Yeah, the weirdest thing is that HTTP Accept-Language has been around for decades and is usually configured correctly (to the OS system language). No idea why people use geolocation for language at all, on the web.

People in English-speaking countries are really bad at thinking about localisation since they're not exposed to these issues personally.

Better hope the Chinese don't take over our economy any time soon, I'm sure their devs have the same view on this.

Localization is easy with javascript. Just look at navigator.language or navigator.languages[0]

And I suggest following gettext's lead in this regard, so that on your code you would have something like:

i18nstrings = {'My string':<?= _('My string') ?>, 'Second string':<?= _('Second string') ?>};

then you can just do stuff like elem.innerHTML = i18nstrings['My string'];

Of course, you process the language header in the backend.

I reviewed a couple of i18n libraries for javascript but ended up liking this approach more. It was simple and effective.

> PSA: The majority language in Belgium is not French.

In my experience it doesn't work either way, french-speaking walloons get dutch, vlaming get french, and I assume german-speaking walloons get danish or icelandic just to fuck with them, possibly Schwiizertüütsch to taunt them.

I'm sorry that this is not constructive:

> In my experience it doesn't work either way, french-speaking walloons get dutch, vlaming get french, and I assume german-speaking walloons get danish or icelandic just to fuck with them, possibly Schwiizertüütsch to taunt them.

But these words are better than faux IKEA names.

If that amuses you it gets even better if you replace the leftover translated names by the "original" version:

> In my experience it doesn't work either way, français-speaking wallons get vlaams, vlaming get français, and I assume deutschsprachige gemeinschaft get dansk or íslenska just to fuck with them, possibly schwiizertüütsch to taunt them.

Yep, this. As a Flemish Belgian (Dutch is my first language) it's a bit annoying that Netflix in general doesn't publish anything in Belgium if there are not at least Dutch or French subtitles available. It's a good thing the original audio tracks are almost always available, but just how limited the selection is just because of their subtitle requirement is sad.

The younger generation here really doesn't mind watching originally English content in English, with English subtitles (or just no subtitles at all). Even content that isn't originally English, I'd be fine having audio in the original language and English subtitles. But Netflix won't do that.

If they loosened their language restrictions a bit I am sure I would get sooooo much more content...

It's nice that they're applying pressure for content producers to comply with various disability discrimination laws and supply subtitles.

I suppose this is because they are afraid to upset certain segments of their users. In the German Netflix you'll often see angry comments in the review section of any show that isn't completely dubbed. Maybe they could avoid this by having a separate "original language only" section.

Or just having it as an optional language setting.