why are website language switchers in the current language?
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This always annoys me. I land on a site that's in a language I don't understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and... it's all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië...
How does that make any sense? If I don't speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. "German" in Polish is "Niemiecki"...
Wouldn't it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?
Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?
This should be a universal symbol. Like a flag in the corner you can pretty safely assume might be for language. And then yeah each language listed in that language.
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It would be way more user-friendly to use the language in the HTTP headers. As a web developer the fact that websites are too stupid to do this really grinds my gears. This is just as bad as assuming the language/region from the geolocation of the IP address.
C’mon guys…
It wouldn't be too much work to hook the request language up to a CMS and then a translation service. You could produce in a couple of popular languages upfront and then when someone with a new language visits a landing page, translate it at high priority (few seconds), then the cascade the next most likely click-throughs in order of popularity (or callout weight if it's new). The translations can then be queued for review, and it will mean you only translate when you need to, and the user only experiences a second or so delay as the translation streams the content above the fold.
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Yes, this one. i18n was a three day training course at my last workplace, because things that seem really obvious if you’re an Arabic speaker browsing a Russian website, aren’t at all visible to the original developer who has their environment set to English, develops in English, puts all the frontend labels in a “messages” config file to be sent for translation by another department in another country, and will likely never even see the end result.
Valid comment to some degree, but putting language options in the selected language is always dumber than providing them in the only world language.
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This should be a universal symbol. Like a flag in the corner you can pretty safely assume might be for language. And then yeah each language listed in that language.
Which flag do we use for English?
I won't allow the stars and stripes
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that's all fine and dandy until you get a porch of geese angry at you for using the brazilian flag or vice versa
They're going to hiss at me aren't they?
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No, flags for languages are a bad thing.
- If you put a Swiss flag, what language would it be? (They speak 4 languages in Switzerland)
- What flag would you use for English? The UK? The US?
More details here: https://localizejs.com/articles/why-using-flag-icons-can-confuse-your-users
I mean, if they insist on everything being in Dutch then at least include a flag. If you're going this deep on the UK obviously having the list in the native language is preferable.
The reason for the list above being all in Dutch might be because it's a list of countries, not a list of languages. (I speak some Dutch)
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Which flag do we use for English?
I won't allow the stars and stripes
Have different locales for uk and us
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I think his point was that they are using different alphabets, and therefore can't be sorted "alphabetically"... there's no N or J in 日本語. In order to sort alphabetically, we would have to pick an alphabet, which will in some cases contradict the alphabet of the language's native speakers.
Haha, to avoid exactly this conundrum we prefixed languages with their iso code in a dropdown. So DE - Deutsch or EN - English.
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Which flag do we use for English?
I won't allow the stars and stripes
I have seen at least one site where they used the English flag. Luckily I have watched the European Cup a few times and could recognize it.
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Valid comment to some degree, but putting language options in the selected language is always dumber than providing them in the only world language.
Nobody's arguing that it's the right way to do it, we're just saying that breaking out words like "dumb" after the fact from the comfort of our keyboards, over problems that aren't necessarily obvious at development time if you've not had i18n training, is kind of harsh.
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Which flag do we use for English?
I won't allow the stars and stripes
Zimbabwe obviously
ah fuck -
Nobody's arguing that it's the right way to do it, we're just saying that breaking out words like "dumb" after the fact from the comfort of our keyboards, over problems that aren't necessarily obvious at development time if you've not had i18n training, is kind of harsh.
The only thing I know about i18n is that it is an annoying shitload of language installer packages for both firefox and libreoffice ^^
That said, however, how you need training for a localization package to provide a language menu(!) - not the translations, mind you - in English, is beyond me. I can't follow the point you seem to be trying to make.
There's no reason to not hardcode (in English) a language selection menu, and then display the list of available site languages (and these should be a country flag with the name of language next to it in what may be the language itself) -
Best answer up to this point
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Which flag do we use for English?
I won't allow the stars and stripes
Every time I make a tool like this, I try to wind up any Americans in the company by putting the US flag as
English (simplified)and the Union Jack asEnglishIt's a fun back and forth we have switching it between the two (inevitably someone makes a PR to put it back, and we go on)
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Out of curiosity, would you put Deutsch before or after 日本語?
Since we're using Unicode we sort by first on left to right or last letter on right to left languages by their code point
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Haha, to avoid exactly this conundrum we prefixed languages with their iso code in a dropdown. So DE - Deutsch or EN - English.
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Ive had multiple situations on websites or in games where i accidentally switched the language to like- japanese or something and then had to fumble around trying to switch it back. On websites at least you can translate to find the right option but i recently installed a game on my steamdeck and the input was all screwed up, and while trying to fix it i accidentally switched the language and then navigated away from the menu. Trying to get back to the right setting with broken input and not understanding anything wasnt fun.
The most recent update to Libre Office reset my UI language to one I don't know well enough to recognise. I uninstalled and reinstalled it.
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My Pixel started giving me distances in miles once because I had the system language to English. I needed to change it to English (German) to show me meters. I don't know if they reverted that but at this point I am too afraid to change it.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]My pixel set to Australian English works fine in metric. I presume you chose British English where they use miles rather than kilometres, of course that works for me as I also want Australian spellings
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Which flag do we use for English?
I won't allow the stars and stripes
obviously. -
the last one piss me off so much, especially when they redirect you and you don't have anyway to load the English version...
Even worse when a version is actually different. I had to check the US prices in a store once, it decided "nah mate, your IP's not American, clearly you're a bloody idiot, here's your native version" and even when I manually changed the url to US English, as they did languages based on part of the path, it still decided clearly I must not know what I want. I couldn't even try to infer the price, as the product didn't exist on my version of the site.
And aside from that and language pet peeves, what if you're on Holiday? Or live in an area that speaks a lot of languages close together?
As Cousin Mose said, the language is in the header, the fact that some web devs decide the IP address is clearly a better way to figure out what language you want is insane
