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?
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.