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Ask HN: Why do sites insist on local language?

19 points by ilchalpenl ↗ HN
If one takes Google or YouTube or Facebook or Outlook they default to local language. Can't they use the browser language or OS language to default to that language.

I can forgive even 'regular sites' like Facebook, Outlook or YouTube. but increasingly even coding sites Github/Google Developers also do it. Why is it needed? Most devs I know of want to have menus/etc in English (as it helps searching or reading documentation).

17 comments

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kbrannigan
Since you're a dev you can adjust the settings to your needs. Change it to klingon if you want.

The average user might not know so it's easier to default English is not the only language in the world.

carlosjobim
The average user does not have to do anything. Their computer will already be set up in their preferred language and web sites should respect this. The HTML lang tag and hreflang tags further lets developers tell search engines the language of the pages, which search engines use to find the correct page to display. Developers shouldn't try to be smart and force change the language after that. AliExpress is the worst offender of all.
netsharc
But it gets obnoxious. take your laptop with all the cookies identifying you to a different country? "Oh you must want Google in Swahili!"... Google you must know I don't know Swahili!
quechimba
Yeah, it's kinda weird. I'm in Colombia and a lot of times I'm redirected to spanish versions of sites, although english is first in my accept-language.

To me it seems easier to display the page in a language matching the accept-language header than to do a geoip lookup and guess what language they want. In some countries they speak multiple languages so it doesn't even make sense to do geoip.

Most of my friends don't speak English so defaulting to English isn't a good solution either.

MandieD
Even worse: when a translation of the page you clicked on into the language the site is forcing into your browser to doesn't exist/isn't properly linked, so you get bounced to the homepage in said language, possibly in a domain registered in said language's main country...
m-p-3
Best Buy is particularly awful for that.

You search for something online, you get a result to bestbuy.com. Tells you there's a Canadian website, but just redirects you to the bestbuy.ca homepage. It's infuriating.

mtz_federico
They should at least show a prompt asking if the user wants to use the first language in their accept-language or the one from their IP.
lxgr
Showing modal prompts on an initial page visit is an easy way to annoy users, though. A language selector in some prominent location will do just fine.
toast0
You can't use browser or OS settings are english as an indicator that people want english, because english is usually the default and a lot of people end up with english based computing without meaning to or without english literacy.

It would be different if there were a different accept-language set for user intentionally picked english vs default though. But approximately 3 people set the browser language settings ever; and nobody respects them so there's no incentive for anyone else to start, either.

harrydehal
We run a high-traffic (millions per day) website and found that for certain cohorts, we saw up to 25% of users in Canada and Australia identifying themselves a "en-us" (English United States) from their default browser language... The number is shockingly high.
netsharc
Why is it shocking? Those users presumably understand American English...
lxgr
> approximately 3 people set the browser language settings ever

But I'd guess most people select their preferred language when initially setting up their device, which usually informs their browser language, no?

> and nobody respects them

In my experience, many most multilingual sites do respect them! (This sometimes throws me off when the non-English version of a site is automatically/badly translated and I have to manually switch to English, but I can see how it makes sense for most users.)

marginalia_nu
To make matters worse, it's not uncommon for the language to be hard coded via the OEM version of the OS.
lxgr
This used to be true for Windows, but I don't think it is anymore. At least on the last version I used, I was able to change the UI language (but that was also marketed as an "Ultimate Edition perk" or something similar, so I'm not sure if OEM versions are still language-locked).

Where it probably gets tricky is for languages that operating systems are not commonly available in – users presumably have less of an incentive to set the correct locale if it does not make an immediate difference (assuming it is even offered in the setup dialog).

carlosjobim
English hasn't been the default for OS or browsers since 1995.
pandaec
The worst offender is YouTube which translates all video or music titles to English, but I already understand the original title. Translation often just made it harder to understand and to search.
lxgr
> Can't they use the browser language or OS language

In my experience, this is actually the norm these days.

Google used to insist on redirecting visitors to their local version, which got pretty annoying when traveling sometimes, but I haven't experienced that in a long time now.