Nuxified GNU/Linux Help Forums - suggestion: automatic language selection - Comments

The consensus usually is

ariadacapo — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:39:15 +0200

The consensus usually is that language selection based either on IP (general case) or browser user agent string (which most people don't customize) can easily become annoying.

We do plan to implement a redirection when/if we release localised versions of the same language (ex US English vs. UK English). But this is not a priority right now.

Speaking of flags, we will drop them soon (the distinction between country and language is sometimes a sensitive topic), probably when the next translation is released. We have a fairly good idea of an alternative, and will discuss when the time comes.

Thanks

Olivier.

this is my Firefox user

Whistler — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:14:05 +0200

this is my Firefox user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; zh-CN; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071128 Iceweasel/2.0.0.11 (Debian-2.0.0.11-1)

so there is a "zh-CN" which indicates my system language. But I don't think this is available in IE.

Well, is it possible to

KIAaze — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:36:37 +0200

Well, is it possible to detect the system language?

Automatic language selection really sucks

reptiler — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:14:20 +0200

tbuitenh wrote:

It makes the wrong assumption that if you are in a country, the language of that country must be your first language.

I agree. I find it quite annoying that I get Google in Chinese on fresh systems, or when I clear out my cookies...

Personally I think language

tbuitenh — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:09:17 +0200

Personally I think language selection based on IP address is annoying on any site. It makes the wrong assumption that if you are in a country, the language of that country must be your first language. Also, it is as if the creator of the website assumes the visitor is too stupid to recognize his own flag.

And what about the countries with multiple official languages?

Yeah I hate that too with

libervisco — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:05:31 +0200

Yeah I hate that too with google.

I'm not sure if it's neccessary for GGL though since particular language sites are actually under their own domain names and as such in a way advertised separately. When speaking to someone in german you would link them to http://www.linuxfueralle.de/ (provided they're a native speaker of course) or english to getgnulinux.org etc.

I can imagine cases where it could be useful and those where it might not. For example it's clearly useful if someone did somehow heard of GGL, but is not a native or good english speaker and lives in Spain, to get a spanish site immediately. On the other hand, an american traveler could happen to be in germany on some conference and get the german site even though he doesn't want to. Same goes for germans who prefer to read english online..

So, maybe just having flag buttons is a nice solution as is, but let's see what others think.

Thanks

suggestion: automatic language selection

KIAaze — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:43:56 +0200

When you go to google.com for the first time (or from a clean unpersonalized system), you are automatically redirected to the Google page of the country you're in.
Firefox.com does the same.