Ask HN: Why do sites insist on local language? 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). |
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The average user might not know so it's easier to default English is not the only language in the world.
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).