It baffles me that there are still so many services that try to 'automagically' intuit which language someone wants to have a service in, instead of just simply .. asking.

Google play is a prime culprit, for example, showing a mixture of language content on the play store. See also subtitles, dubbed content, books..

Another one - Sony's Playstation store, where if you choose a country, then the language (despite them having the assets available through their international presence) is permanently set and impossible to change.

My experience is that language/locale implementation for a big project is so complex that PMs like to handwave the language selection part away. On a recent project I had to go back and ask, "What if an english-speaking user is traveling in Germany, do we show them the German-language site? What if a German-speaking user is traveling to France, do we show them English (since we didn't have an FR localization)?"

Confounding the issue is that many implementations combine locale with language, which can be a problem if you have locale-exclusive features. As a made-up example, maybe Cortana's contract for stock data specifies it can only be used in the US, and you're a US-based Spanish speaker. But Cortana assumes Spanish == Mexico, so if you use Spanish now stock quotes don't work. It's really attractive to just call those problems edge cases to be worked out in the next release.

(I think Etsy handles this really well, you can specify ship-to location, interface language, and currency separately. Although for some reason they auto-detected me, in the Bay Area, as UK, EN-GB, CAD which was strange. Obviously some work to be done.)

How? Seriously, how? Assuming the browser's interface is in Chinese, the Accept-Language header should be set properly.

This can be trickier than it sounds. For instance, selecting English from a Japanese UI should be "English" not 英語. Conversely, from English to select Japanese has to be 日本語　not "Japanese".

Many features and recognition roll out to English (US) first and remain unavailable to me for a long time. I'm in Canada. It's the exact same language, just with some extra "u"s scattered around in the written form.

Well, because they should and rightfully so. You shouldn't have to select a language every time you start an app. Instead it should use whatever language was set on your system. Anything else just isn't intuitive and would add more friction before a user could get anything meaningful done.

The parent comment was referring to Cortana only working with English and thus assumes the user can't speak English as he has his system set to Spanish. That's an unfortunate edge case but one that could be overcome with advanced settings should they want to deal with it. But again, the anecdote is an edge case and shouldn't be used to go against best practices in regards to localization.

By all means, make a guess at what language to use, but always allow the user to choose in case you guess wrong.

The edge case of someone setting their device to a different language than the one they want to use in a specific application is not one of localization but of usability.

> By all means, make a guess at what language to use, but always allow the user to choose in case you guess wrong.

While I agree I wouldn't call it a guess as it's a setting a user set when setting up their device.

Many people outside of those know English well enough that they'd rather have a feature in English than not at all.

Also, many if not most applications and services that aren't billion-dollar businesses or otherwise have had insane amounts of resources poured into them have terrible localization. And even if the localization is good, it can be beneficial to use the English version.

English is the international language, it is taught to children all over the world, it is used in business, academia and so on, all over the world. You know that, everyone knows that, but sadly, to all-English dev teams, it is all too often an afterthought.

And that doesn't even take expats, travelers etc. into account, who might want to use their native language system-wide but need certain applications to use the local language, or vice versa.

Apple takes this approach with Siri, for example.

There's a simple explanation for that. Adding a UI may end up being much more involved than a somewhat complicated guessing infrastructure. And if that's fine for most of users, an organization might not care enough to make it better.

They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't automatically intuit users will call them lazy or declare it bad UX for not using the same language the phone is set to.

I've worked with several really smart programmers from the US during my career. However, I've noticed that their geographical knowledge of anything outside the US is extremely poor (generalisation I know).

I assume this is due to the education system. Could this be the reason why large global players like Facebook and Google have such a poor acceptance and understanding concerning language, location and locales? Simply because many of the programmers are American?

I often give the example that there are vastly more Catalan speakers in the world than those that speak Norwegian. However Catalan speakers are treated like second class citizens because most of them live in Spain, and programmers assume that Spain equals Spanish. And we are talking millions of people more. It isn't a small number.

I'm often reminded of the urban tale of the man who approached a well known seller of washing-up liquid. He promised them a 25% increase in sales and he's receive 5% of the 25%. They agreed since they had nothing to lose and he told them to make the hole in the squeezy bottle 25% bigger. The people still squeezed the bottle for the same amount of time and the genius went home happy.

So I say to Facebook and Google, "use the language of the user, as defined in their browser language s settings primarily, but offer the user a choice to change it. I'd like 25% of the increased sales" .

The user's location should never be used unless you have legal obligations that are tied to geography. In which case, don't show an ad, since they'll not only be ineffective, but they make your company appear incompetent to the end user as well. Especially when I've registered to use your service and selected a preferred language!

Unfortunately this is not always accurate. Chrome on my Mac for example uses "en-us" despite the fact that my machine is entirely configured to use British English (en-gb). For my own websites I'm forced to geoip the location to infer which subset of English to use - most annoying.

"Turn Left on A U T O B A H N TWO ONE FIVE". Thanks for spelling every character in english separately >_>

(proper would be "Turn left on A215", or even better, with German pronunciation for street names)

Take Xbox One. You cannot possibly set your location to say France and language to English. Nope. If you want your console in English, you HAVE to set your location to one of the English-speaking countries. It's really infuriating.

Google started getting this correct, and now they let me choose two languages, so I can either speak to it in Japanese or English.

Devs need to realize that there are disconnects in language and usage context for some people, and I'd think this will get worse, not better. Some apps (Amazon MP3 back in Android 2.x era last I tried -- I'm not sure they've fixed that or not now) went so far and even said the service is not available in your country, for solely by the choice of language.

https://xbox.uservoice.com/forums/253802-home-settings/sugge...

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We sound the same.