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Comment by siruva07 | Hacker News Reader

Super sleek!

A minor feedback for the marketing page.

I’m an English speaker currently in Mexico City. The webpage first opened in Spanish based on my location.

It only took a few seconds to figure that I could change the language just above the footer, but my UI recommendation would be to put the location/language switcher next to the upper right sandwich (I’m on mobile) in a circle with the flag of my default country/language.

That would be much faster to find and have the added benefit of displaying how many countries and languages Stripe works in.

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Good feedback -- thanks. We've long struggled to find the right balance between "convenient/automatically correct" and "non-confusing" in site localization.

Slightly tangential, but when you localize a product for India, do not automatically translate it to Hindi.

Only 38% people of India has Hindi as their mother-tongue.

There is strong anti-Hindi-imposition sentiment in many places of India.

Just because someone's geolocation is set to India, don't automatically translate it to Hindi. It irks many.

If only there were a header browsers could send. Perhaps something we could call Accept-Language?

What would the compromise be?

English is actually the neutral compromise language in India.

This is true, too.

Especially where people willfully get arrested to wipe down Hindi marks from metro stations [0] and people who have fasted to death to not have Hindi as the national language [1].

[0]: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kannada-pride-wins-day...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potti_Sreeramulu

Show a pop-up or pop-up like asking if they want to switch to an Indian language.

I never switch to another language other than English.

It is highly advisable that companies translate to eight most common Indian languages. Or even the top five [0].

People speaking all major languages of India are huge potential markets for companies. Google offers search in nine Indian languages. Amazon provides customer services in five languages.

For some services, you should not even want to translate to languages other than English. India has one of the largest English speaking populace of the world- 2nd only after the US [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of....

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

> What is a good compromise for our international landing page in India?

> Translate to 8 Indian languages

That is not a compromise at all, that's a full solution

India has 22 constitutionally recognized languages, and some 440+ all together.

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

Content is worse.

It is frustrating to no end to visit sport sites in europe (for example, soccer) to have them default to MLS news or mexico news because of my IP

When i specifically go to a EU website to get EU sports news, why is does website forcing me to eat news about my home country sports???

It has gotten so bad that I've just dropped a few sites as a result.

Worse, it is never intuitive or easy to switch the content to the "default"

Born and raised in California, have lived abroad the past 10 years in various locations. The language I always want a website displayed in is the language my browser says I want it displayed in. Sure, make the content local, e.g. assume Chilean pesos if I'm in Chile, but please simply follow Accept-Language for language selection.

That is approximately what we do. (And then we remember any explicit selection that's made.)

Same, but I’m in South Africa now. I was impressed by how cool the banking is. But then, many countries were ahead of the US in that. My fave feature is being able to send cash by SMSing a one time pin.

Why not just use the Accept-Language header? stripe.com already does this – At least I get redirected to "https://stripe.com/en-de", seemingly based on the combination of header and geolocation

It's a tricky balance.

I'm building this myself with a product currently only in English in a Spanish speaking country, for speakers of both, so it's top of mind.

IMHO, the automatic detection being wrong is less of an issue with a greater ease of language selection.

Accept-Language header, to me as a developer, has always been the better approach to this problem. It has language prioritization built-in to the value.

Just remember that flags aren't languages.

That's a great point.

In that case, I'd suggest the first two letters of the language, an "En" for English, an "Es" for Spanish, a "De" for German, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes Not first two letters, two letter ISO codes. There are also complications with dialects, so not quite this simple.

Flags are the most easily-understood way to communicate languages to users, and I say this as someone who is often obliged to pick the flag of a foreign country (often an empire that wilfully starved millions of my countrymen) to get websites in my native language. "Flags are not languages" is one of those pedantic corrections that ends up doing more harm than good.

The easiest way is to state the language name in that language:

English

עִברִית

العربية

हिंदी

ไทย

etc

How do I find the language selector if the page is in a language I don't know?

This reminds me of the recent uber post that talked about how uber SEEMS simple because it is just a few screens but it has to handle thousands of possible international language and location permutations. And keep the install under 100MB or whatever the app store not over-wifi limit is nowadays.

How does uber default the language for you? They've got the advantage of your registration so probably easier...

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