As an avid VPN user it’s infuriating that multilingual websites insist on using the client’s IP address to determine their language and country when web browsers have been sending the Accept-Language HTTP header since the mid-90s.

I understand that you can work out more or less where someone is located based on their IP address but it was never meant to be a geo-based marker. Why not go the simple route and use the header?

  • Deestan@lemmy.world
    93·
    3 days ago

    It’s also such an broken idea that I can only imagine it comes from american tech bros who have a childish view of the world.

    “Yes this area is germany people in germany speak german so websites must german problem solved”

    No:

    • I am Norwegian. I sometimes gasp TRAVEL. Taking a train through Germany to get to France doesn’t mean I want Google to go all “Dieses Suchenwiegenflassen gewürst fleinmescht bitte” at me when I search for pictures of cute cats.
    • Some countries have multiple official languages.
    • Some people technically in Norway living close to the border just speak swedish.
    • Expats.
    • I don’t want badly translated websites in Norwegian. Just give me English. Microsoft Bing for years had a setting that when translated back to English said “Number of results: Car”.
    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
      31·
      3 days ago

      Dieses Suchenwiegenflassen gewürst fleinmescht bitte

      As a native speaker of German: lol

      I mainly notice this with YouTube ads when in a foreign country. YouTube, you have my viewing history, you know I don’t watch videos in Italian or Hungarian because I don’t understand those languages well, so why are you advertising to me in those languages just because my IP geolocates to Italy or Hungary???

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
      21·
      3 days ago

      I so hate the bad translations. Please just give me the app in whatever native language it was built in. And if I can’t understand that language, let me switch to English. It’s awful to use an app and have to translate everything yourself back to the native language to figure out what they actually meant and what went wrong in the translation.

      And it’s especially annoying when errors and such are also translated. These often make even less sense and when trying to search the internet, it really helps if the error is in the language of largest user base.

    • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.chOP
      19·
      3 days ago

      I’m an American tech worker (not bro thankfully) and I’ve seen the poor translation issue firsthand: using Google Translate on the backend to transparently translate the website on the fly.

      I also happen to be multilingual and it’s just unbearable watching some of this stuff play out. Storing translations and switching between them at a technical level isn’t really hard. I wish companies would invest in translation services instead of relying on Google or some other equally bad service.

      • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
        8·
        2 days ago

        using Google Translate on the backend to transparently translate the website on the fly.

        This is what they call “modern cloud-based solutions”. Except, now it’s “modern AI-based solutions” - same shit with a different label.

        I am now trying to imagine how that works. Every time a client calls the website with an unseen (and IP-based of course) language? Do they at least cache whatever google returns?

        Storing translations and switching between them at a technical level isn’t really hard.

        Esp. as you yourself pointed out, the internet has been multilingual for decades now.