Website Language Localization
Discussions debate optimal methods for websites to detect and set user language preferences, primarily contrasting browser Accept-Language headers against IP geolocation, with strong advocacy for prioritizing user browser settings over location-based assumptions.
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How often is an accept-language that isn't set to English wrong?
Or to respect user language settings at all, rather than geolocate and assume.
User with non-English name and language settings as English-US is very common.
Wouldnt they need to check this based on location, and not on user interface language though?
Wouldn't changing the locale settings defeat 1-?
The classical mistake of assuming the language should be the same as the locale.
There are 700+ million people living in Europe. The countries are tiny, most have bunch of official languages. The fix would be to use users selected language and not to flip flop it based on location. IP based location guessing doesn’t work even down to right country in here.
Are you checking the country where the person is coming from? I'm in Luxembourg and it converts back to german when I navigate to some pages.
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 and I have to explain that they can just tell the
Do you realize you can just switch language and locale with few clicks. What's the problem there?