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