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Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

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Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#201

Post by jobigoud »

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #22

My personal papercut is with YouTube. It doesn’t care that: - my browser is in English - that I’m logged in and with English as my language - that my region is set to the U.S. - that I only used English keywords on the search box It still gives me Portuguese results as my geo ip is in Brazil. It’s infuriating.

Youtube has a specific setting under the rightmost menu (under the avatar) to change country and language. It used to work great, you could have multiple browsers/containers set for different languages. This is very interesting to get the news or trending pages from another country. But lately it's been buggy and constantly switch back to some IP-based guess.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#202

Post by mcv »

tuvan wrote: post #31
jakub_g wrote: post #4

The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…

Google sheets also does this and even uses regional formatting standards. I can't copy values between programs because some are using ',' for decimals and some are using '.' its VERY annoying

Maybe we need a locale-neutral separator for these things. Then we'll have three conflicting options.

I always get this wrong in calculators. I type , where I should have typed . or vice versa, and get a completely wrong result.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#203

Post by sn41 »

justinmayer wrote: post #70

I 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…

Google and other internationalisation efforts are absolutely a mess in India. India has many states based on languages - 22 listed languages - essentially each state has its own language and its own script, except in the Hindi belt.

Its not fun to be a North Indian to work in the South or vice versa- you may often be served a page in a script you cannot decipher fast enough or read at all.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#204

Post by piyh »

Symbiote wrote: post #162
silvestrov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#205

Post by Nitrolo »

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #22

My personal papercut is with YouTube. It doesn’t care that: - my browser is in English - that I’m logged in and with English as my language - that my region is set to the U.S. - that I only used English keywords on the search box It still gives me Portuguese results as my geo ip is in Brazil. It’s infuriating.

I'm Italian, but I live in Germany and my language is set to English on all my devices and software.

I haven't lived in Italy for about a decade, but I created my Google account when I was still in Italy. To this day YouTube will randomly switch to Italian and machine-translate some (but not all!) titles and descriptions of YouTube videos.

I've manually changed the language setting back to English a dozen times and tried to nuke any reference to Italy from my profile but Google keeps thinking "This poor user must have accidentally switched language and not know how to go back! Let me help and serve him half translated websites" every two months or so.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#206

Post by kuschku »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #9
jakub_g wrote: post #4

The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…

And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.

In Germanic countries, it’s common to write numbers like 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ; instead of , as separator

Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is universal.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#208

Post by rjmunro »

I think there are 2 valid reasons:

1. Sometimes for legal or practical reasons other than language, the site needs to be different in different places, e.g. terms and conditions, cookie popups, prices legally required to include tax etc. These have to be based on the users location.

2. Users don't set their browser language correctly. The options to change are hidden where no one looks and hard to understand - you an allow multiple languages and set a preferred order for them. I think this was common years ago, but is probably no so much the case now - it will default to the system language.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#209

Post by FabHK »

piyh wrote: post #204
Symbiote wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

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