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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#381

Post by account42 »

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…

> 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.

No, it's a partially ordered list.

> If I read an English news site that has a translated French version, it doesn't matter if I'm most proficient in French, I'll want the English version.

Then you should have both with the same priority.

Re: Don't guess my language

#382

Post by account42 »

hahn-kev wrote: post #184

As much as I agree Accept language should be enough, the problem is that English is the default value, so if it's default it's likely to be wrong so I understand guessing because most people don't know you can tell the browser what language you want to use. Partly to blame is also the websites that don't have other languages can't respect the header anyway. I've had plenty of users complain about localization issues…

> so if it's default it's likely to be wrong

No. Stop second guessing user preferences.

Re: Don't guess my language

#383

Post by account42 »

ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #193
hahn-kev wrote: post #184

As much as I agree Accept language should be enough, the problem is that English is the default value, so if it's default it's likely to be wrong so I understand guessing because most people don't know you can tell the browser what language you want to use. Partly to blame is also the websites that don't have other languages can't respect the header anyway. I've had plenty of users complain about localization issues…

There should be some bit about the locale being default or not. If its not a default, then respecting it would be fine. If its the default, you could try guessing.

> If its the default, you could try guessing.

No.

Re: Don't guess my language

#384

Post by account42 »

ryandrake wrote: post #245
Filligree wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is in fact my primary language. It may be the default, but I cannot set it to something else. I have explicitly chosen to leave it on the default, and would like websites to accept this.

There shouldn't be a default. By default, browsers should just not send the header, which would signal the web site to do whatever stupid thing its developers conjure up. But if the header is sent, it should override the server-side-stupidity. This would solve the "but by default it's English!" objection.

Currently Browsers default to sending the Browser/OS UI language. Which is an good default because users can understand that language (they are using that for the UI after all) unlike whatever your GeoIP provider says. The "but by default it's English!" objection never had any merit.

Re: Don't guess my language

#385

Post by account42 »

davedx wrote: post #71
anilakar wrote: post #69

Going one step further: do not guess my regional preferences from my language. I want to have an American English UI but use little-endian dates, whitespace and comma as thousands and decimal separators, ISO week numbers in calendars (with Monday being the first day of the week), and metric units. I want English subtitles, but not ones meant for the hearing impaired.

Mmm... understandable, but less trivial to implement than the OP. What you're requesting is quite a lot of localization customization. Reasonable to expect this from say, Google Sheets, but you might be out of luck with apps with smaller budgets.

"Apps" should just use OS-provided localization functions which have handled these distinctions correctly since the dawn of time.

Re: Don't guess my language

#386

Post by account42 »

pyb wrote: post #82

I don't understand why Google, of all sites, picks your language based on your IP. It ignores not only Accept-Language, but my Google Language settings as well. Their language handling seems to be getting worse over time. Not to mention the long-gone days where you could go to google.co.uk to get UK content.

And they keep hiding the "no I do actually want to view this in english" link more and more.

Re: Don't guess my language

#387

Post by account42 »

deanc wrote: post #42

I live in Finland where they have two native languages: Finnish & Swedish. In a lot of places you'll see both the Finnish & Swedish place name on road signs. Without getting into politics, it's a good assumption to assume that Finnish is the mother-tongue of most of the population - with some areas having Swedish as their native language but also perfectly capable of speaking Finnish fluently. I have my phone's langu…

It's worse in Taiwan where road signs are in both Chinese and Pinyin (romanized chinese) and Google Maps will randomly shown you only one of them for turn instructions. Good luck recognizing some obscure character for a town name in time if you are not fluent in Chinese. I would be surprised if this hasn't caused any accidents.

Re: Don't guess my language

#389

Post by account42 »

mcv wrote: post #223

> If you want to use GeoIP, fine — but only for currency, shipping, legal stuff Possibly not even then. Shipping should depend on the address it's shipped to, not the IP. Currency, I prefer in your original currency. I don't want you to convert currency for me, because my bank does it cheaper. And of course geoIP can be wrong because of VPNs. Only use it when other methods like user preference and `Accept-Language` o…

> Possibly not even then. Shipping should depend on the address it's shipped to, not the IP.

Sure, but it's nice to show predicted shipping costs before the user has had a chance to choose the address. As long as it's clear about what country its using and properly updates when you correct that it's OK to use GeoIP for this.

Agree on the currency - you could make it an option (have seen this on some ATMs for withdrawals) but no idea why anyone would not want to defer the conversion.

Re: Don't guess my language

#390

Post by account42 »

gs17 wrote: post #247

Even Accept-Language isn't enough, although this probably falls under "respect it". A lot of websites seem to assume if you have a non-English language in it, they should use that language, even if English has the highest score, because obviously it's your "real" language and English was just a default. E.g. `en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7` is read as "we should serve the Chinese version".

> E.g. `en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7` is read as "we should serve the Chinese version".

This can be a correct interpretation if Chinese is indeed the original language of that resource and the English translation has a lower quality - priorities exist on the server side as well, not just on the client setting. In that case you should qive zh-* a much lower q value if you want to see the English version anyway - or just remove them because pretty much everything that has more than one language available has an English version.

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