In most browers' preferences dialogs, you can find settings for which language to display if the content is available in more than one language. What happens is, that your browser and the server negotiate over which language to show you. Your browser tells the server which languages you're comfortable with and in which order of preference. For instance, if you tell your browser that you understand English and French, but prefer English, the server will serve you an English version of the text and a French one only if it doesn't have an English one. If it doesn't have either version, it will serve you the original language, I presume. The HTTP 1.1 specification explains how this should work.
This doesn't work really well for me. You see, I am fluent in English, Dutch, Spanish and Galician, I get by in Portuguese (or Portuñol, rather), and I dabble in French and German. If the original text is in one of the four languages that I am comfortable with, I really prefer the original. In other words, if the original is in Spanish, for instance, I don't want to read the English translation. I like to think that my understanding of the original text will be better than the translation.
There is an accepted wisdom in software design that the way to gather good quality data is to reject 'bad data'. The main tactic is to suppose that no data is better than incomplete data, which is why we are told 'you must complete the required fields'. This sounds like a fine idea, until you observe people filling in a form and typing 'unknown' into half of the fields.
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