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Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons and the list of languages to the current language .... which is beyond fucking stupid and defeats the purpose. Wikipedia does this right. The button to switch languages is clear, using a universal multilanguage icon, and a list of languages (using the name of the language in that same language) in alphabetical order, with the most likely candidates on the top (presumably based on geoip).

E.g. an English Wikipedia page will present me with the following language suggestions:

    Suggested languages
      Deutsch
      Français
      Nederlands

When you assume a language, you make an ass of you and of me. Don't be an ass. Be like Wikipedia.

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

Timely. I’m working on this right now for a product and have everything in place using the accept-language header and then adding a url param.

I’m currently agonizing about how to let the user change their language, because I want to respect locale as well (es-MX vs es-ES for example). And I haven’t found a good UX pattern for changing language+locale. I’ll likely just implement a big list that the user can select, and have the current language be a link that they can click to change via a modal.

Also: don't guess shipping options or other stuff based on my browser's language!

My computers are all set to English even though I'm a German living in Germany, and I absolutely hate it when local business websites give me the "we don't ship abroad, sorry" just because of my browser's language settings.

When we added translation features to our news site I went down this rabbit hole and wholly agree with the author. I checked what others were doing and very often there was this ip lookup happening, and then a redirect or other unnecessary behavior.

In our case, less is more. We decided to not do any of that, and were a bit paranoid that maybe we were going against a 'best practice' somehow?

All we do is look at navigator.language to get the language code:

   const userLanguage = navigator.language.split('-')[0]

and if we support that language then we will change the "Translate" button label to that language and default behavior to shortcut to that language version (you can still get the full list).

Thats it. Keep it simple.

Example: https://restofworld.org/2024/filipino-ai-chatbot-launches-20...

(translation UI in the byline area, under lead image)

Oh god please, this is so important!

Me: Visits Morroco (or pretty much any other country), has smartphone set to english. Also me: Gets youtube ads in Berber language. Has no idea what the ad is about or why someone would pay google to show it to me.

And also make it easy on the site to change languages. Just because my OS is in US English, doesn't mean that I don't prefer certain sites to be in other languages when I choose to. Many of us are multilingual.

As someone who lives in Spain, but prefers to browse the web in English and has all my computing stuff setup in English, good look convincing the world to change this :) It's been utterly broken for as long as I can remember (back when I had a 56k modem) and it'll probably remain so.

It's a uphill battle where you cannot convince others, so the best thing you can do is figure out how to adjust your own setup to make it less of a hassle.

> Do it right or don’t do it at all.

I'm fairly sure we wouldn't have the internet nor the web if everyone thought like this. I personally also strive for making things as good, right and correct as possible, but obviously I cannot force others to think alike, especially for-profit businesses that don't really care about "correct", only about "good enough".

> You don’t override screen resolution or color scheme with your own guess

They absolutely do lol.

Like it or not, people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it. Those people probably buy more too (or at least buy more that shows up in tracking, since you sound like the kind of person who disables cookies etc. too).

I’m glad someone said this. As someone from Pakistan whose first language is Sindhi and who detests the imposition of Urdu as a ‘lingua franca,’ I find it very frustrating when Google forces Urdu on Gmail, YouTube, and Search.

It also flips the entire user interface to a right-to-left layout to match Urdu’s writing direction, which feels completely unfamiliar and disorienting to me.

Also: Don't guess my units.

Why oh why does Google Maps think that "miles", "feet", and "yards" are words that have any meaning at all?

Only like a 20th of the world even knows what these obscure things are. Just because I'm currently located in a country that nominally uses these arcane units doesn't mean that I know what they are.

Oh you can change it to real units temporarily. But if you look away for a split second it changes it right back.

I'm LOGGED IN. How could you not remember?!

Google is the biggest offender. If you have had legitimate use cases where you browsed sites or routed your traffic via a Cloud VM at different locations (or if you're one of those rare people like me that use a damn VPN!) you probably already know this. I have to memorize 'accept' (to accept their ToS prompt each time) and figure out how to change the language.

Going one step further: do not guess my regional preferences from my language. I want to have an American English UI but use little-endian dates, whitespace and comma as thousands and decimal separators, ISO week numbers in calendars (with Monday being the first day of the week), and metric units. I want English subtitles, but not ones meant for the hearing impaired.

Yeah, this is has become of pet peeve of mine since moving to Spain. US sites that automatically redirect me to their Spanish site (which often doesn't have the actual article the original link pointed to!)

What's really annoying is when it sets the script to the local language which could be something like telugu, and then the writing is unreadable if you can only read the latin alphabet.

And then the 'change language' menu is rendered in the unreadable script.

<Cough> google maps, in fact most google apps.

My biggest annoyance is with Google. They know who I am, they know I am traveling, they know my language preferences (English) and yet I still get language based on my location on certain pages.

I let you track me Google, please use it for some good UX and not just advertising.

I really wish for a language setting that says: If the original text is in one of the following languages, use the original text. I might not be equally fluent in all of those languages, but reading the original text is better than reading a translation most of the time.

> No, “but the big websites do it” doesn’t make it right.

Also, it's only partially true, e.g. Amazon doesn't force the language at all, and while it presumes the country of delivery (which makes perfect sense as not all products are available everywhere), it explicitly nags me about it so I can change it with one click.

I have told the story here before, but I built a neat little system to parse Accept-Language weighing the users priorities and using the closest thing we have on offer to the users preferences. As an example, we have a Brazilian Portuguese translation but not Portugal Portuguese, so we would offer the prior to users requesting the latter for instance unless they had a lower priority but more exact match.

From my technical standpoint it worked really well and the code was very slick. It was a lot of fun to build.

From a user standpoint most of our users really just wanted English regardless of their Accept-Language header. They had the option to change it in the footer but this apparently wasn't obvious enough.

We just ask now, and our users are happier.

Here is one big reason some sites do geolocation nevertheless: pricing and legal. Does not matter what language you speak - they still have to look up proper prices in your local currency and offer you country or region-specific deals and legal language. E.g. in Canada Quebec limits what kind of sales or raffles you can offer so websites prepare different site copy. Yes, there are French speaking people outside Quebec and English speaking people in Quebec, but company may not have resources and time to prepare 4 copies instead of 2.

It's entirely ridiculous when you're abroad. Also annoying when in your home country, but the localized versions are not equivalent like e.g. programming documentation. Even in the ideal case you'd probably prefer the English original, but often they're machine-translated anyway and much worse.

Another extremely annoying thing I've noticed more often now are machine-translated versions of content in the search results. Reddit for example does this now, and it's just terrible. One of the main reasons I use non-English search terms is to get non-English results, e.g. because I'm looking for information on topics that is not globally applicable.

This is a real pain in the ass in Belgium. Many websites assume I speak French while my native language is Dutch. Some websites only offer a French version of their Belgian storefront, even though Dutch accounts for ~60% of Belgians. I can't imagine what it's like for German-speaking Belgians.

This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-speaking and French-speaking titles. I tried to raise this issue back when I worked at Apple but they only have 1 storefront per country and didn't feel like changing it.

Another annoying version of this is localized google results. I'm originally from country A, live in country B, but work in English, which is not the language of either place.

But google will then localize results to where I am, which typically deprioritizes English results because I'm not in an English speaking country.

You can set your google settings to act as if you're in the US permanently, but then googling anything local/regional will serve results aimed at people a continent away.

All this "guessing what the user wants" has become detrimental to actual UX.

This was the bane of my existence when I lived in Uruguay! Despite having the Accept-Language header set permanently to en_US, Google would constantly reset my UI language to Spanish, despite being logged in and having the account language set to English.

The worst offender was eBay which would machine-translate listings from English to Spanish.

One of the many, many tedious things about the modern globe-spanning internet, used by hundreds of millions of people who regularly travel far and wide, is this bizarre, stupid forced algorithmic balkanization in which you're pigeonholed right into either being denied access to certain content based on your location, or having your supposed language tendencies modified by default.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this idiocy is. Is it a dark pattern of some kind? Or is it just so hard for grey, cubicle-dwelling functionaries at companies that are themselves often very international to set systems for leaving one's language defaults static unless otherwise adjusted by said site user?

If you're already tracking me and every single one of my digital activities through my devices, then at least give me some modicum of convenience from all the bother.

Yeah I've worked with geolocation databases in the past and they're essentially just hot air. It's wild that even google can't guess my location anywhere close to home. And I live in a big german city, it wouldn't be that difficult to be right. But they've actually never been right about my location. Sketchy is a fitting description.

Every couple months, Facebook's web interface glitches out and displays the geolocation-based language instead of my preferred language in parts of the UI.

I don't know how that happens. Like, do individual teams within Meta have to re-learn that users in their own system have a language preference? (Not even talking about Accept-Language, it's a Facebook user setting.)

> Every browser sends an Accept-Language header. It tells you what language the user prefers, not based on location, not based on IP, based on their OS or browser config. And yes, users can tweak it if they care enough.

This is also a broken assumption.

First, Accept-Language is an ordered list, and most daily-multilingual people don't have an absolute order of preference, and more a topical list of preferences.

If I read an English news site that has a translated French version, it doesn't matter if I'm most proficient in French, I'll want the English version.

Then, as an affect of the first point, users will specify their most practical language, not some actual preference. For instance local non-English sites tend to do less shenanigans than international English ones, so having one's language set as English only will force English display for the former, with few impact on most other sites.

A French site ignoring all preferences and just pushing the French version by default actually helps in that case.

If anything, I just wish site owners stopped trying to be cute or clever and just had a very obvious and quick interface to switch to other versions. Wikipedia does it decently well for instance.

Don't guess what currency I want to pay in either by the way.

Your payment provider's automatic conversion is most likely more predatory than my bank's so I don't want to use it.

And even if you guess my location right, how do you know I want a badly/machine translated web site?

I don't understand why Google, of all sites, picks your language based on your IP. It ignores not only Accept-Language, but my Google Language settings as well. Their language handling seems to be getting worse over time. Not to mention the long-gone days where you could go to google.co.uk to get UK content.

Yes 100% this, Geo-location != language. I wonder why this isn't common sense to be honest

Don't guess my anything. If you're not sure what I want, ask, or at best do nothing. You don't actually know what I want, and every time you decide you think you do, you make everything worse, not better.

I live in Finland where they have two native languages: Finnish & Swedish. In a lot of places you'll see both the Finnish & Swedish place name on road signs. Without getting into politics, it's a good assumption to assume that Finnish is the mother-tongue of most of the population - with some areas having Swedish as their native language but also perfectly capable of speaking Finnish fluently.

I have my phone's language set to English as a native English speaker. Google maps reads me the Swedish road signs, in English.

IP doesn't even tell you where a request comes from, IP just (usually) tells you what network sent it to you.