Poorly implemented translations ‘logic’ is something that really grinds my gear. Today I ran across the new Dyson 360 Eye and it is a case study in how to not do website translations.

Since I’m connected to a VPN in Switzerland, this is what I was presented with:

As you can see, the website is in German just because I connected through Switzerland. Now let’s analyze why this is bad.

Location != language

Your location isn’t really a great way to determine the language for a user. For instance, there are plenty of companies that route all their internal traffic through a central end-point for all their remote offices. Using this approach, all them will see the language of the country the end-point is located.

There are of course a ton of other situations that would break this logic too, such as VPN users (like yours truly) and incorrect GeoIP lookups.

A far better approach is to look at the locale of the browser, and user that as the basis. That way, you can serve the user with the language s/he prefers (regardless of location).

Use proper URLs

Another thing you can notice in the Dyson example is that URL doesn’t change with the locale. For instance, one would expect something like dyson360eye.com/de or dyson360eye.de for the German version. Instead, you just have the German version being served under dyson360eye.com. Beyond being a horrible thing from an SEO perspective, it is also confusing for the users.

Give the users a choice

Even if you have a good implementation for auto-probing for the users’ language (either using GeoIP or locale), you should still give the users a choice to override this.

In the case of Dyson, there is no way for me to change the language, nor override it manually by altering the URL.

What should I do?

It’s easy to criticize, so let’s give Dyson some constructive feedback instead:

• Don’t use the same URL for all languages. Use proper suffix (such as /de or a separate subdomain).
• Use proper redirects for each language to not upset thy mighty Google Bot.
• Give the user a choice to set the language themselves (regardless how good you think your logic is).