You have a website with content in multiple languages. How do you decide which
language to serve a user with? Easy, the Accept-Language header
exists for this very purpose: it allows a user agent to provide servers with a
list of acceptable languages, weighed by preference.
But not everyone uses it. Instead, websites will infer the user agent’s location from the IP address, and serve content accordingly. This is universally terrible.
My operating system’s language is English. The only locale is
en_US.UTF-8. Firefox is set to English, and sends Accept-Language: en
exclusively. That’s how I do my computing. You are reading these words in
English. Nevertheless webdevs think they are smarter than the user agent.
Examples
When logged out, Google ignores Accept-Language and uses geolocation. When
logged in, it does the exact same thing.
My account language is English, but the search language (even when logged in) is Spanish unless I tell it to use English. But this isn’t an account-wide setting, it’s a client setting. So every time I use Google from a new browser, a new computer, or simply after deleting local storage, I have to remind Google for the billionth time that I want English-language search results.
Even after changing the language, search queries are parameterized by location. Which is determined by geoip, and geoip here is very coarse, so Google thinks I live in a different city, and this is reflected in the search results.
DuckDuckGo and StartPage both respect Accept-Language,
which is another reason to prefer either over Google.
Airbnb
Airbnb implements what I can only term Heisenlocalization: place names are either in English or localized, seemingly at random. For example:
eBay
eBay’s approach is fascinating: if I browse US listings from Uruguay, eBay will machine-translate the English to Spanish, with predictably unreadable results. I can’t apprehend the motivation behind this decision.
Accessibility
Some of these terrible websites implement a dropdown for choosing the language,
and store the preference in a cookie or local storage – essentially
reimplementing Accept-Language one level up. Implementing things one level up
is a common pattern in the web (example) and it always destroys
performance and usability.
Sometimes this is useless because the language names themselves are localized to
whatever locale the server has decided you use. If you use a screen reader and
can’t see the little flag icons, or the screen reader doesn’t work with the
JavaScript <select> replacement du jour, there’s little you can do.
Conclusion
I don’t think this is incompetence, but rather the result of the metrics-driven race to the bottom. There’s a spreadsheet somewhere that says geoip makes some ill-conceived metric go up, so let’s use that.