Re: bilingual websites

At 01:55 AM 10/30/2001 -0500, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
>2001-10-29 21:59:20, Barry Caplan <bcaplan@i18n.com>:
>
> >
> > Does anyone have any real statistics from various types of
> > sites indicating when this is set and when it isn't?
>
>Most browsers default to the locale/regional settings for the list
>of languages used in 'Accept-Language'.


Well of course the default would be set to be the same as the locale of the 
install/menus. No surprises there.

What I would really like to see is :

1) How often people find the default not sufficient for their browsing 
needs, so they are forced to change it
2) How often people select a locale from the HTML/UI of a web site that is 
contrary to the Accept-Language headers, or for that matter the same as the 
Accept-Language headers.

It would be really interesting to know this over a wide variety of web 
sites from around the world. Is there anyone on the list that can provide 
at least a summary of this data for your web site ?



>But you *should* always have links to different language versions
>of the Web pages.

I am not so sure about that. It may be in many cases that while the 
delivery mechanism may need to be internationalized, the content that 
travels across the delivery channel does not need to be. I think this is an 
important distinction.

For instance, I am not aware of any Yahoos that are available in multiple 
languages, although it appears Yahoo uses essentially the same software to 
support all of its sites around the world.

Barry

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2001 02:25:11 UTC