

Ask HN: Why do so many companies get basic language detection wrong - stephenr

I am Australian, but for the last 14 months I have lived in Thailand.<p>I am now frequently presented with webpages in Thai, for two reasons:<p>* The local companies default to Thai (for obvious, understandable reasons), but 99% have a &quot;TH | EN&quot; toggle on every page - I can accept and deal with this.<p>* &quot;Global&quot; sites&#x2F;companies, like Google, EA, etc have an annoying habit that some of their pages will GeoIP detect my location as Thailand, and then present me with a page full of Thai, ignoring the Accept-Language header and not even presenting a manual &quot;change language&quot; option.<p>If a company like Google or EA thinks enough to offer different languages, which idiot engineer made the logical conclusion that everyone in country X speaks the same language!? Have these people never left their home country?<p>[Update: re-phrased title, fixed typo]
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Lorenz-Kraft
Hi, i think its a mix of narrow minded developer / developer who does not know
which source to trust (IP or Browser) / developer who uses the wrong CMS.
These three factors influence each other.

Beside that, setting up a multilingual page prepares several questions for a
developer like Toplevel Domain vs. Subdomain vs. Path vs. nothing to enable
diffrent languages. Therefor all those SEO Questions and Text encoding
questions come into the game. And at the end: Does my CMS support my well
thought solution?

Developers are lazy and they usally take the easiest way ... even many of
Googles own pages are not SEO optimized!

Greets!

Chris

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stephenr
I can understand (to some extent) a junior dev using some flavour of the month
framework/cms not getting this stuff right.

But this is not some "oh the framework does it that way" issue - Google are
well known for hiring excessively smart people, and building their own tech
when whats available isn't "good enough" \- and yet this shit is pervasive
through their pages.

~~~
Lorenz-Kraft
Like i said, even many Google pages are not SEO optimized... also in big
companies there are big structures and you have to know this structures to
properly use them. Multilingual is a extension of single Lingual and if you do
not set up something as multilingual (may because its to much overhead for a
small project) its pretty much work to fix it later on... and sometimes its
not even possible, because your desired my domain.fr (fr = france tld) is
already sold ...)

By the way: being smart does not mean anything as long as you can't show it.
And being smart in one thing does not mean you are smart in every way. There
are just ordinary people at google who do not SEO optimize their pages and
make mistakes setting up multilingual pages ... just normal.

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sanxiyn
Can't you override GeoIP detection manually (and persistently using cookies)?

While this is annoying, I don't think engineers are necessarily idiots. To the
first approximation, nobody knows what Accept-Language is. I think it is more
likely that Accept-Language is wrong because one installed the English version
of operating systems or browsers, but wants the local version of websites, but
does not know how to configure Accept-Language, than that Accept-Language is
right because one moved to foreign countries and configured Accept-Language to
one's preference. Do you have the evidence it is otherwise?

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stephenr
> Can't you override GeoIP detection manually

No - as I said the pages I'm talking about provide no method to change the
language.

> To the first approximation, nobody knows what Accept-Language is.

By nobody, you mean end users? No, of course they don't, but they know if
their device displays english or thai menus/buttons/etc to them.

So you're suggesting that this is not a case of idiot developers but instead
that the Accept-Language header is not reliable, because there are whole
countries of non-english speakers using devices that are mistakenly set to
English, and they never worked out how to change the language to their local
language, so they just randomly hit buttons/menu items they don't understand?

~~~
Lorenz-Kraft
Jap, that might be the case ... for 0.001% of the users. I think using the
browsers "Accept-Language" (beside manual language switch in the page) is the
only way to go, because it respects the user decision. If the user is not able
to make the decision: who are you (=developer) to make this decision?

~~~
sanxiyn
You can't claim to respect user decision when users don't know how to set what
is supposedly "user decision".

~~~
Lorenz-Kraft
Jap, i think "users agree" is more to the point (i'm not nativ english
speaking). The user "agrees" in some way (because he does not change, or let
it change) to the "Accept-Language" header sent by the browser (which
correlates to the used browser language (developers switching this value
excluded))

