people I've spoken too they are fewer than if you just respect `Accept-Language`.
  • marcosdumay 6y ago
    > For most people they are incorrectly set to some form of English(en-US, en-GB) even though this is not what the user wants. This stopped being true a long time ago. It was once a problem, but not during the last decade, and certainly not now.
    • K0nserv 6y ago
      If that's the case I guess the industry has not caught up. I had these conversations about 4 years ago FWIW
• markosaric 6y ago
  Completely agree! I run ProtonVPN pretty much at all times and they have the option to simply connect to the fastest server. Often it happens that it is from a country I don't speak the language to so I hate when sites automatically show me that language. I understand the idea but there are better ways of doing this.
• woutr_be 6y ago
  From a UX perspective, what is the best way to indicate a user can change the language on a website? I see websites using the globe icon a lot. But what I see more, is; websites translating "change language" into the language the website is currently in. How does this even make any sense, if your website is in German, the people who would want to change the language most likely don't speak German. So why is the "change language" link translated in German?
• NicoJuicy 6y ago
  I recently launched a belgian beer shop. The way i thought it was best: - Give users the option to change - If the main user browser language is different than the current one, suggest it more on top: https://www.belgianbrewed.com/nl https://www.belgianbrewed.com/nl - will suggest english for the majority here. [Screenshot] https://gyazo.com/0372490df1b033ac42c8cb7aa3a4198b https://gyazo.com/0372490df1b033ac42c8cb7aa3a4198b My entry page is google. So if they find something in English, i suppose they want the english site. If they don't, i give them the option to change it to the most obvious "supported" option. I do redirect them to the main page, so they see an overview of the shop. Showing them the translated (current) page is not a priority (right now) PS. Google has the option for /ncr . They obviously forgot the use-case where my proxy of work redirects to Paris. PS2. /ncr changed to https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=cr&safe=active&ssui=on https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=cr&safe=active&ssui=on => No Country Redirect.
  • umanwizard 6y ago
    My suggestions: * Make the "continue in English" button easier to find. It does not stand out visually, and I had to search for it. * In the languages dropdown, use the native name for each language (e.g. français, deutsch, English, Nederlands) instead of the Dutch name for all of them.
• brokenkebab 6y ago
  This, and currency too.
• esotericn 6y ago
  The site shouldn't even bloody know my location. Most of the time geolocation seems to completely cock it up anyway because it thinks an IP is based somewhere when it's not. Google like to think I'm Arabic at the moment, bouncing around various Middle Eastern countries. Google Maps sends me to the UAE right now. Y tho?
• eska 6y ago
  Google sends me emails and shows me webpages that are English, German and Japanese at the same time.. I'm in Germany, my browser is set to English, and I bought a play store app while I was in Japan using Japanese money. The other day I wanted to install the "Too Good To Go" app but I had to sideload it because Google thinks the app is not "compatible with your device". It's just region locked and the app should be available to me because I'm not in Japan. When I tried to change the settings on various Google websites, the language kept switching between the three languages. A forward even failed because of this and I had to find out the next URL and manually edit it so that the language didn't change and thereby restart the settings wizard. In the end I couldn't figure it out and gave up.
• cromulent 6y ago
  Question: When is it appropriate, or not, to use language negotiation? Answer: The short answer is: always. https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-lang-neg https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-lang-neg
• bmn__ 6y ago
  Expert advice incoming to alleviate the suffering. How to determine the locale correctly in a Web application: try the following steps, in order. 1. locale preference stored in session of the Web application 2. locale preference stored in user settings of the Web application 3. locale preference advertised in browser 3. a) Accept-Language header 3. b) language/territory in User-Agent header 3. c) IP address lookup/geoip 3. d) Geolocation API 4. default locale of the Web application You will notice that Google tries to be "smarter", to the detraction of the user, as shown in many comments in this thread. Implementation notes: 1. and 2. require a locale selection somewhere as part of the Web application, 3. is browser settings, 4. is hard coded in the Web application. ---- From the article: > Don't set the language of your website based on user location This is an extreme/absolute prohibition and therefore almost certainly false/useless. Done correctly, user location is one clue in a chain. > why would I have my machine in that language? And if it's not, I will change it myself. Sometimes, it is not possible or feasible. Be aware of these situations. Examples: * You are in an internet cafe or corporate environment and the browser settings are locked down by admin policy. * You borrow someone else's mobile phone or tablet for a few minutes.
  • tvaughan 6y ago
    As someone who has traveled and lived abroad the past 10 years, please, never ever use physical location to set the language. Yes, never ever. Why assume everyone at an internet cafe speaks the same language as determined by its physical location? Why assume either person involved in this borrowed tablet situation speaks the predominant language of wherever they happen to be physically at that moment, like a business trip, or vacation? What about VPN's? Use a cookie and Accept-Language, and provide a menu of language choices where each choice is in that language, e.g. Español not Spanish.
    • bmn__ 6y ago
      You made such a poorly thought out reply, I have already written three drafts in attempts to tackle it and discarded them. I don't have the patience to point out in detail what's wrong with it on a level of discourse that I consider acceptable on HN because it takes an order of magnitude more effort than you put in. I will reconsider and write the proper reply if you really want me to.
• tallanvor 6y ago
  Food Network is also horrible at this. You try to go to a .com URL and it forces you to .co.uk, where the page doesn't even exist, so you get a 404 instead!
• apexalpha 6y ago
  "A much better way (and probably easier) is to use the user's browser/system language. That's the language I want to read on 99% of the time. Otherwise, why would I have my machine in that language? And if it's not, I will change it myself." I would disagree with this and propose a clear choice. Many people speak 2 or 3 languages. The only reason my browser / OS is in English is because it's easier to troubleshoot or Google error messages that way. Just a bigger pool this fish in for answers. A little flag in the top corner is best.
• bamboozled 6y ago
  Foreigner living abroad, can confirm this sucks.
• dijit 6y ago
  I posted about this 3 years ago[0] and I was met with the following (not verbatim): > "The amount of people who live in the world who do not change their default OS settings is higher than those who live in foreign countries" > "it is computationally expensive to read Accept-Language vs geoIP" > "obviously companies know what they're doing here" I have seen only a few applications using the accept-language header, Grafana and Outlook Web Access are notable, but they wouldn't necessarily have the luxury of using GEOIP as they're typically hosted on-prem. [0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-language-they-speak https://blog.dijit.sh/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-langu...
  • marcosdumay 6y ago
    > "The amount of people who live in the world who do not change their default OS settings is higher than those who live in foreign countries" They'll get computers with an OS and a browser on their language. There are people claiming that in some places the computers will be in English even though people do not speak English... But this is such a suboptimal situation that I can't believe it happens in any large place, and those people will certainly learn how to set their browser locale. Much more likely is that people will get a computer on a different variant of their language, like many countries in Africa that get computers set for the European variants of their language, so ignoring the variant may make some sense. But still it would make much more sense to not ignore the variant, and let people change it on your interface. > "it is computationally expensive to read Accept-Language vs geoIP" The cost difference is included on the page processing already... and in your firewall, and in your HA proxy, it's so cheap that every node on the path pays it just in case you want it for something. > "obviously companies know what they're doing here" Oh, sure.
• pi-victor 6y ago
  *looks confused at this while living in Switzerland as a foreigner.
• jeffrallen 6y ago
  Especially if you think that just because Swisscom routes my traffic from Lausanne through Zurich that I speak German, damn it.
• IshKebab 6y ago
  Ironically just below the article is this "helpful" hint: > Sore eyes? Go to the "misc" section of your settings and select night theme If only there were some built in way for browsers to tell sites that user's want dark themes. If only...
• keymone 6y ago
  software UX suffering doesn't nearly enough translate to software developers' suffering.
  • kps 6y ago
    Oh, it translates into software developers' suffering, it just doesn't translate into project managers' suffering.
• jve 6y ago
  > That's the language I want to read on 99% of the time. Otherwise, why would I have my machine in that language? In the era of Windows 7 and before. Maybe Windows 8 - don't remember when it changed, BUT someone at Microsoft considered localization a premium feature of Windows Ultimate. What a "great" idea. End result in our small country? Understand you English or not, but that was the version on majority of PCs sold on retail stores and used at home. The other part of the issue is techies don't love localized Windows here. But even if it did, it costs you money no-one will be spending to switch that language for their Mom/Dad/Uncle/... or myself. Luckily Windows lets you set Country or region apps should use. Don't know if browser takes data from that setting or not.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  By the way, it also is important to distinguish between the preferred language for the UI, the preferred language of the content, the preferred localization (geographical relevance) of content, the preferred currency etc.
• ArchD 6y ago
  Perhaps for some of these websites, this annoying design is helping improve monetization? Perhaps the users being inconvenience by this design is only a small minority and what they perceive of as a flaw could be the result of A/B testing with increasing profit as a goal? Alternatively, some website consultant/'expert' is charging by the hour and adding this 'features' is a way for them to charge more? Or, some technically clueless manager is asking the consultant why the website is not showing up in the local language when it is his browser that is misconfigured?
• mumblemumble 6y ago
  On the other side of the coin: Don't try to guess the user's location based on the browser's language preference. It's not as common, but plenty of e-commerce type sites try to redirect me to their site for a country that's on an entirely different continent, based on my browser being set for a language that's spoken plenty of other places, too.
• dybber 6y ago
  When I access Google News, I get it in Norwegian, with news from Norway, even though I live in Denmark (they don't support Danish news). I use a browser with English language settings. I'm interested in getting world news, not something country specific.
• el-salvador 6y ago
  I'm from El Salvador and our country ISO code is "sv" which some websites confuse for the ISO language code for Swedish (Svenska) "sv". It took Spotify a long time to fix that! MSN/Microsoft used to have that issue too.
• kps 6y ago
  Related: if you're going to use location, then use the location my browser gives you¹ rather than pulling something out of your ass based on my IP address, especially if you're trying to sell me something. My ISP spans the country, and if you insist my ‘local store’ is 2000 miles away — well, I'll shop somewhere closer. ¹ Firefox: config setting geo.provider.network.url returns JSON in the form of https://ichnaea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/geolocate.html#response https://ichnaea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/geolocate.html#... — e.g. set the config value to: data:application/json,{"location":{"lat":43.5,"lng":-80.5},"accuracy":1000}
• luord 6y ago
  It's worse when the language is only in half of the interface. I often see sites in "spanglish" and that "language" never fails to make me want to tear my eyes out.