Despite this, major sites (google, amazon) still present the wrong language when I browse to them from a country whose primary language is not what I have set as default in my browser. (Bing gets it right.) Is this a deliberate design choice or is it just SV myopia that assumes location=language rather than using what the user has configured?
If you went to the French site and had English set to your language they could redirect you to a different site but if you really wanted to visit the French site you’d have no way to do it.
To first order web internationalization is a scam. It is one thing to (at great expense) have translation strings for all the phrases like ‘check out’ and ‘user reviews’ —- all the text that doesn’t matter. But translating all the product descriptions (many supplied by small marketplace sellers) and reviews, etc. is a big if not impossible job.
I have seen startups not killed but seriously set back by the overhead of translating text. Some of them sensibly give up when they see how much it costs, other ones just stop making small improvements in the site, edits for clarity, etc. because messing around with internationalization strings makes it 3-8x more expensive to make what would otherwise be simple changes.