While you’ll find most people in a location may prefer the most commonly spoken local language (or languages) or dialect of a particular language, there may be exceptions: members of a minority language group, immigrants, expats, members of the armed forces, civil servants, language-learners or people who may simply prefer another language.
A lot of non-native English-speakers have grown used to setting sites to English-language options because of poor or confusing translations. Of course, your priority should be to improve your translations, but if your users want to see your English page despite them visiting from a country with a different primary language, let them see your English-language pages.
Some websites are not very flexible, but offer one or two common regional languages. Some only offer one. There are even websites that ostensibly sell to countries with multiple languages, but offer only one language (like websites that sell to Switzerland and have only a Swiss German option with no French or Italian available). Switzerland has four official languages – but according to Apple, Ebay and Paypal there’s just one, German. Something similar happens to sites that target Belgian customers and only offer French, even though a slight majority of the population speak Flemish and there is a German-speaking minority.
In order to access eBay in a different language (or dialect) other than the one (or ones) associated with your country, you need to use a different country’s eBay site. You can’t visit a Spanish-language eBay site and have prices default to US Dollars or Pound Sterling.
There are lots of reasons why someone might want to have modular language and currency settings:
- An Australian working in China: English (Australia), Chinese Yuan, China
- A Chinese person working in Spain, paid in Euros: Chinese (Simplified), Euro, Spain
- An American Japanese-learner in the Netherlands, who has a US bank account: Japanese, US Dollar, Netherlands
- A Romanian working in Italy, being paid in Euros: Romanian (Romania), Euro, Italy
- A German working in Singapore, being paid in Singapore Dollars: German (Germany), Singapore Dollar, Singapore
- A British expat working temporarily in the US, being paid in pounds to a British bank
account: English (UK), Pound Sterling, United States
An example of a site that allows for flexibility is Etsy. You can choose any country listed on the site, which is a separate setting from your language and currency. It also shows you which settings it’s derived from your IP address and your computer’s language settings, and asks to confirm them.
In this screenshot, Etsy has cleverly detected my preferred settings: English (UK), US Dollar as a currency, and US as a location. As you can see, I’m not bound to choose English (US) or Spanish (if I’m lucky) or French or Chinese (if I’m really lucky). I can choose Dutch or Russian if I like. If I happened to have an overseas bank account I could change the currency from ‘US Dollar’ to ‘Euro’ (to give an example).
Websites and operating systems that don’t offer this facility, despite the existence of other language translations for the website, make lots of assumptions about the users and their habits. They may fit for some people but there will always be exceptions and allowing for that possibility may make your customers or readers happier because of your thoughtfulness. A way (for web apps) to base language preferences on what the user prefers, rather than what you think they might prefer, is to use the language their browser is set to in order to determine the display language.
