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Comment by gpjt | Hacker News Reader

Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.

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Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."

Yeah I've seen this a few times on the backend that decides this. The standard should be to use the accept-language header, but all the time when people write their own code on top of frameworks (or maybe use niche shitty ones) they just geoip for language.

For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.

Try to use any Google site while traveling. I have two languages in my Accept-Language header, but Google always give me language based on location if I'm not logged in. There are also many other sites that does the same, often without any option to change language

I have the same problem in Argentina. Worse, I'm pretty sure that Google and other search engines decide that I don't deserve to receive good information because I live in a Spanish-speaking country, so they send me to terrible low-quality pages because often that's all that's available in Spanish.

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