Region selection does not define language preference

January 28, 2010

7 Votes

Status: Archived

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I live in Germany, but my first language is English, and not German. I find that I am unable to check my order status in English. Selecting UK and entering a order number and (German) customer number returns zero results.

It is a poor (although understandable) assumption that someone's geographical location defines their preferred language. However, it is even worse to prevent someone from changing that forced language selection to their preferred option.

If I remember rightly, Dell EMEA supports 12 languages and 18 regions. I suggest that it would be a good idea to remove the assumption that each region only supports a subset (usually 1) of the 12 languages. 

I'd like to see a change to the following process:

  1. The user's language and region should default to their browser language preference (en-GB, de-DE, de-CH, fr-CH etc).
  2. The user should then be able to change the region and select ANY language (i.e. en-DE).
  3. That preference should be remembered for future visits and applicable on all Dell sites.
Defining locale preference using this logic is the safest, for the following reasons:
  1. It covers the vast majority of people that oriiginate from the region (e,g German citizens will most likely have de-DE set up). 
  2. It covers business travellers that might happen to be on business abroad, but want to view the correct region in the correct language (i.e. visiting Germany but still with their browser set up as en-GB).
  3. It covers ex-pats, who live abroad (and therefore have to order via their local region), but don't necessarily speak the local language (e.g. en-DE).
  4. It covers locals who don't speak the available language options you have selected. A good example is the Italian speaking part of Switzerland that you don't currently support.
A great example that illustrates issues of locale and language selection is as follows; There are 14 million speakers of Catalan in the world, but only 10 million speakers of Norwegian. Dell supports Norwegian, but not Catalan.


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