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Comment by bhrgunatha | Hacker News Reader

This is what so many websites do now. It causes me constant aggravation. It's nothing to do with your browser settings. They infer your language from your IP address, and for most cases that IS the right thing to do. However for me it isn't. I really really wish there was a way to configure your browser to force websites to accept your language settings.

The only other option is to enable cookies so that the website language choice is saved - which also invites countless tracking cookies which I do NOT want.

Your web site does NOT know better than me which language I want to read.

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Very minor point: the right thing to do is to not infer the language, specially not from the IP, if no explicit information is available. You shoukd make the user choose or take him/her to the default language (there should be an obvious way to change the language from there anyway)

If you have multiple language, hopefully you already have a scheme to differentiate the language (i.e. wikipedia has the language in the URL). If the user went to a specific language URL you should ignore the other settings.

If he/she didn't go directly to a specific language, it's fair to assume he/she is in a non standard situation or is OK with the defaults, and applying heuristics doesn't help.

Would assuming that the default language is English be valid? I know a large percentage of the Internet probably doesn't "know English", but if they can connect to the Internet, would they at least recognise enough words (like "language"") that they can choose a different language?

What makes you think that? If their computer came with an OS preinstalled, with Mongolian, for example, as the language, they would not have to ever see any English anywhere. A flag might be more universally recognized way of selecting the right language.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html

Or just have each language option specified in said language, so that native-only speakers and pick it out.

The flag doesn't work for the billion people of India. We are massively multilingual; we have 22 official languages. Google.co.in is offered in 9 of those 22 languages -- each one with its own unique script, which are mutually un-intelligible. One Indian flag for all languages? No, thanks. Look at the confusion caused by the Metropolitan Police website [1].

If you can afford two pop-up lists, the approach of Lufthansa is the best [2]. If you want just one list, follow the installation screen of Ubuntu -- they write out the name of the language in its own script.

[1]: http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/2011/09/the-metropolita...

[2]: http://www.lufthansa.com/de/en/pre-homepage?command=cc&lang=...

I think it could be anything making sense (the default for a german company could be german for instance) as long as switching away is smooth and discoverable. People not familiar with the english alphabet for instance could be lost in the site, getting overwhelmed by the unknow information, even if they know the word "english" or "language". For people like in that case, the page could be in french it wouldn't make much difference.

As a visual marker for language switching I imagined having a flag, but looking at the replies, that seems non optimal.

The best behavior could be a popup shown only to users who's accepted languages don't match the current language, and keep the choice in a cookie perhaps ?

> They infer your language from your IP address, and for most cases that IS the right thing to do.

If IP and accept-language don't match, why not make a prominent button (in the language they didn't pick) to allow you to quickly change?

This is the best option.

"It looks like you are in Japan, but your computer's language is set to English. Which language would you prefer? [English][日本語]"

> and for most cases that IS the right thing to do.

The problem is that for a large minority of people this is absolutely catastrophic. Think of the Western business traveller going to Japan or China...

You're preaching to the choir, I'm in the suffering minority; that's is my problem exactly. I was just pre-empting the usual replies. Every time the subject comes up, people always respond with "Most people can't configure their browsers correctly" and "these websites do extensive testing and for most visitors they are right".

Not just travelers. What content do you serve to people with an IP from Belgium? Switzerland? Canada?

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