[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

Andre Engels andreengels at gmail.com
Fri Jun 4 09:18:07 UTC 2010


On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be
> surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such
> statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can
> choose the languages involved.

However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular,
logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is
more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we
can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is
some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond
country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number
of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give
everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those,
regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss
out on a good advertising location.


-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com




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