Forced Localization
I have to wonder, why do major sites that are also available in the official language of the country they detect you’re in automatically switch to it, regardless of your preferences? For example, lately I see YouTube switching my location, and the site version I see, to Romania instead of Worldwide every so often even after I set it back to Worldwide, and oddly enough even if I don’t clear cookies. Previously, there was the issue with Avaaz sending e-mails in Romanian, which seemed temporarily fixed after I set my language preference to English and also wrote them to complain, but after a while I again started receiving e-mails that are either just in Romanian or in both Romanian and English, with the Romanian version first. And don’t even get me started on the BitDefender site, which seems to constantly check and switch back to the localized version, no matter how much you try to select another.
If it always annoyed me, to say the least, that books aren’t also printed in the original language in every country where translated versions are published or that English versions of software may at times be more difficult or more expensive to obtain once fully or partially localized ones become available, this may be even worse, especially since there’s absolutely no excuse for it. Considering the amount of effort put into the current system that determines a user’s location, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been any problem to determine the user’s system language, or at least browser language, set the default to that instead, and then definitely add a clear localization setting on every site available in multiple languages. On sites that change even more according to the selected location, this becomes absolutely necessary, so all registered users will be able to select the version of the site they prefer to use, including a generic one, without any localization, and make sure that version will be saved, even if they clear cookies, switch browsers or even use different computers.
