Language negotiation
 

I have installed and enabled 2 language packs (English and French).

I have installed the Geolocation module. It works and sets my country correctly on the front-page.

But... although my browser locale is French, the language remains English.

Am I missing something? Is there no language negotiation system/module in place?

Re: Language negotiation
 

The language is not supposed to be changed automatically I'm afraid.
As far as I know the dev team are planning to improve this in future releases (but most likely not before 5.4).

Re: Language negotiation
 

I think it requests to change language manually.

Re: Language negotiation
 

Bump!


We are in 5.4.1.x now and now automatic geolocation for the language yet, if there is more than one language.
The code appears pretty trivial to me. What's the problem to implement it.
Multi-lingual websites would really attract more customers after all.
Eg, if a German visitor sees a website in English he/she leaves quickly to look for a German "speaking" site and easily misses a manual language adjustment button for sure.

Re: Language negotiation
 

This is very much personal preference:
I agree with you in general that the site should detect and eventually adjust based on location on the basis that maybe (maybe) most people want this.
However personally I hate it when sites do this automatically. After all this behavior is something the creator of the site decided "it's what everyone wants". But it is not. I'd rather manually change language, and this means the language button/dropdown should be prominently shown, or let browser do this for me after explicitly asks me if I want it to happen (and I do this on per site basis). Of course this uses some sort of online translation like Google Translate.
And this is the proper behavior - we detected you are in X area and your spoken language is Y, do you want to see this page in Y language variant... or something like this.
So not assume what people want.


If XC adds such a functionality I'd rather see it as an option for customer to make a choice and not something forced on them.

Re: Language negotiation
 

I agree as well generally.
However, we need to look at this from the viewpoint of a general customer, not as computer savvy guys or software developers/technicians who don't want to be "nannied" into a certain behaviour since we immediately know what to look for and find it (if it's there at all).

Additionally, lots of customers use mobile devices and don't read (or comprehend, I dare to say), what their tiny screen with a great resolution tells them.
If they hit a page in language X where there is a matching flag with no proper sign that it can be tapped opening a choice for language Y/Y/Z, and it's not the language they understand or want, they navigate away within seconds. They are lost customers.

The customer can be addressed automatically in the language, where he/she comes from (geolocation) and still have a language selector prominently on the page for their choice.
So, the second part of your answer pretty much hits the nail on the head.

The main thing is that the visitor is prominently made aware of having the choice. Otherwise, it's lost business more than often.

Re: Language negotiation
 

Oops, I just found out that this functionality actually appears to be implemented.
I tried it using several VPN exit points.
It's in Store Setup -> Translations, Languages Tab.
There is a column "Countries", where clicking in the field behind each language, the countries, where to use this respective language can be selected or deselected.
My bad, if it is documented in a proper way and I did not read it, lack of documentation if it's not and I could not find it.
This solution looks good enough.