web Gerd Saurer on 02 Sep 2007 11:11 pm
Location != Language
As web applications get used international the need to translate them into several languages gets bigger and bigger. Google describes in on of their last blog entries how proud they are to support 170+ Laguages for some of their applications. They even try to include the community to do translation on their own.
Everyone understands the need for translation of the services to provide the services to persons in their own language. The question is how to find out the right language for the current user. There are several ways:
- Use the browser default Language
- Let the user decide which language to use
- Use the location of the request to choose a language
Google as many other services decided to use the third of the above options. Let me explain why i do not think that is an good idea.
I travel at least once a month to Hungary for a weekend because my girlfriend comes from there. Last week we spent several days there. I used the time to change my blog to WordPress as already described in my last posting. As i was playing araound with Blogger i noticed several of the following Screens:
Believe me i try to learn speak hungarian but the language is very difficult to learn so I understand not really very much of the information Blogger gave me. My browser is configured to use English (en) as my default language.
I can not understand why Google simple ignores the browser configuration and just guesses the language out of the location I surf from.
on 08 Oct 2007 at 9:49 1.Gerd’s dev 2.0 Blog » Location != Language fix said …
[...] I mentioned in one of my last posting titled Location != Language, I do not like the idea Google chooses the language to present it’s website to us. At least [...]