Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinios | Hacker News Reader

Congrats! Little suggestion if I may, don't use the location of the user to set the default language of the website. Everything on my computer is in English, but your website defaulted to Spanish, as I'm currently in Spain.

Am no expert, but a short article I just found on the topic: https://dev.to/bitdweller/stop-setting-the-language-of-your-...

View on HN

I'm in Washington, USA and it's showing spanish. That's just the default and they don't even use location to set it.

About 20% of documented residents of washington speak spanish, and up to 52% including bilingual, documented, and undocumented. Thus it is the majority language.

Haha, yes, that's how it is for now. In the future, I will recommend the language based on the browser settings.

In India and Spanish for me too. However, I can select English from the selection dropdown above.

Anyways, why is that even the Big Tech does this! For instance, Google Maps will default to Dutch (which in the land of the Dutch) while my OS, the browser and everything else is in English. I found no option to say “English” and be done with it. I can translate but that isn't the correct way to it.

Yes, I believe a better approach is to recommend the language based on the browser settings, allowing users to switch manually if they prefer. This is my plan, and I will release this feature once it's developed.

Thank you very much for your suggestion. Currently, I don't display the website language based on location; I simply set Spanish as the default language. In the future, I will recommend the language based on the user's browser settings, as mentioned in the article you provided. Thanks again for your suggestion.

it's just in Spanish and not dependent on location

Reply on news.ycombinator.com