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Don't guess my language

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Re: Don't guess my language

#301

Post by jillesvangurp »

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.

Re: Don't guess my language

#302

Post by lxgr »

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?

Re: Don't guess my language

#303

Post by lxgr »

harshreality wrote: post #272
tapia wrote: post #23

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.

Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language? If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles. The other thing that Google might properly use is account-specific language settings. But if they're using GeoIP as has been suggested, I agree they're doing it wrong.

> If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles.

Your hope is unfortunately entirely misplaced. Google is one of the worst offenders for assuming language and region from users' IP.

Re: Don't guess my language

#304

Post by yusina »

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?

Re: Don't guess my language

#305

Post by drtgh »

bmn__ wrote: post #194
derf_ wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is the sites who do parse Accept-Languages, but then pick the last one in the list instead of the first. I have mine in rough order of my competence in them, which gets me my least-competent language on some sites even when my most-competent is supported. I get a kick out of it when I see it, because you can understand how it happens. "Well, at least you tried."

It is wrong to blame the server here. For better results in content-negotiation, a user-agent should allow you to assign numeric weights instead of just a list (implying the same level of preference). Example: Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3 If you already send something similar to this, and the server gets it wrong, then this is an outright bug, the software or its operator is out of compliance with HTTP.

This parameter, at first glance, appears to be used as numeric weights for automatic translations served by default, what turns browsing very uncomfortable (wrong translations, distorted texts).

Ie. Google, Youtube, Reddit.

Automatic translations should never be served by default, but only be loaded if the user requests it. The classical "do you want translate".

Re: Don't guess my language

#306

Post by PeterStuer »

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)

Re: Don't guess my language

#307

Post by lxgr »

Aachen wrote: post #76
nottorp wrote: post #12

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?

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…

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!

Re: Don't guess my language

#308

Post by lxgr »

elric wrote: post #63

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 t…

Ironically, given TFA, it seems to be primarily using the user's IP:

> How does Universal Language Selector determine which languages I may understand

> ULS queries a service that determines your originating country based on your IP address. This is inaccurate in some cases. Based on the country code, most often spoken languages are suggested for you.

(from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/F...)

Re: Don't guess my language

#309

Post by wudu »

magicalhippo wrote: post #264
elric wrote: post #63

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 t…

A related issue that has me fuming is when, after arriving at a page of interest from a search engine, a modal popup forces me to select the country I'm from, and then promptly redirects me to the homepage of the regional website. Some have a X button to close said dialog, but many don't which is really aggravating.

Google does this. I want to check out the new device they just released - "sorry, this product is not available in your country". I just wanted to read the specs, not buy.

Re: Don't guess my language

#310

Post by aembleton »

LoganDark wrote: post #28
lblume wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Firefox with this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...
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