As someone who works every day at a Japanese startup that has a Japanese/English bilingual UI, can generate documents in different languages than the user, mult

As someone who works every day at a Japanese startup that has a Japanese/English bilingual UI, can generate documents in different languages than the user, multi-currency, Japanese address formatting aware, etc.. I can say that these problems are actually quite hard to get right for most use cases. For most companies it's not worth it. However, once the user has logged into your site as is the common case with google properties, there is no excuse for serving the page in the wrong language. For months google calendar on my iPhone here in Tokyo would be in Japanese. All of the other tabs on the mobile google site would be English but just google calendar would be Japanese locale. As far as I could tell there was no way to fix it. Then one day it was fixed. I still see this mistake all over the place with other sites. I actually blame the rise of geo-ip and location databases for enabling the ability to geo-locate users. Something about giving developers the rope to hang themselves with…