How Language is Determined on Career Sites

If a career site is translated into more than one language, a language drop-down list displays to external candidates, and they can use it to change the language displayed to them on the site. When they do this, a language cookie is saved to their devices.

This cookie is used later when the candidates revisit the site. Here's how this works.

The majority of the URLs that link to career site pages contain a language parameter that determines which language is loaded to the page when the link is used. Candidates can then change that language, but there's no additional logic needed when the site is loaded.

However, some of the URLs may not include the language parameter. This is the case for sites that use a vanity domain and no additional parameters (for example: HTTPS// jobs.vision.com). If a candidate uses such a link, the application has to determine what the site display language should be.

Let's say, for example, there is a career site that has English and Italian translations, with English set as default. When a candidate clicks the link to visit the site, the language that loads on the page is determined using the following process:

1. The application first verifies if the candidate’s device has a language preference set in a cookie (if the candidate has visited the site before). If a cookie is there, and the language from the cookie matches one of the site languages (English or Italian), the site is displayed in that language.
2. If there’s no cookie saved, the application checks the user’s browser language. If there’s a match between the browser’s language and one of the site languages, then the site is loaded in that language.
3. If the user’s browser is set to a language that is not one of the site languages (for this example, let’s say French), then the page is loaded using the site’s primary language, which in our example is English.