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Give us your service as-is

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70 pointsailon35 comments

My personal frustration is that when things do get localized, the localization is sometimes outright wrong. Like, the person who's doing the localization didn't even do basic fact checking on what language a country speaks.

I'd rather have access to the US English pages (which are useful) than a language I don't speak (which makes it clear your products are made by doofuses).

Also why on earth does no-one respect Accept-Language and uses GeoIP instead? Do people in SV just never travel?

Is Accept-Language widely and correctly sent by browsers?

I've seen some pretty weird Accept-Language strings getting sent by UAs, but I don't really know how accurate they are compared to GeoIP + Account Settings.

I don't know about accuracy, but please, put Accept-Language in front of location/GeoIP.

It is frustrating when Google redirects to the country I'm in.

I still speak the same languages even if I'm traveling!

Its unbelievable to me that Google makes this mistake. Very frustrating.

Makes me sometimes wonder how accurate their ad system is ? If they do not seem to record such incredibly basic and clear thing as the few languages I can read...

But that's the thing, browsers regularly send Accept-Language, if it's overall less accurate than ip geolocation, then it's hard to prefer it.

Well, it generally mimics your OS settings, so why is it inaccurate?

The worst case is pages displaying in the same language as the rest of my computer.

There's a long tail of mobile browsers out there. I also don't know how many people have OS settings that differ from their real language preference due to poor OS support for their language (e.g. what this article talks about - how many users run en-US to get features that Win10/Android/etc doesn't do well in their language)

I mean, there are reasonable arguments either way here IMO and without actual data, e.g. how often users change their language from one or the other, it's hard to know what is better in the long tail.

And obviously users should be able to change their preference if we get it wrong.

I also don't know how many people have OS settings that differ from their real language preference due to poor OS support for their language

Why would these people be badly served by being sent pages corresponding to their OS language? It's clearly preferable for them over poor localization.

All the big browsers do send a proper Accept-language string. It is configurable and uses OS settings as default. One can't really go wrong with that.

Discovering Accept-Language was a small revelation. I had no idea on how to do the localization of a web project of mine, geo-ip sounded ridiculous to me (not configurable). And there it was, a sound solution already provided by the browser.

Yes. For decades already. Browsers default it to the OS language, which often indeed is the users preferred language.

Relying on GeoIP for language info is done, I suspect, mostly simply because too many programmers don't know about Accept-Language. So great that you asked. Yes, it works and it's great.

GeoIP means that Google gives me a polish login page when I am in Poland even though my browser says en-gb.

my localization efforts have mostly been limited to english-canadian and french-canadian traffic, but i've found that the Accept-Language header is the most reliable indicator of language preference. It tells you the language the user's operating system is configured to use.

That's good to hear; have you been able to measure language switch rates or discrepancy between accept-language and account language settings?

The only measurement i have is anecdotal, french customers used to email our support to complain about a lack of french-language support (we have always had french support, but they didn't like having to find a button when we detected the language wrong). Since switching to accept-language i'm not aware of any complaints.

Cool!

Rarely used in my experience.

Yeah, I remember when EA's origin started. German IP? Well here is the website in German. The only way you can change it is using a VPN and connecting to a us or UK server. I think it took them a year to let you at least choose which language you want. At least if you wanted English, other languages still weren't available.

> what language a country speaks

It starts with assuming country equals language. And even when they figure that out, they still use GeoIP. Try using various online services in the Brussels region for a laugh.

It's ridiculous that internally operating corporations like Google or Facebook still haven't figured that shit out.

Yes, I should have written languages, my idea was that if they'd look it up they'd see it's plural for huge parts of the world, but nobody bothers.

There's also the basic problem that just because people in country X speak Y and Z doesn't mean a user connecting with an IP that seems to originate from X necessarily speaks Y or Z.

The reason it's not supported is not because "Fuck you", but because supporting a feature is not as easy as just rolling it out.

What's important is what happens AFTER the rollout. Most people (like the author) have no idea what's going on behind the scenes and just think it would be a simple thing, and criticize the company based on this assumption.

But I am sure these same people will be the ones who complain the most when the company does end up rolling out the half-baked features.

Well, yeah, on one hand, getting criticized for not serving some group of consumers is much easier to handle than off-the-wall support requests and complaints about poor support.

But on the other hand, this is how most of the internet works, after all. No one is translating HN comments to Finnish real-time, right?

The primary reason for not providing services in "rest of the world" is apparently "fuck you".

The same applies to not respecting your language of choice.

But the absolute worst is American companies (it's always American services, and not just because of US dominance) manipulating content based on GeoIP and giving me a shitty localized version of their service for no legal or commercial reason.

It's infuriatingly patronizing.

Does anyone have great examples of localization done right? I'm trying to build an internationalized web application right now and I am interested in best practices.

Edited: I mean web applications that work well for international users (e.g., ltr and rtl direction, taking countries and languages into account, etc.).

Personal names around the world https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

Or the classic Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

Probably the biggest (+900 languages) is http://jw.org

Wow. Thank you.

Separate issue, but I'm quite frustrated with countries being lumped together by geographic proximity regardless of culture and language. It's possible to drive from Helsinki to Saint Petersburg or Riga on a single tank, but as Dota matchmaking will thoroughly demonstrate, it might as well be a different planet.

I don't think the Russians will let you cross the border on a tank

It's true. Driving tanks across borders is their job!

Yep, it's incredibly frustrating that even though I speak fluent English, and a product is available in English, I can't purchase/use the product, because I'm in the wrong region.

Purchasing can be understandable. The laws for that do vary from country to country, and evolve over time (see VAT regulations in Europe). This will be tricky for smaller operators. But free services? Not so much.

Yet, you'd think that companies like Microsoft and Google can deal with the sales as well, but they don't, at least not universally. Either through organizational incompetence or just plain indifference.

Google will literally SPAM you with services they REFUSE to sell to you.

Wait until GDPR kicks in on May 25, 2018. ANY company that collects data on EU citizens (Name, phone number, email adress, geo location) will be required to comply or be subject to 20 million euro fines. So your Apple Store app that you offer for free because you use it to collect data? You must hire a Data Protection Officer (DPO)and be able to erase a user's data on request. I predict that will lead to blocking EU citizens from many services outright to avoid having to comply with an onerous regulation.

Yeah, and giving up on the biggest and richest market in the world ? The companies that do will soon see competitors grab for the cake, while the others will clean up their act and maybe even improve how they treat their customers in the US and rest of the world (though I am not holding my breath for that one)

The page doesn't display without JavaScript, and it even breaks Firefox's Reader mode. Anyone have a link to the plain text? I'd kinda like to read the article as-is.

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