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Comment by redleader55 | Hacker News Reader

There are two situations that I hate: 1. I have a different IP than usual, so all the sites change to that country - including language, news and search results(Google), etc, even though my browser sets a list of Accept-Language options. It's still me, I know you track me, so why? 2. Changing a multi-language website to a different country, also changes the language to that country, even though by browser sends an Accept-Language header and they have the translations for the website from their other sites/countries. I don't suddenly start speaking a different language if I look at a your site from a different country.

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I hate it too.

Not only languages change, but many other things like date formatting, mathematical formatting (using commas rather than dots breaks few things around) and currencies too! And it's a pain to fix as settings often collide and with many applications abusing microfrontends you can even end up in conflicts on the very same pages.

Google's the worst offender on all of its services and not just search, youtube, etc (even for work, their forced localization breaks Google Sheets in multiple ways), even my goddamn portoflio prices get converted in the local currency or using google flights shows me prices in the local currency forcing me to open more tabs to convert non stop.

And changing it to my own, on so many different services is such a pain.

But I know why this happens as a developer who advocated multiple times with my managers to not forcefully try to compute the language/region/market of users without giving them a simple button flag to change locale: product people don't listen and would rather have thousands of "ifs" that eventually will fail rather than listen to reason.

Hell, as a developer I have all my software and preferred language to english, even though I'm italian. And sometimes I use VPNs!

Even Amazon at times gives me some text in a language, and some other in others (completely unrelated like German) on the very same page.

Just keep it simple.

I want "proper" English, SI units and Euro as default currency. For me, the only thing that sort of works is pretending to be Irish.

Irish with US English

> Not only languages change, but many other things like date formatting, mathematical formatting (using commas rather than dots breaks few things around) and currencies too!

The most egregious instance of this is Google search with the news articles at the top. When I’m in Thailand, even if Google correctly figures out that I want English, it displays the news articles with the year in the Thai calendar! How many English speakers know that the current year in the Thai calendar is B.E. 2567‽ This is the correct configuration for approximately zero people in the world!

"It's still me, I know you track me, so why?"

They're not tracking you for your benefit.

Though one does have to think that clickthrough rates and all similar metrics do go plunging when you serve a user a page in the wrong language.

This is just a guess, but I suspect it wouldn't be in The Google's best interest for other engineering departments to be too involved with the ones that deal with data mining, otherwise they'll end up knowing too much. Even if someone working on a particular web product at The Google thought it would be a good idea to use the existing tracking to improve the user experience, I imagine there would be so much organizational friction in place that they're likely to give up.

Having worked in the ecomm industry for quite a while, one thing that always drove me nuts was stores that did not understand that your current location should not drive your store choice and certainly shouldn't drive your language choice. Sure, if you need to guess, then you can use assumed geographic location as a starting point if you like. If you don't know what language someone wants, by all means, use the Accept-Language header to make a best effort. After that, let your visitor select a location and language that they want.

I went through a lot of effort on one project that had something like 90+ country stores to make it work as expected. We used IP-based location to select a store if you hadn't already selected one. We used Accept-Language header if you hadn't selected a language. If we couldn't determine a location via IP address, we had a world map landing page you'd get redirected to so you could select a store where you'd be directed back to the product page for the correct store. Language display was best effort. All of the 'chrome' of the site could be displayed in most every language. Products had limited subsets of language. I don't recall how we resolved that disparity.

> I don't suddenly start speaking a different language if I look at a your site from a different country.

As someone that traveled a lot, I always hated this. Sorry, maybe I'm not fluent enough in German to read your site, but I really do want to order from your German store. Or maybe I really want to order from the US store even though I'm in Germany.

One other aspect of all of this that was *extra* fun was payments. Anti-fraud systems frequently get super suspicious if your location and the store location don't match.

1.b. When somehow they identify you’ve change IPs the first time, and now that you are home, there’s still some sticky session that doesn’t get cleared without purging all cookies for the domain.

It's not a high priority task and is in the backlog gathering dust ;)

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