I am English, my browsers language order is to set English (UK) then English (generic). No foreign languages. However I live in France and if I visit a site it will give me a French version due to my location rather than the language set within the browser.

I (apparently wrongly) assumed saying I want content in English would mean the website would query what language the user wants and then send that.

Could someone explain what the browser language preference is for?

Users don't configure it (and quite possibly don't know how) so many websites ignore it.

Many websites ignore it so it isn't that useful to learn how to configure it.

#2 is the site language cookie from a previous visit. If that fails, #3 is the language the browser requests. If all those fail, English, because it is the most common language the company uses internally.

In our user testing, we run into a lot of situations where the computer's primary user, and the person who set it up, are a child, who speaks English. But our site is more geared toward their parents, who often will speak the language of their homeland. For this reason, I make it stupidly easy to change languages, and we have a policy that ALL content has to be translated into English, Spanish, and Chinese, which covers 99.8% of our customers.

You don't find out these sorts of things through modern "telemetry" gathering and such current methods of testing. You find these things out by going into the field and watching your customers use your products. But interacting with wetware is beneath people in the SV bubble.

While not a perfection solution I feel if the user is able to understand the language of the OS they are using then giving them a website in the same language is much better than picking one based on an IP location.

I totally agree the browser language options are hidden with a pretty crappy UI that no normal user would find and use easily.

I'm currently in Switzerland. Different regions speak German, French and Italian (among others).

If you just use "this IP is in Switzerland" to try and guess the best language, you will definitely get it wrong. 25% of .ch pages I have never visited before start out in French, most others in German.

No rhyme or reason.

Interesting. I'm in the same situation but I do speak German (as a third language) and it didn't even click with me at first the website is indeed in German.

Also nobody really looks at accept language headers anymore, I feel.

Which is funny, because Google is always coming up with better, more effective ways to track users.

The problem is they ideally should separate UI language from region settings, but most sites don't.

And they may have some difficulties to do so because they could have specific products that they simply don't have info in languages other than the local one.

If you just want to read the description, you can simply change the region below.

If you visit https://www.apple.com/jp/shop/, it only has Japanese too. You can't use JP region store and have it in English at the same time.

Makes sense to whom? Not to someone who's been using a company's web site in one language, and then suddenly gets shifted to another language simply because they want to make a purchase from the same company they were communicating with seconds before.

Imaging talking to someone at your bank's call center, and then when you get transferred suddenly speaking to someone in another language. "Well, you wanted the Fraud Protection department. It makes sense to speak {$xx__language}."

Computers are supposed to work for people, not the other way around. We have grown accustomed to half-assery, using the excuse that "everyone else does it."

Just today I received a package from Amazon. A simple cat food bowl. I had to put it together. I remember when it was so unusual for production burdens to be shifted to the consumer that such products were labeled "some assembly required." Now we're so used to companies not completing their work, that we make excuses for them. Enough.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is an issue, but the issue is not they ignore user's language setting.

What it does is that

1) They detect store region based on user's region instead of language preference, which is reasonable IMHO;

2) However, they don't have English display language for their German store. This can and should be improved. For example, Amazon Japan offers Japanese, Chinese and English. Google can definitely do better since their products are much more limited and they have translations for most of content already.

>Imaging talking to someone at your bank's call center, and then when you get transferred suddenly speaking to someone in another language. "Well, you wanted the Fraud Protection department. It makes sense to speak {$xx__language}."

A better analogy would be you're in China. Well now everything will be in Chinese and Chinese only to begin with.

If your business units can't cooperate on something as simple as passing a language variable, then the business is broken.

And that's not what I said.

I said it's "reasonable" to switch to German store if you're in Germany (1), but they should still have a English display language for it if user prefers English (2). They failed at 2, not 1.

I do not speak flemish (be-nl). Yet, my page of the store is in flemish.

My browser (a Google browser!) is configured to ask for pages in english, and as a fallback, in french at a lower priority. There is a French version of the store, and it's still not sending it.

And a lot of people here in Belgium speak exclusively English. German is also an official language in the country, though only actively spoken in a small part of it. (Map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium)

I have no obvious way of changing the language, other than a flag which rather points to changing the region. Turns out, in the region picker (https://store.google.com/regionpicker), "Belgium French" is a region, separate from "Flemish". When I click "Belgium French", a warning appears. In Flemish.

In other words, almost everything about language that store page can get wrong, it does get wrong.

No, it will appear in two languages, top one being your current region/language, and bottom being your target region/language. So in your case, it should show in nl-BE and fr-BE.

Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ICwIgxH.png

If a retail store physically located in Germany can cope with my ignorance of the local language without ever meeting me before, then Google, with it's vast knowledge of me - and my specific choice of language preference - should be able to do the same.

In other words - there's absolutely no good reason why I can't use either the Google or Apple stores in the country I live in but using any language I choose.

Also - switching region to one that speaks a language I understand usually means I then can't select a delivery address in the region that I live in. It's like they refuse to sell things to people who don't understand the official language of the country.