Akkaunt... and translating territories to languages

Here’s a strange picture I got one day from TypeKey when trying to log into a blog to comment.

The shot is in Russian, although there’s no Russian in the language list I guess they were experimenting with a new language and figured by my GeoIP that Estonia should get the Russian language. Which is nasty — Russian is not an official language in Estonia. Many large corporations do the same error of associating Estonia with Russia — an excellent way to turn off the more intelligent part of the region.

I recently needed to solve a similar problem — determining language by territory. Turns out that unicode.org offers a whole complete translation table for that. So you can feed it the GeoIP and get back what language you should use to talk to the user. You obviously cannot localize into all the languages, but you can localize to the bigger ones. And when no match is found, I guess just use English as fallback.