Best practices for determining a visitor's language?

[JAB Creations]

What is or are the best method(s) for detecting or determining a visitor's language?

- John

[encyclo]

The

Accept-Language

header sent by the browser. It should offer a choice of preferred languages with a quotient of preference. For example, mine reads:

en-ca,en;q=0.8,fr-ca;q=0.5,fr;q=0.3

Other options include checking the language in the user-agent header, but that's less reliable. I may user a browser with the interface in one language, but have a preference for another. Geo-targetting is possible too, but that doesn't indicate the preferred language, just the language of the region where the person is connecting from.

You should always offer the possibility of switching languages manually - in that case, set a cookie for the chosen language and serve that up as a default for that user.

[JAB Creations]

Thanks, I'm going to rely on this primarily and cross-check via the user agent. Simply put all I'm going to do is provide flags of detected/determined languages and it should give visitors an easy visual queue that a translation is available. Here is the method to determine the visitor's language via their browser header in PHP...

- John

<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'];?>

[edited by: JAB_Creations at 5:41 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2007]

[phranque]

i concur with the above.
we typically go with the following priorities:
- user profile/session/cookie/whatever (last user-selected language preference)
- satisfy high-q language/locale specifications in Accept-Language header
- default or "native" language for the site.

in most cases we allow for a url or form parameter to override all.
(e.g., "...&User:LANGUAGE=sa&...")

if you were using perl the HTTP::Negotiate module [search.cpan.org] would be helpful - perhaps php has something similar...

[anewstone]

Why not use Google Analytics?

[JAB Creations]

I've updated my homepage to determine the supported languages via the browser's headers. When a language is supported I have PHP echo a highlight class so the flag that corresponds with the language stands out more.

- John

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], anewstone!

Why not use Google Analytics?

it's a little late to use google analytics if you are trying to serve content based on client-side settings.