22 ms·

Don't guess my language

• HorkHunter 1y ago
  Yes 100% this, Geo-location != language. I wonder why this isn't common sense to be honest
• vaylian 1y ago
  I really wish for a language setting that says: If the original text is in one of the following languages, use the original text. I might not be equally fluent in all of those languages, but reading the original text is better than reading a translation most of the time.
  • lblume 1y ago
    Modern browsers with auto-translation features always offer the option to "Never translate X" — never translate a language the user speaks. If websites really need translation (which they very likely do not!), this should be the norm as well.
  • watson 1y ago
    MacOS has this feature under Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Preferred Languages. Here you can have an ordered list of languages you wish apps and websites (I _think_ only works for Safari) to use. I don't know how widespread this is in other OS'es or browsers.
    • oefrha 1y ago
      That's just the standard Accept-Language header, not unique to Safari or macOS at all. It's up to the server to interpret and respond to the header, and they mostly don't do what gp wants, i.e. they usually serve the translated language with a higher q rather than the original language even if it's in the list (and it's mostly ignored anyway in favor of geoip/manual region/language picker).
      • happytoexplain 1y ago
        It is not the accept-languages header - it affects the accept-languages header. Like the parent said, it is also used for apps (which includes your browser's UI).
    • Aachen 1y ago
      This has been OS-independent since the dawn of time (see the Accept-Language header specification), but sites rarely use it
      • detourdog 1y ago
        I think the date might be later definitely after the adoption of unicode characters.
  • dijit 1y ago
    You’re in luck! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Accept-Language https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/... I wrote about it once; https://dijit.svbtle.com/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-language-they-speak https://dijit.svbtle.com/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-la... Outlook web actually respects this, which is refreshing.
    • Vinnl 1y ago
      Unfortunately, that just specifies which languages you prefer, regardless of what the original language is. I speak Dutch and English, but have English set as my preferred language, because most of the time that multiple languages are available, that is the original language. However, sometimes I'll be visiting a Dutch site that has a (usually badly-)translated English version available, and I'd rather get the Dutch version.
      • dijit 1y ago
        I think thats bad logic on the server side and not to do with the concept of Accept-Language though. I would think the ideal prioritisation should probably be: * Exact (en_GB) * Exact (fr_CA) * Soft (en_*) // Any variant of English you might have available * Soft (fr_*) // Any variant of French you might have available * Translated. (to first preferred) for Accept-Language: “en_GB,fr_CA”
        • Vinnl 1y ago
          I don't think Accept-Language supports "Translated", "Exact" or "Soft"? But yes, that would match the language setting that GGP asked for.
          • bmn__ 1y ago
            This is expressed as the quality parameter. To make the system GP proposed work atop HTTP content-negotiation, a server operator should assign a very small number to the automatically translated content.
• swiftcoder 1y ago
  Yeah, this is has become of pet peeve of mine since moving to Spain. US sites that automatically redirect me to their Spanish site (which often doesn't have the actual article the original link pointed to!)
  • tough 1y ago
    yeah tailscale/wireguard/vpn usually fixes this but then you have to -know- at which geo you want to operate. The internet has long been broken as a global field imho
    • diggan 1y ago
      > yeah tailscale/wireguard/vpn usually fixes this It does not "fix" that at all, and breaks so many other things. I don't wanna see US/UK/Australian prices just because I happen to live in Spain but prefer English when browsing the web (literally same boat as parent).
      • tough 1y ago
        sorry, yes does not fix the language stuff i meant it fixes allowing you to pretend to be phsycally somewhere else, but as you say introduces a whole can of new problems/hurdles idk man i just switch it on and off depending on site
  • agapon 1y ago
    I agree that it's most stupid and most annoying kind of localizing. I search for some specific product (or other information), get a link to an English version of the page (and perhaps the only one). But when I follow the link I get redirected to my language version of the site, most often its portal page. Sometimes because the language specific site does not have a page for the thing I searched, but most often because the site is lazy. And then I have to search again but using the site tools instead of my search engine of choice.
• RamblingCTO 1y ago
  Yeah I've worked with geolocation databases in the past and they're essentially just hot air. It's wild that even google can't guess my location anywhere close to home. And I live in a big german city, it wouldn't be that difficult to be right. But they've actually never been right about my location. Sketchy is a fitting description.
  • lblume 1y ago
    Bold of you to assume Google would actually show your their most precise and accurate guess.
• lmm 1y ago
  > You don’t override screen resolution or color scheme with your own guess They absolutely do lol. Like it or not, people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it. Those people probably buy more too (or at least buy more that shows up in tracking, since you sound like the kind of person who disables cookies etc. too).
  • q3k 1y ago
    > people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it Is this actually something that you can back up with data, or are you just guessing? I find it hard to imagine that would be the case, considering this header generally gets populated by the user's system locale/language.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • zinekeller 1y ago
      Actually, yes. Google and Facebook invests in translation significantly more than Microsoft in languages in Africa and Asia (to the point that you cannot set Windows do not have that language in question), for example, the various non-colonial languages in the African continent. In those countries, the computer is set to English/French because not of practicality but of significantly broken/no translation by Microsoft.
      • account42 1y ago
        This doesn't explain why Google then also uses their crappy heuristics in countries whose languages are well supported by all major operating systems and browsers.
    • bmacho 1y ago
      Windows + Edge populates it for me. I consider it a form of tracking so I definitely will look into it how to override it, this hasn't happened yet tho.
• doix 1y ago
  My biggest annoyance is with Google. They know who I am, they know I am traveling, they know my language preferences (English) and yet I still get language based on my location on certain pages. I let you track me Google, please use it for some good UX and not just advertising.
  • lblume 1y ago
    What incentives does Google have to improve UX in this way? I absolutely agree that it should be the case, but the people for whom it matters are (1) completely insignificant wrt to the whole user base and (2) mostly care about tracking and try to circumvent it.
    • OtherShrezzing 1y ago
      >(1) completely insignificant wrt to the whole user base and At any one time, there's got to be tens of millions of people accessing Google from a country which has a primary language unknown to the traveller. Even if this number is insignificant compared to Google's full user base, the cost for Google to service 20-30mn people with a feature is presumably lower than their annual ad revenues across 20-30mn people.
    • plastic3169 1y ago
      There are 700+ million people living in Europe. The countries are tiny, most have bunch of official languages. The fix would be to use users selected language and not to flip flop it based on location. IP based location guessing doesn’t work even down to right country in here.
      • bluGill 1y ago
        That is not an incentive. There is nothing in to for Google. It is of course useful for those 700+million, but they are not customers of Google, they users/the product. So long as you won't go elsewhere (in mass) you don't matter.
        • 1y ago
• sgt 1y ago
  And also make it easy on the site to change languages. Just because my OS is in US English, doesn't mean that I don't prefer certain sites to be in other languages when I choose to. Many of us are multilingual.
  • lblume 1y ago
    That should not be the business of the site, but of the browser. It is precisely what Accept-Language is for. The site should respect the header, allowing circumvention should be a very low accessibility priority.
    • LoganDark 1y ago
      Which browser, if any, even allows you to modify this header per-website?
      • lblume 1y ago
        One example is qutebrowser: https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#content.headers.custom https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#content.heade... I assume other developer-centric browsers have similar options.
      • aembleton 1y ago
        Firefox with this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...
    • sgt 1y ago
      The browser just looks at the system language. That may be US English, but you want to read the site in Spanish for example.
      • lblume 1y ago
        It defaults to it, but the preferred language can be changed in all major browsers, though currently not on a per-website basis.
• nottorp 1y ago
  Don't guess what currency I want to pay in either by the way. Your payment provider's automatic conversion is most likely more predatory than my bank's so I don't want to use it. And even if you guess my location right, how do you know I want a badly/machine translated web site?
  • xobs 1y ago
    OVH is awful for this. I’ve given up trying to use their site and always have to open a support ticket any time I want to give them money.
  • Aachen 1y ago
    This. Related: if I had a penny for every time I needed a VPN just to load the payment method selection screen (but not for the actual payment, it's not geolocked) just to be able to pay somewhere, I'd get a lot of products for free by now... Why not let germans select iDeal and dutch users Giropay? They'll not click it if it's not useful for them. Adjusting the sort for what's most commonly used makes sense, but why actively thwart users from paying by geolocking payment methods by IP address...
    • lxgr 1y ago
      Because then companies would have to charge all users the same price for the exact same service. Charging customers from countries with higher average purchasing power more and hiding the fact behind "charging people in the local currency for convenience" is much more profitable!
      • nottorp 1y ago
        I'm talking about those online stores that don't have a (customer hostile) thought out price for every locale, but they have some auto conversion. When price is set to $9.99 which works out to 47.89287237634 in your local currency. Although it would work out to 45.89327782 if you used your bank's conversion instead of the "helpful" service. In those cases i don't think the seller makes any extra money, they get their $9.99 minus payment processor's fees. They just think they're helpful but make you spend more for no good reason.
• tsukikage 1y ago
  Don't guess my anything. If you're not sure what I want, ask, or at best do nothing. You don't actually know what I want, and every time you decide you think you do, you make everything worse, not better.
• makeitdouble 1y ago
  > Every browser sends an Accept-Language header. It tells you what language the user prefers, not based on location, not based on IP, based on their OS or browser config. And yes, users can tweak it if they care enough. This is also a broken assumption. First, Accept-Language is an ordered list, and most daily-multilingual people don't have an absolute order of preference, and more a topical list of preferences. If I read an English news site that has a translated French version, it doesn't matter if I'm most proficient in French, I'll want the English version. Then, as an affect of the first point, users will specify their most practical language, not some actual preference. For instance local non-English sites tend to do less shenanigans than international English ones, so having one's language set as English only will force English display for the former, with few impact on most other sites. A French site ignoring all preferences and just pushing the French version by default actually helps in that case. If anything, I just wish site owners stopped trying to be cute or clever and just had a very obvious and quick interface to switch to other versions. Wikipedia does it decently well for instance.
  • hnfong 1y ago
    > Then, as an affect of the first point, users will specify their most practical language, not some actual preference. Where does this assumption come from? Given the fact that many (most? almost all?) sites don't honor the Accept-Language header, I doubt that there's much game theory going on in users' head when deciding this configuration.
    • Aachen 1y ago
      They're right. Try to find a Dutch IT person with a laptop not set to English. Only a small fraction will realise you can set more than one language and put Dutch as a second, even though many struggle beyond basic reading comprehension in English. They're not picking it because they're just as good, much less better, at English compared to Dutch We definitely pick languages that work as opposed to languages that we speak. Setting it to Dutch is just worse: UX doesn't fit, english search results wouldn't show up (way fewer results/content/info), and translations often don't make sense (imagine a button called "you shut it" on a modal window, it's a literal translation of one interpretation of the string "close it" but you'll be confused as to what that button will do)
• donatj 1y ago
  I have told the story here before, but I built a neat little system to parse Accept-Language weighing the users priorities and using the closest thing we have on offer to the users preferences. As an example, we have a Brazilian Portuguese translation but not Portugal Portuguese, so we would offer the prior to users requesting the latter for instance unless they had a lower priority but more exact match. From my technical standpoint it worked really well and the code was very slick. It was a lot of fun to build. From a user standpoint most of our users really just wanted English regardless of their Accept-Language header. They had the option to change it in the footer but this apparently wasn't obvious enough. We just ask now, and our users are happier.
  • binarymax 1y ago
    Yes! I still want to default to accept-language, but asking is key. What is your pattern for giving the user an option? I like this article in that it rejects icons, but I don’t like how they arrive at one language for multiple regions https://usersnap.com/blog/design-language-switch/ https://usersnap.com/blog/design-language-switch/
    • donatj 1y ago
      We literally just have a box that pops up with "<language> (<region>)" in each of the native languages. It gets saved to a long lived cookie rather than the user's account for some business reasons.
  • Aachen 1y ago
    You ask, as in, whenever I visit the site without having your cookies stored, I'll get a language selector wall first? I run into those regularly and it's always a struggle to know how to stay on the damn page I clicked on: will the "continue" button use the preselected value or will it dismiss the pop-up and continue on the current page?If the former, is the preselected value the page I'm on or a different language? Can I guess which locale I'm on to select that and dismiss the pop-up then? Can I inspect-element→delete this modal and just sidestep the whole problem? Even just a small close button is a luxury on these language walls... 95 out of 100 times, I'm fine with whatever language I clicked on, and if I want your German version for locale-adjusted shipping info or payment options or whatnot, I'll look for a language selector on the top right or, alternatively, in the page footer. If it's in one of those two places, I'd be much happier about a web without JavaScript-based pop-ups constantly
• binarymax 1y ago
  Timely. I’m working on this right now for a product and have everything in place using the accept-language header and then adding a url param. I’m currently agonizing about how to let the user change their language, because I want to respect locale as well (es-MX vs es-ES for example). And I haven’t found a good UX pattern for changing language+locale. I’ll likely just implement a big list that the user can select, and have the current language be a link that they can click to change via a modal.
  • CaptArmchair 1y ago
    As someone who lives in one of those locations mentioned in the article: split out locale and language into different settings. Because they are not the same thing. This article explains that nicely. [1] You want your users to be able to change their location (and, therefore, locale) and their language independently. The Accept-Language header could be used as a sentinel for language. Then again, I wouldn't outright rely on geoIP to set the locale which is an umbrella for regional differing variables like timezone, date formatting, currency, VAT / Taxes,... I think it's okay to have your content served, by default, in a language that reflects either the majority of your target audience; or the culture / place you're based in. Changing the locale / language should follow a clear UI pattern e.g. a language switcher & locale switcher in the header; or a clear navigational aid pointing to a context menu. That's how Hetzner works, for instance. Another example is Deliveroo. [1] https://translatepress.com/locale-vs-language/ https://translatepress.com/locale-vs-language/
    • binarymax 1y ago
      Thanks for the advice! I wasn’t planning on using geoIP at all for several reasons - the main two being inaccuracies AND that I’d need to use a paid 3rd party.
• tapia 1y ago
  I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.
  • Freak_NL 1y ago
    And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.
    • apples_oranges 1y ago
      Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.
    • cypressious 1y ago
      Agreed. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-translate https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-tra... to work around it.
  • avhception 1y ago
    My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert. Lidl is worth it, ja!
    • FinnLobsien 1y ago
      I absolutely hate this. I have the exact same thing. Even if the technology was good, I speak both languages and want to see the original. Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
      • avhception 1y ago
        I wonder if Lidl or the other advertisers know and approve of this.
• LoganDark 1y ago
  IP doesn't even tell you where a request comes from, IP just (usually) tells you what network sent it to you.
• fabian2k 1y ago
  It's entirely ridiculous when you're abroad. Also annoying when in your home country, but the localized versions are not equivalent like e.g. programming documentation. Even in the ideal case you'd probably prefer the English original, but often they're machine-translated anyway and much worse. Another extremely annoying thing I've noticed more often now are machine-translated versions of content in the search results. Reddit for example does this now, and it's just terrible. One of the main reasons I use non-English search terms is to get non-English results, e.g. because I'm looking for information on topics that is not globally applicable.
  • 9dev 1y ago
    Right. You can basically hear the product team at Reddit humming star-spangled banner while conceiving this feature for themselves as monolingual people. The rest of the world can understand multiple languages just fine, thank you very much.
  • Tmpod 1y ago
    Yes, oh my Lord I've been getting seriously frustrated with Mongo's documentation lately. I'm not sure if it picks the language based on location or Accept-Language, never played around with it, but it's behavior is deeply rage-inducing. I do a web search and get a list of results for the English version, open it and it automatically changes to PT-br as soon as JS loads, but then, after a few seconds, once the page is fully loaded, it jumps back to English, while keeping the /pt-br/ slug in the URL... What the heck?? And yeah, the translation is very obviously not human made or reviewed. Furthermore, I'm PT-pt, so the differences to PT-br just make the experience even more annoying X)
• hnfong 1y ago
  Every couple months, Facebook's web interface glitches out and displays the geolocation-based language instead of my preferred language in parts of the UI. I don't know how that happens. Like, do individual teams within Meta have to re-learn that users in their own system have a language preference? (Not even talking about Accept-Language, it's a Facebook user setting.)
  • pona-a 1y ago
    Same happens for YouTube and Google, which sometimes switch to Russian or Ukrainian despite my preference for English.
• fifnir 1y ago
  Oh god please, this is so important!
• deanc 1y ago
  I live in Finland where they have two native languages: Finnish & Swedish. In a lot of places you'll see both the Finnish & Swedish place name on road signs. Without getting into politics, it's a good assumption to assume that Finnish is the mother-tongue of most of the population - with some areas having Swedish as their native language but also perfectly capable of speaking Finnish fluently. I have my phone's language set to English as a native English speaker. Google maps reads me the Swedish road signs, in English.
  • kps 1y ago
    I live in Ontario where major highway road signs are bilingual, e.g. “427 North/Nord”. Google has ingested these, blindly translates the French part, and tells me to take “427 North North”.
  • eythian 1y ago
    Fwiw, you can set (on Android at least) the language of Google Maps independently of the rest of the system. I also have my phone set to English, but maps set to Dutch because otherwise the reading out of street names can be incomprehensible compared to their proper pronunciation. This does mean your navigation instructions are also in that language, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your fluency (but there's not really a whole lot of phrases to learn.)
    • deanc 1y ago
      Yes I discovered this, this weekend. As you mention, that relies on it being your native language. But it's absurd that if I'm in driving in a foreign country it would attempt to read the names of the streets in your own language's dialect.
  • jiehong 1y ago
    Maps is so annoying for that: I travel to France, Italy and Germany on the road, and language is set to English on the phone, so it tries to pronounce everything the English way, and I can’t understand anything. I wish I could set a "read location/road names in local language" setting.
• avhception 1y ago
  Also: don't guess shipping options or other stuff based on my browser's language! My computers are all set to English even though I'm a German living in Germany, and I absolutely hate it when local business websites give me the "we don't ship abroad, sorry" just because of my browser's language settings.
• donohoe 1y ago
  When we added translation features to our news site I went down this rabbit hole and wholly agree with the author. I checked what others were doing and very often there was this ip lookup happening, and then a redirect or other unnecessary behavior. In our case, less is more. We decided to not do any of that, and were a bit paranoid that maybe we were going against a 'best practice' somehow? All we do is look at navigator.language to get the language code: const userLanguage = navigator.language.split('-')[0] and if we support that language then we will change the "Translate" button label to that language and default behavior to shortcut to that language version (you can still get the full list). Thats it. Keep it simple. Example: https://restofworld.org/2024/filipino-ai-chatbot-launches-2025-local-languages/ https://restofworld.org/2024/filipino-ai-chatbot-launches-20... (translation UI in the byline area, under lead image)
• zetalyrae 1y ago
  This was the bane of my existence when I lived in Uruguay! Despite having the Accept-Language header set permanently to en_US, Google would constantly reset my UI language to Spanish, despite being logged in and having the account language set to English. The worst offender was eBay which would machine-translate listings from English to Spanish.
• elric 1y ago
  Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons and the list of languages to the current language .... which is beyond fucking stupid and defeats the purpose. Wikipedia does this right. The button to switch languages is clear, using a universal multilanguage icon, and a list of languages (using the name of the language in that same language) in alphabetical order, with the most likely candidates on the top (presumably based on geoip). E.g. an English Wikipedia page will present me with the following language suggestions: Suggested languages Deutsch Français Nederlands When you assume a language, you make an ass of you and of me. Don't be an ass. Be like Wikipedia.
  • e-topy 1y ago
    And it even remembers what you chose last time and pushes it to the top. That is UX. Being actually helpful and not fucking annoying.
    • whstl 1y ago
      Oh nice! I never noticed that "Suggested languages" shows languages I previously selected. But additionally, I like how it's not simply "pushing to the top", it does shows a previously selected language on the top, but it still keeps it duplicate in the list below, in case the user is going by muscle memory. To me this is the best way. Either make it VERY OBVIOUS that you're removing the item from the bottom of the list (which wouldn't be possible here), or don't remove it at all. If I had a cent for each time a SaaS made my life harder by trying to "help me" I would be CEO of every SaaS I use.
  • CGamesPlay 1y ago
    > in alphabetical order Well, it's in an order, but I don't know about alphabetical. I clicked on today's English featured article and looked at the languages: "中文", "Italiano" are "suggested", then the remainder are grouped by geographic region, and aren't particularly alphabetical. They appear to be in groups which are still not alphabetical. Europe seems to have a Cyrillic group but "Қазақша" is shown after "Українська" which isn't accurate in Kazakh and probably also unexpected for anybody who isn't familiar with the letter Қ (Қ isn't a letter in Russian, this is probably why this happens). The Chinese languages don't seem to be in stroke order (no expert here), although Korean is below them (because of course, K for Korean alphabetizes after C for Chinese). Anyways, no hate for Wikipedia; they do a great job of localizing. Just a bit of nuance/pedantry about how you can't "alphabetize" language names in their own language.
• anilakar 1y ago
  Going one step further: do not guess my regional preferences from my language. I want to have an American English UI but use little-endian dates, whitespace and comma as thousands and decimal separators, ISO week numbers in calendars (with Monday being the first day of the week), and metric units. I want English subtitles, but not ones meant for the hearing impaired.
  • davedx 1y ago
    Mmm... understandable, but less trivial to implement than the OP. What you're requesting is quite a lot of localization customization. Reasonable to expect this from say, Google Sheets, but you might be out of luck with apps with smaller budgets.
    • account42 1y ago
      "Apps" should just use OS-provided localization functions which have handled these distinctions correctly since the dawn of time.
• gield 1y ago
  This is a real pain in the ass in Belgium. Many websites assume I speak French while my native language is Dutch. Some websites only offer a French version of their Belgian storefront, even though Dutch accounts for ~60% of Belgians. I can't imagine what it's like for German-speaking Belgians. This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-speaking and French-speaking titles. I tried to raise this issue back when I worked at Apple but they only have 1 storefront per country and didn't feel like changing it.
  • Guillaume86 1y ago
    It's exactly the same problem on lots of websites if you're a french speaking belgian don't worry, you just don't notice it in that case.
    • gield 1y ago
      Oh yes, I'm sure it's the same for French-speaking Belgians! And probably 100 times worse for German-speaking Belgians.
  • roelschroeven 1y ago
    This drives me nuts. Once upon a time French was used even in the Dutch speaking parts, in government, economy, high society. That was long before the internet got popular though. We've had a long fight to get rid of French in Flanders. Dutch is the only official language in Flanders, and it's the language people speak (except expats, or migrants who haven't learned the language yet). So when companies still assume Belgium == French, it's not only wrong, but it comes across as very condescending. It feels like they haven't outgrown the times where Dutch was suppressed in favor of French. And why? If a company wants to use only one language for the whole country, it's better of choosing Dutch (as we indeed account for about 60% of the population). Many of those companies do have a perfectly good Dutch translation, which they use for their site when viewed from the Netherlands. Even if they don't, I much prefer English over French.
    • Orygin 1y ago
• southernplaces7 1y ago
  One of the many, many tedious things about the modern globe-spanning internet, used by hundreds of millions of people who regularly travel far and wide, is this bizarre, stupid forced algorithmic balkanization in which you're pigeonholed right into either being denied access to certain content based on your location, or having your supposed language tendencies modified by default. I'm not sure what the purpose of this idiocy is. Is it a dark pattern of some kind? Or is it just so hard for grey, cubicle-dwelling functionaries at companies that are themselves often very international to set systems for leaving one's language defaults static unless otherwise adjusted by said site user? If you're already tracking me and every single one of my digital activities through my devices, then at least give me some modicum of convenience from all the bother.
• pyb 1y ago
  I don't understand why Google, of all sites, picks your language based on your IP. It ignores not only Accept-Language, but my Google Language settings as well. Their language handling seems to be getting worse over time. Not to mention the long-gone days where you could go to google.co.uk to get UK content.
  • account42 1y ago
    And they keep hiding the "no I do actually want to view this in english" link more and more.
• sikiladho 1y ago
  I’m glad someone said this. As someone from Pakistan whose first language is Sindhi and who detests the imposition of Urdu as a ‘lingua franca,’ I find it very frustrating when Google forces Urdu on Gmail, YouTube, and Search. It also flips the entire user interface to a right-to-left layout to match Urdu’s writing direction, which feels completely unfamiliar and disorienting to me.
  • nottorp 1y ago
    Ouch. So we europeans have it easy. At least all the languages are left to right.
• FinnLobsien 1y ago
  Another annoying version of this is localized google results. I'm originally from country A, live in country B, but work in English, which is not the language of either place. But google will then localize results to where I am, which typically deprioritizes English results because I'm not in an English speaking country. You can set your google settings to act as if you're in the US permanently, but then googling anything local/regional will serve results aimed at people a continent away. All this "guessing what the user wants" has become detrimental to actual UX.
• jacknews 1y ago
  What's really annoying is when it sets the script to the local language which could be something like telugu, and then the writing is unreadable if you can only read the latin alphabet. And then the 'change language' menu is rendered in the unreadable script. <Cough> google maps, in fact most google apps.
• mynegation 1y ago
  Here is one big reason some sites do geolocation nevertheless: pricing and legal. Does not matter what language you speak - they still have to look up proper prices in your local currency and offer you country or region-specific deals and legal language. E.g. in Canada Quebec limits what kind of sales or raffles you can offer so websites prepare different site copy. Yes, there are French speaking people outside Quebec and English speaking people in Quebec, but company may not have resources and time to prepare 4 copies instead of 2.
  • pif 1y ago
    The article is not against geolocation: it is about guessing the language! In your example, there's only one language available, and it depends on your location, and that is fine. What is NOT fine is the general case, where several languages are available, and you have already chosen the one(s) you prefer, but the site decides to ignore your choice because reasons.
  • j16sdiz 1y ago
    Quoted from TFA > If you want to use GeoIP, fine — but only for currency, shipping, legal stuff, never for language
• knorker 1y ago
  Also: Don't guess my units. Why oh why does Google Maps think that "miles", "feet", and "yards" are words that have any meaning at all? Only like a 20th of the world even knows what these obscure things are. Just because I'm currently located in a country that nominally uses these arcane units doesn't mean that I know what they are. Oh you can change it to real units temporarily. But if you look away for a split second it changes it right back. I'm LOGGED IN. How could you not remember?!
  • pezezin 1y ago
    Related to this: don't even offer arcane units or M/D/Y dates in languages other than English, no other language in the world uses them.
• notepad0x90 1y ago
  Google is the biggest offender. If you have had legitimate use cases where you browsed sites or routed your traffic via a Cloud VM at different locations (or if you're one of those rare people like me that use a damn VPN!) you probably already know this. I have to memorize 'accept' (to accept their ToS prompt each time) and figure out how to change the language.
• diggan 1y ago
  As someone who lives in Spain, but prefers to browse the web in English and has all my computing stuff setup in English, good look convincing the world to change this :) It's been utterly broken for as long as I can remember (back when I had a 56k modem) and it'll probably remain so. It's a uphill battle where you cannot convince others, so the best thing you can do is figure out how to adjust your own setup to make it less of a hassle. > Do it right or don’t do it at all. I'm fairly sure we wouldn't have the internet nor the web if everyone thought like this. I personally also strive for making things as good, right and correct as possible, but obviously I cannot force others to think alike, especially for-profit businesses that don't really care about "correct", only about "good enough".
• benterix 1y ago
  > No, “but the big websites do it” doesn’t make it right. Also, it's only partially true, e.g. Amazon doesn't force the language at all, and while it presumes the country of delivery (which makes perfect sense as not all products are available everywhere), it explicitly nags me about it so I can change it with one click.
• harvie 1y ago
  Me: Visits Morroco (or pretty much any other country), has smartphone set to english. Also me: Gets youtube ads in Berber language. Has no idea what the ad is about or why someone would pay google to show it to me.
• pif 1y ago
  I think this is a case where it is unfortunate that the biggest players are from the USA, because they are notoriously mono-lingual and cannot fathom what it means to know more than one language. If they did understand, no site would ever propose you an automatic translation into your primary language over the original text written in any other of the languages you can read.
• alias_neo 1y ago
  Before we even get as far as the wrong language being chosen; The GeoIP databases are rarely even up to date so they've got you in the wrong location to begin with. I've been on static IPs for a decade or so; my last home's static IP was regularly Geo-located to Romania, the next one to the Netherlands, and sometimes even further afield; I'm in the UK. I started to have a heart attack just yesterday because Zenarmor on my OPNSense box was suggesting that a particular device was sending traffic to a region it has no business sending traffic to; turns out the DB is just wrong and a quick search indicated it actually (currently) belongs to the UK. In a separate incident (also yesterday, as I then got into investigative mode), I installed Rethink on my phone, which suggested, yet again, that devices (including my phone itself) were sending traffic to places they shouldn't be; again, false alarm, turns out they were all UK IPs, one of which being my own static IP which was being wrongly attributed to another region. If this part of locating the IP can't even universally be done correctly; why on earth is anyone even considering trying to use it to guess a person's language. EDIT: The result of these issues, particularly with my home IPs usually manifests in certain sites displaying in languages and with currencies neither I nor my family speak/read or understand, for me I'm used to it and will look for where/how to change the language/currency, but for my wife and kids it's just confusing.
• knorker 1y ago
  Some sites ignore en-US because so many devices ship that as a default. The Internet becomes a bit better if you set your language to en-AU. But yes, many ignore the selected language or units completely.
• foft 1y ago
  In Switzerland pretty much all sites have a setting for French, German, Italian and often English. It is very much a multi-language country. It is great to be able to select individually per site. I often like to use the native French and just drop back to English if its technical language. I do find that every site has the setting in a different place which is annoying, it would be great to be able to select it in a standard place on the browser. The worst offenders are the single language per country sites. For example Ebay insists on only using German in Switzerland, which is rather frustrating since I only know English and French so far.
• Steve16384 1y ago
  My own law: "Few things are as annoying as software trying to be helpful."
• leonheld 1y ago
  While others have expressed sentiments about YouTube and Google, let me tell you what I really hate - translated reddit posts. They're polluting search results and it's the ultimate disrespect against multi-lingual users... it's made my life hell when trying to find localized information (for example, in Portuguese), when my computer is set to Portuguese but I'm searching in English.
  • vladkens 1y ago
    Honestly, I don't even know what you're talking about – I don't have anything like that. Maybe it can be changed in the settings?
    • sltkr 1y ago
      It's in the Google index, not on Reddit itself. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+inurl:?tl=it https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+inurl:?tl=... ...will show you posts that have been translated into Italian, most of which were originally in English or a different language. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/1k2fotl/welcome_to_derry_release_date/?tl=it https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/1k2fotl/welcome_to_... And of course in this case I explicitly searched for that, but the point is that if Google thinks Italian is your primary language, it will surface those results automatically, even when you might prefer the English original. Probably this is caused by Reddit offering these pages to Google, rather than Google deciding to send you to a different URL on its own accord, but it's still annoying from an end user perspective.
• nightfeather 1y ago
  Accept-Language still cause quite a bit annoyance to me though. Because the fallback rule most implements still follows similar assumption as the first point in this article. Languages in the same group doesn't mean the user would accept it. I don't care if there are any other auto-translated thing that you though it's close enough because they have same prefix that would help. NO, absolutely NO. I even specified the en-US or any other language that original content uses as the secondary candidates, then most just ignores it and serves randomly translated thing that you think would be close enough because you can't tell. Just please, follow what user asked first. Edit: formatting
• vladkens 1y ago
  Totally agree. Who can send this article to Google?
• MandieD 1y ago
  The most useless thing Google Maps does on my US-localized phone here in Germany: literally translates the proper names of businesses. For example, listing Stoff Bauer as "Fabric Farmer" in the results when I search for "Stoff" - the reverse of helpful (Bauer is a very common German surname, but also literally means "farmer").
• bemmu 1y ago
  Seems this is a free-for-all to drop language gripes, so here's mine about Apple TV. Have a family member who only speaks Japanese. My Apple account is in Finland. We wanted to watch The Martian together, but can't select Japanese dub even though that audio track definitely exists. They just don't show you the options not relevant to your account country, and the only way around is to change your whole Apple account to a new country. Which you cannot do while you have an active Apple TV subscription. End result: unable to watch Apple TV as a family.
  • netsharc 1y ago
    My guess is there's licensing issues, i.e. the Japanese language dub isn't licensed to be played in Finland... in this case the moronity is due to copyright laws/lawyers.
    • jiehong 1y ago
      I don’t buy that argument. Sometimes if you buy the movie you have more audio choices, on the same platform. If you buy the Blu-ray, you likely have tons of languages not present in the streamed video.
      • netsharc 1y ago
        And streaming vs. distribution licensing laws differ... ask a copyright lawyer near you.
      • frollogaston 1y ago
        If buying on the same platform unlocks more languages, that sounds even more like a copyright thing
      • anigbrowl 1y ago
        You'll get regional languages. I would be astonished if a blu-ray of a non-Japanese film bought in Europe had a Japanese soundtrack.
  • jurip 1y ago
• captainpiggies 1y ago
  On a related note: whatever idiot started using keyboard language instead of system language for emoji autocompletion on certain MacOS and iOS Apps, please go die in hell somewhere... I have had this issue randomly pop up with the Telegram client I am using, and it infuriates me beyond belief. Every single setting on my machine indicates that the language I am using is English, why is the search text of emojis tied to the one setting I cannot reasonably change because it is tied to a physical property of my device and not the 4 settings I can and did change.
• breadmakerlc 1y ago
  I hate that this is a thing on physical products aswell. Panasonic being the latest offender by "supporting" my language. Then, when opening the safety instructions for the machine it reads grammatically correct but materially incorrect advice. Someone not following through with enough critical thinking could end up killing themselves. Reading up on the english version it becomes clear it was machine-translated with zero persion checking on if any of it was proper.
• deleted 1y ago
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• draw_down 1y ago
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• hahn-kev 1y ago
  As much as I agree Accept language should be enough, the problem is that English is the default value, so if it's default it's likely to be wrong so I understand guessing because most people don't know you can tell the browser what language you want to use. Partly to blame is also the websites that don't have other languages can't respect the header anyway. I've had plenty of users complain about localization issues and I have to explain that they can just tell the browser what language and region to use.
  • madeofpalk 1y ago
    Websites can only guess the language until the user explicitly choses. Accept-Language is a good guess, but as you pointed out it often defaults to English, or it may transmit language codes the website doesn't support (It sends `es-MX`, but website only supports `es-ES`). The website still has to guess.
    • Filligree 1y ago
      English is in fact my primary language. It may be the default, but I cannot set it to something else. I have explicitly chosen to leave it on the default, and would like websites to accept this.
      • ryandrake 1y ago
        There shouldn't be a default. By default, browsers should just not send the header, which would signal the web site to do whatever stupid thing its developers conjure up. But if the header is sent, it should override the server-side-stupidity. This would solve the "but by default it's English!" objection.
        • account42 1y ago
          Currently Browsers default to sending the Browser/OS UI language. Which is an good default because users can understand that language (they are using that for the UI after all) unlike whatever your GeoIP provider says. The "but by default it's English!" objection never had any merit.
• markh1967 1y ago
  I first used Uber while on holiday in Poland and consequently every email I got from them was in Polish until I worked out how to cancel that account.
• cubefox 1y ago
  Ideally a browser should ask for languages and country when being installed, in order to correctly fill the Accept-Language field. But that doesn't happen because it would introduce friction.
  • alpaca128 1y ago
    Why? Browsers already apply the setting from the operating system which is correct in almost 100% of cases, and if you need more options you can change it in the settings.
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    > Ideally a browser should ask for languages and country when being installed Yet in reality, a browser asks for language before you download it. (Or buy on the cases that come pre-installed.)
• VeninVidiaVicii 1y ago
  Here I am losing my mind. My phone’s set to Portuguese (EU), I live in the US, and somehow I get ads in German and Spanish, and news exclusively for Portugal. No ties to Germany at all. Just lost in some algorithm’s fever dream.
  • rcarmo 1y ago
    Hey, at least you're not living in Portugal and getting US news like me...
  • account42 1y ago
    [flagged]
• trollbridge 1y ago
  The reverse is also a problem. If I set my accept-language as en-AU, many sites assume I’m geolocated in Australia regardless of where I actually am.
• Peanuts99 1y ago
  Whenever I've visited Aliexpress (for cheap ESP32s of course) I seem to only get served the French version of the site despite having a UK based IP, UK language flags and actually telling the site to use the GB store. Next time I visit though it will display in French again.
  • projektfu 1y ago
    For a while, AliExpress was locked on Arabic for me when using my phone and Chrome and I couldn't tell why. I ended up using a different browser. It was set for sale in the US, but choosing Arabic. I've since changed my setup. Now it offers two language choices, English or Español, and defaults to English.
• Ensorceled 1y ago
  I worked on a project where I was responsible for implementing accessibility and multiple language support for a government adjacent site. I used Accept-Language to decide which of our supported languages to use as the default. The PM over-ruled that decision and forced a EN default. The accessibility auditor put "use Accept-Language" into they audit report as a "red" item and then ripped the company a new one when they found out it had been initially implemented that way but then reverted. I got another couple of weeks of contract work for this and other such stupidity.
• GuB-42 1y ago
  I suspect that many people who deal with languages only speak English and never left the US. They have been told that other languages exist and that foreign countries exist, and they have to do something about it, and they did... something. I remember a company I worked with used to have its internet connection go through German servers, even though it was in France. I remember the presentation page for one of Google's phone was in German with no way to have it in anything else. Using a ".fr" domain, "accept-language", logged into a French Google account, I also tried English too, no luck. I only managed to get some UI elements in something other than German, it felt like a troll. I wonder how the Swiss (a small country with 4 official languages) are doing. In addition to the idea that the IP address is a pretty bad indicator of the language you speak, some websites have trouble with the idea that people can understand more than one language. Hey, YouTube, I know I have set my account to French, but I understand English and you know it, so please don't auto-translate video titles for me and do a terrible job at it. And I don't want to set my account to English, because I guess it would translate French titles into English, which I want even less.
• dandare 1y ago
  Spotify is the worst. EDIT: not any longer?
• estebarb 1y ago
  It is particularly annoying with Google. They recently forced results translations, which are of extremely bad quality. So, even if I'm searching for computer science topics or machine learning (where I'm only interested in English results) they insist that I must speak spanish and read useless translations. I ended up switching to Bing just because this issue. Google is absolutely useless for me now.
• latexr 1y ago
  > Let the user change it if needed (and remember that choice with a cookie or URL param) As a reminder, such a cookie would not require a cookie banner. https://commission.europa.eu/resources/europa-web-guide/design-content-and-development/privacy-security-and-legal-notices/cookies-and-similar-technologies_en https://commission.europa.eu/resources/europa-web-guide/desi...
• mcv 1y ago
  > If you want to use GeoIP, fine — but only for currency, shipping, legal stuff Possibly not even then. Shipping should depend on the address it's shipped to, not the IP. Currency, I prefer in your original currency. I don't want you to convert currency for me, because my bank does it cheaper. And of course geoIP can be wrong because of VPNs. Only use it when other methods like user preference and `Accept-Language` or similar have failed, and make it easy for the user to correct your wrong assumptions.
  • account42 1y ago
    > Possibly not even then. Shipping should depend on the address it's shipped to, not the IP. Sure, but it's nice to show predicted shipping costs before the user has had a chance to choose the address. As long as it's clear about what country its using and properly updates when you correct that it's OK to use GeoIP for this. Agree on the currency - you could make it an option (have seen this on some ATMs for withdrawals) but no idea why anyone would not want to defer the conversion.
• bunderbunder 1y ago
  So much this. I also hate the implicit assumption that everyone understands just one language that's baked into this kind of design. I can comfortably read in four languages, and naturally prefer the original language to (typically) bad localization. So your guess at what language I would prefer based on my IP is virtually guaranteed to be wrong. Seriously, just look at what languages I'm already telling you work for me. There's no reason to assume I'm not smart enough to correctly configure my browser's language settings. It gets even worse with YouTube and their awful AI dubbing that's always on by default. So now for solidly half the videos I watch, I need to (1) open it, (2) click through the settings to turn off the AI dubbing, and then (3) rewind back to the beginning and start over. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it's incredibly annoying.
  • danhau 1y ago
    YouTube‘s AI dubbing is truly awful. It took me 5 minutes to realize the audio I was hearing was coming from the video itself, and not some random ad in a different tab. I also don‘t like that video titles are shown translated. It‘s so weird when I‘m watching a video in spoken English, yet the title is in a different language.
    • tuetuopay 1y ago
      It's especially painful since they don't translate all subtitles. I'm french, but my browsers are configured for English. Some (but not all!) english titles are translated to french, and some french titles are translated to english. This actually caused me to miss a few uploads from channels I'm subscribed to, as the language of the title is part of my mind-filtering for those channels.
  • bluGill 1y ago
    I even have Spanish set in Google as one of my known languages and it still auto translates everything to English. I'm not fluent in Spanish, but one of the well known good ways to get there is to consume native content, but YouTube makes that hard.
• TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  Kinda great to annoy me as a web-scraper using a mobile IP in the Philippines
• miki123211 1y ago
  Clearly there is some reason to do this. I mean, Google does it, and they employ some of the most brilliant people on the planet. Showing people their website in the wrong language is clearly losing them money, so minimizing that is a very direct way to increase profits. There must be some reason they rely on IP more than on Accept-Language. They don't leave money lying around, and there's no way Google engineers aren't aware of that header. I don't know why they do it, but somehow Accept-Language must be less reliable than IP. No other explanation makes sense in this context.
  • Narishma 1y ago
    Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
• yfkar 1y ago
  Once my Google suddenly turned into Hebrew (I'm Finnish so that was pretty wtf). It was around the 2023 Hamas attacks so I initially wondered if I'd been hacked by some pro-Israeli group. Soon I realized it only happened if I used my home network and then restarting my router to get a new IP fixed it.
• the_snooze 1y ago
  Not just language. Some retailers' websites (e.g., Target, Home Depot) use IP geolocation to guess the nearest store to you. It'll even override your preferred store if you set it to the correct one earlier. If you're on a cellular connection, it's absolutely useless. To anyone working in tech: stop trying to outsmart the user.
• anuraj 1y ago
  In India, if you don’t know the user’s language precisely - just default to English which is the only business link language. Using an alien language like Hindi to non Hindi speakers will backfire badly.
• gs17 1y ago
  Even Accept-Language isn't enough, although this probably falls under "respect it". A lot of websites seem to assume if you have a non-English language in it, they should use that language, even if English has the highest score, because obviously it's your "real" language and English was just a default. E.g. `en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7` is read as "we should serve the Chinese version".
  • account42 1y ago
    > E.g. `en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7` is read as "we should serve the Chinese version". This can be a correct interpretation if Chinese is indeed the original language of that resource and the English translation has a lower quality - priorities exist on the server side as well, not just on the client setting. In that case you should qive zh-* a much lower q value if you want to see the English version anyway - or just remove them because pretty much everything that has more than one language available has an English version.
• tuetuopay 1y ago
  Can we also stop tying e-commerce languages to the commercial zones? Yes, I want my HPE or Dell or FS.com website to be in English but still get the French catalog and warehouses and VAT. Especially for tech, where the lingua franca of english goes so deep that most people don't bother to translate technical terms to their native language. Heck, I don't know most of those in french!
• joelthelion 1y ago
  More generally, if you've never dealt with foreign languages (for real, not just in school), don't assume anything about multilingual support. You'll get it wrong.
• globular-toast 1y ago
  How does this relate to the film The Dreamers? I did watch that film when I was a teen, but I didn't pay attention to the story.
• remon 1y ago
  Author is not wrong, but boy do I get annoyed with tech articles with this sort of "listen up you dumb f*cks..." tone.
• rcarmo 1y ago
  As a bilingual Portuguese/English speaker who essentially spends most of his waking hours working in English but switching back when I leave my home office, I have been very much annoyed by this since the dial-up days. Infuriatingly, there was a train of thought at one time that used website analytics as a justification for either setting the default language of a site or trusting an external third-party like IP addresses databases (often just relying on the free, unmaintained stuff that broke after 3 months as the Internet expanded). Then came the browser geolocation prompts, etc. -- and most people, lacking a basic understanding of how HTTP works, preferred chunks of JavaScript they could "see" to HTTP header information they didn't understand, to the point where that got codified as "best practice". It also doesn't help that most CMS frameworks completely fail to make use of that information and pass it down the stack, or that people have turned to doing SPAs (which _can_ just use navigator.language, but just do a search in any framework's source code and see how often that is used).
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  How many other things are websites guessing? Are biased heuristics for the benefit of (a) the website user (the ad target) or (b) the so-called "tech" company and its advertiser customers? What other HTTP headers are websites ignoring?
• xorcist 1y ago
  Much more importantly: Never ever auto-translate content to the user's language. Present what languages you actually have the data in. The user is smart enough to click the "translate" button in the web browser should they want. That translation is also likely to be better quality. English is not my first language. Or my second. But I understand it well enough to work in it every day. And I never ever want to wade through auto-translated garbage just to find the right button to read the original English version. Because for some reason this is only a problem for English, web sites using other locales never do it, which should be indication enough that international visitors hate it. If you ever think about using machine translation tools for you web site, first you must do a full translation round trip for every language before publishing. Translate, paste back the result and translate back. That is roughly what you intended to publish. Don't do it.
  • dominicrose 1y ago
    I hate reddit because it auto-translates to French and users have a specific style that would be hard or impossible to really human-translate anyway. Even if I didn't speak English the translated content would not be worth it. The feature to change the language or show original content is hard to find and it depends on wether it's the app or mobile web or desktop web. They also try too hard to make us download the app but that's an other issue.
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    Machine translation has been good enough for a few years, that even native speakers don't notice it.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      If done with SOTA LLMs, yes, depending on the language (although even then I would dispute the "even native speakers don't notice it" part). But SOTA LLMs cost money, so what you usually get in practice for auto-translation at scale (like YouTube) is around Google Translate level, which is hardly good enough.
      • 1y ago
• TheRealPomax 1y ago
  Linguistic nit: that's not what cargo cult means. Cargo cult refers to doing things that don't in themselves do anything, just because XYZ did them, in the mistaken belief that "showing signs of XYZ-ness" will lead to the same results that XYZ sees/produces. Copying big-name-here's practice of localizing based on IP is not that. Copying "the way they comment the start of every file" would be. Or "using the same pep talk to the full company" would be. Actually using an approach that has both code that actually does something, and has an immediate and measurable effect on the user, isn't.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  There's also a commercial argument here. If your website or app sells stuff, you might want to care about your audience and addressing them in their own language. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world that aren't fluent in the local language of wherever they are. Many of them probably speak English. Quite a few of those are possibly not that poor either and have disposable income. So, if your business is selling stuff online, you could do worse than serving up stuff in English when being informed by the Accept-Language header that that is a preferred language. It's not that hard.
• lxgr 1y ago
  Yes, please. And while we're at it: Google, you know literally everything about my life. You know which languages I speak, which countries I live or have lived in. So why is it impossible to find results relevant to country A, in country A's language, while browsing from country B, but with both languages A and B in my "Accept-Language", and me having lived in both A and B for years? Why does the "languages I speak" setting on Google's search settings, which seems to be the only way to maybe make Google get the message, auto-reset at random all the time? How is using a VPN to get around this limitation a thing in 2025?
• yusina 1y ago
  If language guessing is not ok, then why would currency and shipping guessing be ok? If you are VPN'd to Hong Kong and don't understand Chinese, how does it help to expect HKD payments?
• PeterStuer 1y ago
  A sad example is Amazon Prime Video. 'I see you're from Belgium so I'll serve you a lott of films dubbed in French exclusively. My native tongue is Dutch, but I prefer watching films in their original version, not dubbed. (Btw, my Prime sub is on the German Amazon, but they don't care. You're from Belgium so French it is)
• RedNifre 1y ago
  Could we also agree that bilingual (or more) people exist? I hate playing whack-a-mole with YouTube captions: Apparently me turning them off on English videos means I only speak English, so the next time I watch a German video, I'll have to turn off captions again, which apparently means I forgot English and only understand German. I mean, doesn't Google have employees from multiple countries? Shouldn't diversity fix this in the sense that some bilingual person there notices this?
• closeparen 1y ago
  One reason this happens: the product is slightly different in every country due to market and regulatory nuances. Therefore the source content is different in every country also. We are not going to push every (country, language) permutation through legal review. Therefore we have a few "Accept-Language" values we respect for each IP geolocation. If it's not on the list, you get the country's default.
• thrill 1y ago
  Just as bad - don't guess my location based on my IP address.
• cessor 1y ago
  It's easy to make Django react to "Accept-Language" headers, I love how the LocaleMiddleware supports it out of the box [1]. I implemented automatic language detection to show either German or English content and was surprised how many users hated it. We're located in Germany but a lot of people have their browser set to English for some reason, yet they still expect to see pages in German. Of course I had provided an explicit language switch but many users did not like the site guessing their language. [1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/topics/i18n/translation/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/topics/i18n/translatio...
• Discordian93 1y ago
  I think there's some too down agenda to force people into bilingualism, big tech doesn't like how the internet of the 00s and 10s made many people polyglots that look behind their borders' information and media markets.
• burnt-resistor 1y ago
  This reminds me of AliExpress that constantly corrupt its language (but not country) preference by randomly serving me a foreign language not in my Accept-Language list. Language determination should be, by decreasing order of preference: 1. URL param (temporary override) 2. Cookie (optional, set by a flag image list drop-down conflating country with language) 3. Accept-Language (prefix) (optional) 4. GeoIP (guessing at conflating language with country by demographics as a starting point) Country, by decreasing order of preference (for pricing, shipping, legal, regional content): 1. URL param (temporary override) 2. Cookie (optional, set by a shipping address or preferred region preference) 3. Location (optional) 4. Accept-Language (suffix) (optional) 5. GeoIP (guessing at current location as the desired country of interest) Note: It's important to make a default guess at the statistically most likely possibility to reduce the burden on the most users, but not prevent users in the US from using the site's French i18n.