Instant messaging programs need to support the sending of language information. I am an English speaker. 98% of the time, if I am producing something, it will be in the English language. I would probably go into the preferences of my IM client and set my default to en-us.
Now, I have been occasionally been known to say the odd phrase in German. I took two years of German in high school, so I know just a little bit. The rare case that I write something in German, I could easily change the language selector to German. This should be sent out as xml:lang="de" in the case of Jabber.
This would be good, for one, because it would allow us to file the messages appropriately w.r.t. language. Second, you could then get tools to sit between the message and you. Imagine that I am an English speaker for a moment. (Really stretch that imagination.) Now say that I am speaking via IM someone that has set their preferred language to Spanish. It would be easy to set a processor on my end to take the message I have received, automatically run it through a translation service, and display it to me. I would of course still want to have the original message available to me as well.
All these things could be easily done if clients routinely sent correct language information. Since this information is currently almost universally unreliable, it’s hard to really make use of it.
Tags: clients, jabber, laguage, user interface