Then we should have browser settings for regional dialect, because the same thing holds true. I don't stop being a British English speaker just because my IP address is in Toronto.

Language is a property of people, not place.

edit: Also, I'm an English speaker living in Berlin. This shit happens to me all the time, and it's a trigger. Apologies for blowing my cool.

And I'm used to reading any flavour of English. The regional dialects really don't matter. Colour can be color and I'll still understand. I won't understand "Farbe".

> Then we should have browser settings for regional dialect

We do, and that's what I'm using. Sorry if my example was confusing, I should have worded it better. I am using the regional setting from the browser to determine the correct region for your language, I'm not using your physical location in any way.

My comment was an outline for the right way to do it and I blew it when my example had the person with their region set to mexico actually in mexico (which is true most of the time, and true in my example, but is not how the app logic works because it's not true for everyone all the time). Either way, I think the actual logic agrees with what you would expect -- you get the language your browser is set to regardless of where you're connecting from. Additionally, if you have your region selected, we'll also tune your desired language for the right region of that language too regardless of where you are physically.

Apologies for not reading your post right, then. Like I said, this is a bit of a trigger for me because I live in a country where I don't speak the language, and deal with this shit all the time.

Your site is an outlier if you ignore the user's location. Most tend to take the IP address as more important than the browser settings (looking at you Google, Amazon).

The Amazon case is especially weird. I can talk English to Amazon.com, but as soon as I set up a Berlin delivery address it wants me to switch to Amazon.de. Which speaks German to me. There is a switch for language there, but that only works for some parts of the interface, and not things like reviews, etc, which are all still in German. It knows I speak English, because it keeps offering to translate these German reviews into English for me. But if I go to the same product on the .com site, there's a ton of English reviews for the same product. I must admit, I don't understand the logic behind it all.

But the same problem is at the core: assuming that because someone lives in Germany, they speak German. Again, language is a property of people, not places.

> Which speaks German to me. There is a switch for language there, but that only works for some parts of the interface, and not things like reviews, etc, which are all still in German.

It's worse than that. The Amazon interface on amazon.de is clearly a translated version of amazon.com, but the English option is a machine translation of the German amazon.de (which was originally manually translated from English). Why?

And then amazon.fr just doesn't give you an English option at all. Again, why?

haha that's hilarious. I hadn't caught that it was that bad.

I always figure I must be a tiny minority market for Amazon to not have optimised my experience.

With few exceptions, I can't think of a good reason to serve up regional dialects of English and I can't imagine anyone approving the translation of a site into UK, US, Australian, Canadian, Indian English or any other regional dialect.

English speakers are quite capable of understanding regional dialects and I would guess there are few instances when a user could be confused by a dialect not local to them.

Do we then have to go down the route of translating to northern English dialect over Scottish English? etc.?

No, you serve up whatever variation of English that is local to you. The rest of us native English speakers will get by just fine, unlike if I was on holiday in Mexico and was served up Spanish. I wouldn't have a clue.

I don't think dialect is the key thing.

As someone from the UK, I don't need a news article to use "pavement" or "footway" instead of "sidewalk".

But I do appreciate sites using a UK date format, and saying "Colour" instead of "Color", in their UI.

No one should be using the travesty that the Americans call a "date format" anyway =)

An HTTP Accept-Language header includes a regional qualifier -- de-DE, en-GB, es-CO and so on.

(Although, I don't think I've ever seen a website offering multiple versions of English.)

Really!? I'm from the UK and can think of loads of sites that offer a British English version.

"Favourites" instead of "Favorites".

South African English! :)