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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

So I went to IBM.com to look around. I live in a German speaking country, but I consume internet almost exclusively in English, and I set my browser's preferred language as such.

IBM.com somehow misindentified the country I am in, and displays in a language that doesn't appear in my browser settings. The language selector is at the bottom of the page, with "region - language" pairs, including a million countries with a million random languages, except for my country in English.

Anyway, I can waste my time on other sites too, other than IBM.com.

I just wish developers and re-designers would use their creation for 2 minutes before deploying it...

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Too many websites assume that everyone in Europe speaks the language of the country they live in. Another assumption is that their IP is located where they are. The only locale you should use is the one supplied by the user agent.

Except you can't trust the en-US locale and basically need to treat it like NULL and fall back to ip based locations.

The nice thing about real en-US users is they live all close together, and IP location really works well for them.

There are still a lot of exceptions and pissed of people, but less than when you believe the en-US locale means what it claims. So of course, make it stupendously easy to switch languages, both locale and ip based location are wrong a lot of the time.

This is one of those things where you can't really do it right, and you just try and minimize the number of people you anger.

I agree with this - the web has evolved much faster than operating systems that most computers in other countries don't much have a choice but to set it to English (you might look at Windows and dispute this, but outside of some languages such as French and Japanese the translations are laughable and non-nonsensical with a side dish of Microsoft-branded hypocrisy when a government institution informed Microsoft and basically Microsoft replied with a letter equating to "F*** you! Our translations are correct!!!1!!"), learn what are the basic keywords of the OS, and use the web browser as their real operating system. You can't rely on en-US.

Worse in multilingual countries. The websites somehow think I speak the most prominent language in the country when I can't understand a word of it and I prefer English and my own language.

You need to have an easy to find override especially considering that business people travel and often can’t read the local language.

At least have a way to escape back to English as the Lingua Franca of the Internet.

This gets worse when reading developer documentation

- Github does not allow for 'web' VSCODE to have English (if I use non-English OS locale or browser).

- Google - developer sites (API) translate it to local language. While one can chane it; for reasons unknown this reverts back if one logout and relogin. BTW, most EU devs reading developer documentation still want to read things in English, as it helps better communication with rest of the world.

I remember reading someone on Google Forums ranting and raving that Google's homepage showed up in Arabic when he opened his laptop in a hotel on the way to his deployment in Kuwait...

I wonder if logged-in accounts still do that, it's incredibly lazy to think "Oh, this American user is in Iceland [just to pick a more obscure country], let's assume, instead of a traveller, that she's a dual English-Icelandic speaker! (and yes we assumed if she was in America she spoke English, not Spanish!)"

What's really fun is when traveling in Europe. A Spanish-speaking person visiting Belgium, for example, would want the maps to show directions in Spanish, except sometimes it would be nice to see street names in the local language so they can be matched up with street signs. But wait, what's the local language in Belgium? What if you're in Brussels?

Fun times.

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