<story><title>Stop Guessing Languages Based on IP Address</title><url>https://medium.com/@kristopolous/stop-guessing-languages-based-on-ip-address-3862464b97c7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bigbugbag</author><text>&amp;quot;Stop guessing languages based on IP address&amp;quot; misses the target by going a bit too far. IMHO it should be &amp;quot;Stop guessing languages&amp;quot;, because that&amp;#x27;s the root cause of this issue.&lt;p&gt;It stems from making assumptions on the human and her intentions based on the computer settings or network location. We know better than that.&lt;p&gt;Problem is design is made based on metrics and tracking, and things are tailored to the largest user base and the rest is an afterthought.&lt;p&gt;The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. Tackling this in an almost universal way is not that easy and obvious, but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kartan</author><text>&amp;gt; Stop guessing languages&lt;p&gt;Thank you. That is it. As the world goes global, who speaks what gets impossible to guess. I had a friend from Barcelona (Spain), that lives in Sweden, temporarily relocated to Shangai. To guess his preferred language is impossible. Sometimes he can prefer to read something in English to send it to colleagues. Other times he is more comfortable reading Spanish, or maybe Catalan. But can also want to read in Chinese, as sometimes it is better to read the original language - even with a very low understanding of it - than to read a really bad translation.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags.&lt;p&gt;To show every user of your website a long list of languages each time you get a visit is overkilling. I understand that a website will show by default a reasonably guessed language, it is going to work for 90% of your users, but changing to any other language should be fast and easy. The worse I have seen is websites that don&amp;#x27;t allow you to change the language, so you are trapped for whatever guess they did.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stop Guessing Languages Based on IP Address</title><url>https://medium.com/@kristopolous/stop-guessing-languages-based-on-ip-address-3862464b97c7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bigbugbag</author><text>&amp;quot;Stop guessing languages based on IP address&amp;quot; misses the target by going a bit too far. IMHO it should be &amp;quot;Stop guessing languages&amp;quot;, because that&amp;#x27;s the root cause of this issue.&lt;p&gt;It stems from making assumptions on the human and her intentions based on the computer settings or network location. We know better than that.&lt;p&gt;Problem is design is made based on metrics and tracking, and things are tailored to the largest user base and the rest is an afterthought.&lt;p&gt;The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. Tackling this in an almost universal way is not that easy and obvious, but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patrick_haply</author><text>&amp;gt; The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags&lt;p&gt;The whole point of the blog was that the browser &lt;i&gt;already has&lt;/i&gt; asked the user that question in the sense that it defaults to the system language setting, i.e. the first things you do on a computer when you open it for the first time.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand. What you&amp;#x27;re proposing as a solution (asking visitors their language on first entry) is essentially the fallback scenario for guessing incorrectly.&lt;p&gt;I try to think of the number of different websites I visit and thinking of every single one asking me for a language preference makes me feel not good about using the web. Right now, the worst case scenario is when chrome automatically detects that the website doesn&amp;#x27;t match my language and gives me a popup asking me if I want to translate.</text></comment>