Yes, as an English speaker living in Germany, this is also something that drives me up the wall, but has also gotten better recently. My personal favorites, the cream of the crop:
* Netflix: full site in English, subtitles (and audio tracks) for all shows available in German, English and several other languages. Only a few edge cases where the source (written) material appearing on-screen has already been hard-translated in.
* Amazon: will let you turn on full English experience, up to and including...English speaking support (both written and verbal). This is truly the cream of the crop in terms of quality of experience.
I really appreciate any German-oriented site that offers English as a possible language in spite of knowing my location. And if somewhere on your servers you already have English available, you would be silly to not make that available world-wide (where it makes sense).
Of course, these are two of the biggest tech companies, so perhaps that speaks to the cost of internationalization.
* Netflix: full site in English, subtitles (and audio tracks) for all shows available in German, English and several other languages. Only a few edge cases where the source (written) material appearing on-screen has already been hard-translated in.
* Amazon: will let you turn on full English experience, up to and including...English speaking support (both written and verbal). This is truly the cream of the crop in terms of quality of experience.
I really appreciate any German-oriented site that offers English as a possible language in spite of knowing my location. And if somewhere on your servers you already have English available, you would be silly to not make that available world-wide (where it makes sense).
Of course, these are two of the biggest tech companies, so perhaps that speaks to the cost of internationalization.