Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 14, 2017 21:44 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Highlights in Fedora 26 by Creideiki
Parent article: Highlights in Fedora 26

<sarcasm>And everyone lives in countries with exactly one official language, so that's not a problem.<sarcasm>

Do you think these automatic region-base language selectors use official languages of countries? I don't know how they work, but I'd assume they have a table of regions (as distinguishable by IP address) and popular languages, without regard to political boundaries or legal status of languages.

It does sound really unfair to people who can't read the most popular language in the region they're in, though, which must be pretty common. I don't travel enough ever to have experienced this myself.

Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 15, 2017 21:47 UTC (Sat) by bernat (subscriber, #51658) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, there is nothing fancy. You are in country X, you get the official primary language of country X. I am in Switzerland and I get everything in German (website, ads) while my browser is correctly configured to get English and French only.

Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 15, 2017 22:04 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

You are in country X, you get the official primary language of country X

Well, it can't be that simple, because a lot of countries, covering much of the planet, do not have an official primary language. The US has no official language; Canada has two, of equal status. And of course there is room for disagreement as to what is a country and probably as to what if anything is an official language of a country.

So if it's by country, someone had to sit down and assign one language to each country for web serving purposes, and I wonder why such person wouldn't use some more meaningful geography than country territories. Maybe there was already a table mapping IP address to country?

Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 16, 2017 6:04 UTC (Sun) by bernat (subscriber, #51658) [Link] (1 responses)

In Switzerland, it's that simple. There are 4 official languages, German is the dominant one (60%) and everything just defaults to German. Even swiss websites just default to German. Google serves me ads only in German. Twitter serves me ads only in German. And I am not in the German-part of the country.

Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 17, 2017 10:42 UTC (Mon) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link]

Being from the German speaking part, I do occasionally get ads in French and Italian on Youtube.