This article isn't looking at both sides.
I am in an English speaking country and Google absolutely does honour my accept language header, eg is set to French I get french.
I suspect that a non English speaker with an English language configured device in a non English speaking country is sufficiently more common than the other way round that they choose to make an exception and ignore en accept-language headers
Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
181–190 of 343 posts
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#182I'm currently in France and I've resorted to just using duckduckgo.
It's the same class of accessibility error as tying shipping address to website language, which I still see all the time, too.[0]
When will we learn that people don't necessarily speak the native language of the place they reside? This isn't even uncommon, there's expats and tourists and foreign students and business travelers abound.
[0] Framework required me to use the French language website to ship to France, for instance. My forum post suggesting this be changed got unceremoniously merged into some megathread and ignored.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#183Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition? Ridiculous. Luckily there was "Vistalizator" where you could install language pack of choice. Anyway, after multiple OS releases like that, they finally dropped that nonsense starting with Windows 8.
I have one windows PC that has heritage back to 2016, was originally installed in Japanese, then switched to English. It always had a Windows 10 pro license, and there is still in 2022 many places in the OS that only show up in Japanese. And many smaller and enterprise apps use region instead of language to set the language.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same for me here in Denmark for google and gmail - I don't f***g speak Danish!
So the Googlers in Zurich Switzerland should get a Swiss German version. I'm sure they'd fix that soon enough.
The "fix" was probably to add an exception to the IP range of the Swiss office...
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#185Just BTW on the Netflix subtitles issue - I live in Germany, but I'm not German and generally prefer original audio on everything, typically with English subtitles. And some movies and series on Netflix will really only offer German subtitles, or, even worse, only German audio. No option to choose original.
All movies that have such limited audio/subtitle options, when I play them, start with a title card of a German distributor, so I would believe Netflix on that one.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#186My fav in this regard is Amazon: I can manually set a language in the settings, but those get at random times overwritten by my browser language setting. So why have it in the first place?
Amazon will occasionally randomly ignore my browser and my Amazon language setting forcing me to Spanish.
(In Puerto Rico)
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#187I met one-on-one with Google’s senior leadership in 2000 to talk about their internationalization efforts. This was very early in their trajectory, so I even sat down with Larry Page and chatted with him for half an hour. A year or two later I’m in Tokyo and talk to a new Google product manager based there. I tell her it is insane that Google serves me Japanese pages on my English-configured PowerBook just because I…
Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…
> "The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages!
I have this issue with Microsoft. The national language in my country is English. However, Microsoft's store defaults to a local language that I don't speak every single time. My IP is also not from a part of the country that speaks that language either.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#188I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.
I added Accept-Language to our web logs for a month before we added our first site translation.
That showed us that the majority of people had a language matching the expectation we would have from an IP geolocation, so we use Accept-Language alone.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#189Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition? Ridiculous. Luckily there was "Vistalizator" where you could install language pack of choice. Anyway, after multiple OS releases like that, they finally dropped that nonsense starting with Windows 8.
> Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition?
I remember Microsoft Windows (and MS-DOS) having a hardcoded OS display language; if you installed a Brazilian edition of Microsoft Windows, all you got is Brazilian Portuguese, since the translations are hardcoded within each binary (but you could still change things like date format and keyboard layout), and if you wanted a different OS display language, you had to wipe and reinstall. I vaguely recall reading that this had changed starting with IIRC Windows Vista, which put the translations in separate files (instead of hardcoding them in the executables and DLLs).
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#190There are definitely cases where I want “whatever is local” and others where “whatever my normal default is”.
If I’m getting driving directions in a place where the car and road signs are in kilometers, I probably want my directions in kilometers as well, even if my default is stupid-units.