Wed

Feb 28
2007

Allison Randal

Allison Randal

Unintended Side-effects of Internationalization

Dear Google,

I applaud the enlightened international perspective that led you to provide your site in multiple languages and to detect a user's country and language preferences by their IP address. You'd be surprised how much French I remember from studying it as a child, and how much Dutch I can read as a result of studying Afrikaans the past 3 months. However, perhaps you should consider providing an option to change languages, or set a language preference, so your users aren't all forced to be so linguistically nimble when traveling. If there is such an option, I haven't been able to find it yet while navigating my account preferences in Dutch. I'm curious to experience Google Docs & Spreadsheets in Japanese, but maybe not that curious.

Love,
Allison


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Comments: 11

  ivar [02.28.07 10:08 AM]

Google honours the http accept language header. You set it in your browser.. in Firefox it's prefs->advanced->general->languages.

  Rob Flickenger [02.28.07 10:19 AM]

This is one of the added benefits of using a VPN when travelling. Not only is your traffic protected from eavesdroppers, but you appear to be "coming from" the other end of the VPN: probably your home or office in the US. Google doesn't (and can't) know the difference.

  Simon [02.28.07 10:24 AM]

Oh, if you want real fun, combine it with Tor: your language changes to something unpredictable every single visit to the Google site...

  John Dowdell [02.28.07 10:47 AM]

I've gotten surprised like that before. If you type in google.com/preferences, though, then you can set UI language as a cookie.

(Their list of languages is long, though, and could be difficult if you wake up in an area that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. Sometimes I've had to bounce around in there a few times before I found English again.... ;-)

If you remember the address google.com/preferences, though, then you'll have a path out regardless of where you travel.

jd

  Doug K [02.28.07 10:50 AM]

I've noticed the Tor effect, and had the problem in Germany. Afrikaans incidentally works fairly well on German too ;-)
However if memory serves I found a way to tun back into English on the page, though I don't remember the details.

Why study Afrikaans for heaven's sake ? Knowing the the dialect of a small white African tribe is a recondite skill at best..

  jmreidy [02.28.07 10:52 AM]

To make your google.com/preferences life easier... add hl?=en to see the prefs in English -- or change the "en" to something else like "de" to see it in German. So: http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en

  Dave Kebab [02.28.07 10:54 AM]

google.com/ncr

english every time. ncr stands for no country redirect and will leave you at the .com

  Sam [02.28.07 11:11 AM]

Don't all countries' home pages have a "go to google.com" link in the strip of links at the bottom?

  Jim [02.28.07 11:46 AM]

Sorry, this isn't a side-effect of i18n. This is a side-effect of ignorance.

HTTP includes a perfectly reasonable method for detecting which language a user prefers. Web developers should know about this. The ones who are ignorant of the most important protocol in their field go on to produce the incredibly stupid hack of trying to figure out where the user is and what the most popular language in that country is.

Just think, if they actually knew the fundamentals of their profession, they could have avoided this.

PS: Yes, I'm aware that Accept-Language is not perfect, but it's a much better start than anything else.

  photon [02.28.07 04:20 PM]

Google does honor HTTP 'Accept-Language'. How high a priority it is given is another story. However, that does not help if you drop by an Internet cafe in Thailand (instead of using your own laptop at a hotel room) where browsers are configured to send 'th' as the first choice in 'Accept-Language'.

  Shawn Lauriat [02.28.07 09:13 PM]

Either bookmark http://www.google.com/intl/en/ (or whichever language you choose), or do what I do and bookmark http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/ for your searching needs.

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