Re: Localized Pages

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Michel Martens wrote:

> > I wouldn't say that "most" people don't like this. In my experience, it 
> > is only a relatively small group that purely detest their mother tongue 
> > being used instead of English in technical writing. But this group is 
> > often the loudest ;-)
> >
> > These users that don't want information in their own language are also 
> > very rarely novice users -- so if www.gnome.org is at all aimed at 
> > novice users, it should include some language selection mechanism that 
> > is automatic, provides a "smart" default and is overridable if the user 
> > wants that. I think only the content-negotiation language selection as 
> > default and an optional language selection method on the page that 
> > overrides that (and with this info stored in a cookie) provides all this.
>
> The best way to get around this is to provide simple links to pages in
> other languages. The user that goes to www.gnome.org won't be surprised if
> he/she finds that all the texts are written in english.

No, he won't be surprised if the site he goes to isn't translated. It 
used to be that way, when men were men, the web was the web, and you had 
no place on the Internet if you weren't fluent in English.
But I think translating to the preferred language by default is a good 
and fair strategy, as the users who maybe need the translations the most 
will have trouble finding the language setting otherwise (as if you 
*must* select a language option on the page to get translated content).

Advanced users who desperately want content in English will find the 
language option on the site, or even realize why the site defaulted to 
that particular translation and change the language preferences in the 
browser. That's at least what I believe :-)


> Here goes the voice of experience: I speak spanish, english and a little
> bit of french. I lived in France for one year, and I hated when many sites
> showed everything in french.

Did you change the language preference in your browser (I assume that 
the sites you speak about where multilingual, and the french translation 
was automatically picked for you, and your complaint is about that)?


> Clean text links. A splash screen showing a menu of languages is evil.

Yes. That's not what I meant either. I ment that the user should be able 
to select a different language somewhere on the front page if he is not 
comfortable with the automatically detected language preference.
I agree, forcing the user to make a language choice (a "splash screen") 
is evil, that is why I want it to be an automatic process, but where the 
user is still able to override it (and the site remembers that decision) 
if he is not comfortable with the results.


Christian