this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
488 points (97.5% liked)

Ask Lemmy

33238 readers
1028 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

(page 3) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (13 children)

In an international context, not everybody speaks English. A Japanese customer wants to switch to French. Which language should the language picker be in?

Alternative is to put the flag of each language next to the name in the picker. That way, whoever doesn't read the current language can at least pick by icon.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago

Which language should the language picker be in?

the language of the listed language. Lots of language switchers do it that way

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

The language selectors in the system I have built are either English or native. And I can tell you, implementing and verifying over 100 languages in their native writing is quite a challenge.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago (6 children)

If people really insist then at least have a flag emoji

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (2 children)

that's all fine and dandy until you get a porch of geese angry at you for using the brazilian flag or vice versa

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 94 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Perfectly comprehensible if you speak english, look:

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago

I think i've had a stroke

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 104 points 6 days ago (9 children)

I've seen language switchers with translated language names that were sorted by the English name. So "Deutsch" was sorted under G.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What language would you sort them by?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If everything is displayed in the same language then sort by the displayed language. You don't want to have to search for Spanish near the E letter because it's sorted by the original espanol in the background since that's not what you as the user sees.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (3 children)

And if they're all displayed in their own language?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 days ago

Yeah that happened on Microsofts knowledgebase sites for years...

So annoying. But cant blame such a small company for not fixing that, they probably couldn't afford to fix it /s

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's not my fault if the Scrum Master can't provide a proper scope in the ticket. They said change the names, not the sorting.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (3 children)

The scrum master is not a product owner and shouldn't be providing scope or anything for that matter in tickets. No wonder agile is hated and dying, it's been corrupted beyond recognition by people who have no reading comprehension.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The product owner often doesn't understand technology well enough to know that mapping labels and sorting are different. They don't know what they don't know. The SM needs to help bridge that gap.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Just bad UX design. Typically this should include flags or the language's name in the language if they really did a good job.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What flag is for English? What flag is for Portuguese? What about Austria, do they got a language? What do we put under Chinese flag, Mandarin? Where do Cantonese go? Oh, what about Belarusian? There are at least three options, and two could get you in jail, choose carefully.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (4 children)

What flag do you use for english ?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Use the UK flag if the site is in English and use the American flag if it's in Webster English. Seems pretty evident to me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

A split combo of the two is pretty common.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Flags don't represent languages and therefore shouldn't be used to represent languages.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (7 children)

Flags don't make sense.
Otherwise this is completely valid:

( ) German 🇧🇷
( ) Italian 🇧🇷
( ) Japanese 🇧🇷

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago

Because they didn't think it through.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 children)

The reality is, it varies.

I just opened the language picker on the first site I had in my browser tabs (happened to be Epic games) and they display the language list using native names for the target language, rather than current language (screenshot attached)

I agree it's much better to do it this way.

As a developer, why it doesn't happen sometimes could just be by accident. If you intentionally set out to localise a site and put all text and menu elements into localisation files to be translated, then the language names are going to end up getting translated too. It takes conscious thought and UX design to realise that it's better for accessibility if that single part of the site is actually just static text, regardless of what language is selected.

And before anyone suggests using country flags in your language picker as a cool solution - please don't, because that sucks too. There isn't a 1:1 relationship between countries and languages and so the flag approach is a flawed compromise at best, and actually insulting at worst.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's plenty of examples of software doing this right and displaying each language in the selector in that language, it's hard to say why they've localised it here. Most likely they just didn't consider how the user interacts with that element and localised it the same way they translate everything else, but that could be down to anyone from the developer habitually running everything through localisation to company policy where they couldn't get an exception for that element.

You'd have to ask support for whatever software you're using for more detail, chances are you won't get anything useful back but if you're lucky they might fix it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is Fairphone's website. I'm not that anal about it, doesn't bother me too much, but I did see it on several websites, and I'm just confused...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Since Fairphone is Dutch it kinda makes sense they'd make this mistake. I suppose if you'd e-mail them about it they'd be open to making the change. They're probably not even aware of it.

It gets more difficult if even the script is different. I once installed some Chinese app that would put the language picker in Mandarin and their symbols. I really didn't know how to change it to anything I could understand so I'd go by all of them one by one until I found a language I understood.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›