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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#21

Post by donatj »

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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#22

Post by binarymax »

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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#23

Post by tapia »

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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#25

Post by binarymax »

donatj wrote: post #21

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 tech…

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/

Re: Don't guess my language

#26

Post by hnfong »

makeitdouble wrote: post #20

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#28

Post by LoganDark »

lblume wrote: post #16
sgt wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Which browser, if any, even allows you to modify this header per-website?

Re: Don't guess my language

#29

Post by OtherShrezzing »

lblume wrote: post #19
doix wrote: post #9

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.

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.

>(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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#30

Post by oefrha »

watson wrote: post #13
vaylian wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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).
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