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Side note: the language selection is stupid on the website. No, I'm not from Germany, and I don't speak German even if it's the closest country to me that you s

Side note: the language selection is stupid on the website. No, I'm not from Germany, and I don't speak German even if it's the closest country to me that you sell laptops in. Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages. Or to give options that don't work after you select them. Otherwise, very nice news!

kingcharles 5y ago
I agree that flag != language (British Union flag for English being a prime example), but what is the next best alternative?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- flatiron 5y ago
  “Please select your ISO language code” /s
- ignaloidas 5y ago
  Why have flags at all? Just use the native language name and a translation.
  - KeytarHero 5y ago
    If I end up on the page in a language I don't know, then how would I find the language selector? I agree that flags aren't great, but I don't know of any other solution to this problem.
    - scj 5y ago
      More problematically, in a character set you don't know! Iconography is required.
    - kilburn 5y ago
      We should push to adopt a standard iconography for "language/region menu/options". A good candidate may be a world icon (which some companies already use, e.g.: dell.com). Once there, given that the language list itself is in its own localization (or that iso codes are used to represent them, or both) you should be able to pick yours just fine.
- brightball 5y ago
  Yea, it’s always a struggle. UI wise it clearly looks better to use flags and people know what it’s for when they see it. There’s always people who complain about it though. I’m of the opinion to not worry about it and just use the flags. It’s enough effort to properly internationalize a site and keep it maintained. That it’s available at all is a huge effort. Debating flags vs a drop down with languages is nitpicking IMO. Plus, when the language codes include a country it’s a natural UI decision. EDIT: Supporting multiple languages increases the complexity of the entire development pipeline. Translation teams are brought in, translation tools are brought in to support in-code language as well as translations in the database itself. Every new text snippet needs to be translated to each language to deploy it. Your search features get more complicated, date formats, number formats, currency, collations. Every language you add increases this complexity. Because of that, you will represent a language with a primary country and not every language spoken in that country. On the chance that a company has opted to go all in to support region specific dialects of languages where 100+ choices will be listed, then no…of course flags wouldn’t work. But in most cases you’re lucky to get 2 languages at all with potential for a couple more for all but the largest of companies. Virtually every other site is just going to use one and churn out some Google translations or ask you to do that yourself. After considering all that, yes…just use flags.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > Plus, when the language codes include a country it’s a natural UI decision. Un-natural UI decision then if a language can exists in more than one country, and one country can have many languages?
  - galgalesh 5y ago
    Yeah, just use flags and confuse the fuck out of multilingual countries. Belgium has Dutch, German and French as official languages. So what would a Belgian flag mean? What flag should I choose? If I choose the flag from the Netherlands to get Dutch, I'll probably be confused by a whole bunch of terminology since the dutch of different countries differs vastly more than the English from different countries. "People who complain about flags are nitpickers" is a perfect way to say "I grew up in a gigantic monoculture where you can drive 5 hours in any direction without encountering a different language, if you ignore the natives"
- rg111 5y ago
  Anything but the flag. Why not use full language names? I am very tired of seeing one flag represent my language where that is the newer nation using that language as national language. But that language is spoken for a thousand years or more in other regions.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > I am very tired of seeing one flag represent my language where that is the newer nation using that language as national language. But that language is spoken for a thousand years or more in other regions. I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but I'm curious: What language is over a thousand years old and still recognizably the same language?
    - badLiveware 5y ago
      Icelandic and old norse perhaps
    - Hjfrf 5y ago
      US English comes to mind, not that middle English is particularly readable.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        I was thinking of English as a counter case when I wrote the comment:) Skimming the history section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#History , I don't think I would really describe anything before "Early Modern English" (1500-1700) as meaningfully the same language; if you took a modern English-speaker and gave them a sample of Middle English, they wouldn't be able to read it, and if you stuck them in a room with a speaker of ME neither would be able to understand what the other person was saying. Although in fairness, it does now come down to a semantic argument about what counts as the same language, and I acknowledge that a reasonable person could disagree with my narrower view.
        5y ago
- grishka 5y ago
  I've seen English represented as a flag made of halves of UK and US flags
- uoaei 5y ago
  We've had two-letter designations for languages for a long time now.
  - darrenf 5y ago
    Two letters in the Latin alphabet, I assume - does that assist those who primarily read Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese, Arabic, Thai, Tamil, … ? Localisation basically never has a simple “we should just…” solution.
    - uoaei 5y ago
      I'm sure if Mandarin were the default language, English speakers would quickly learn to recognize the character for "English" and be able to find/click it on a webpage without too much hassle. Language comprehension is unnecessary when all you need to do is recognize a character.
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      My first reaction was to agree, but, all languages also use Latin characters for all sorts of things, especially brand names. A lot of native languages just aren't adding native words fast enough to keep up with technology and so the English words end up getting subsumed. Sometimes they'll be converted into local glyphs (e.g. Katakana in Japanese), but sometimes not. I doubt there are many humans alive who can't recognize Latin characters, even if they have absolutely no understanding of what the meaning is or how to pronounce them.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > but what is the next best alternative? Use the user locale. Expressed as a geographic region (which you can use to compute the best possible region to serve the user from) and a language (used to render the page). If you do it correctly you can support weird combinations, such as a German speaker living in California (expects prices in USD). Or the country of Switzerland (one territory, 4 official languages).
- amelius 5y ago
  > what is the next best alternative? This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028593
  - looperhacks 5y ago
    This doesn't help the user choose a language. The language my browser sends to the website is not necessarily the language I want to view the webpage in.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Then you have to change your browser settings. https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-prioritie...
      - kingcharles 5y ago
        Well, the problem is I'll sometimes go to a site like Wikipedia and then switch to the Japanese version because the Nihongo 日本語 version of the article has more information than the English one.
Beltalowda 5y ago
They don't have a language selector, they have a region selector which sets the appropriate currency, VAT (presumably), and also language, yes. It's an entirely appropriate usage of flags.
- 3np 5y ago
  It is not. I can be present in Germany and want my laptop delivered there. That does not mean I speak a word of German. Language and physical location are disjoint. Even worse when I know the original content is in English, my preferred language, but someone decides I only deserve the partial translation.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    You can switch the region then, it takes 3 seconds and persists across visits.
    - 3np 5y ago
      Sure, and now I can not select shipping destination "Germany" anymore, as somehow it's an impossibility to match the existing language contents and shipping destinations... This is such a frustrating trend. Google has already been mentioned as an offender - it is an annoying procedure to keep resetting the language for every fresh session - but at least their texts are mostly properly translated... Going to the Amazon site of my country (a smaller one where I am a native speaker of the language and most but not all products listing are machine-translated), I have to constantly change my language preferences to get the non-machine-translated version of various texts, as "prefer original language" doesn't seem to be a thing. Some things are just so hilariously wrong that doing this is the only way to make sense of everything. Oh, and they (framework) also force the currency tied to the nation. My credit card is not necessarily in the native currency of either my shipping destination or my preferred language. Just let us set all three independently, please :/ aliexpress and iherb are two sites that do this right.
redthrow 5y ago
> Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages There's even a website for this issue http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...
- zild3d 5y ago
  Don't think the site is going against these. It says "Choose Location and Language" and offers for example: - :us-flag: United States [USD] - :ca-flag: Canada (English) [CAD]
  - kstenerud 5y ago
    What it should offer is two separate options: One for the store location, one for the language. This becomes especially important in Europe because you have so many people who live in a country where they don't speak the associated language natively. This is such a basic UX rule that I'm a bit surprised to see them fumble on it...
  - kilburn 5y ago
    The issue there is that "being in country X" and "wanting to see the site in language Y" is going to be against some users' preferences. Examples: - Canadians from Quebec may prefer the site in french (but use CAD as a currency and see Canada's taxes where relevant). - Expats in Thailand very much prefer to use the site in English. - I'm in Spain and my browser is setup to reflect my preferences (Catalan first, English if that's not available, Spanish last). I prefer English to Spanish because international companies either have a strong presence here (and will probably have Catalan as an option) or their Spanish translation will be worse than the original language in English which I understand better than low effort translations. Frame.work is going for a locale selector but they don't even support all the official locales of the regions they already operate in (e.g.: they don't support fr_CA). Even if they did, there are always users that would prefer a "non-official" localization (en_TH, en_ES following my examples above). In the end they would be much better off letting users pick the language, region and currency separately. It's less effort from their part and a better solution for the users. In that case, flags for languages are bad and flags for regions are fine but can still rub against some users' feelings. Example: pro-independence Scots having to pick the UK flag. Is it really that terrible to have auto-complete and/or select fields for these 3 things?
schleck8 5y ago
Do you have an alternative iconography for language selection? It undoubtedly makes the UX better, especially with many languages

kingcharles 5y ago

I agree that flag != language (British Union flag for English being a prime example), but what is the next best alternative?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
flatiron 5y ago
“Please select your ISO language code” /s
ignaloidas 5y ago
Why have flags at all? Just use the native language name and a translation.
- KeytarHero 5y ago
  If I end up on the page in a language I don't know, then how would I find the language selector? I agree that flags aren't great, but I don't know of any other solution to this problem.
  - scj 5y ago
    More problematically, in a character set you don't know! Iconography is required.
  - kilburn 5y ago
    We should push to adopt a standard iconography for "language/region menu/options". A good candidate may be a world icon (which some companies already use, e.g.: dell.com). Once there, given that the language list itself is in its own localization (or that iso codes are used to represent them, or both) you should be able to pick yours just fine.
brightball 5y ago
Yea, it’s always a struggle. UI wise it clearly looks better to use flags and people know what it’s for when they see it. There’s always people who complain about it though. I’m of the opinion to not worry about it and just use the flags. It’s enough effort to properly internationalize a site and keep it maintained. That it’s available at all is a huge effort. Debating flags vs a drop down with languages is nitpicking IMO. Plus, when the language codes include a country it’s a natural UI decision. EDIT: Supporting multiple languages increases the complexity of the entire development pipeline. Translation teams are brought in, translation tools are brought in to support in-code language as well as translations in the database itself. Every new text snippet needs to be translated to each language to deploy it. Your search features get more complicated, date formats, number formats, currency, collations. Every language you add increases this complexity. Because of that, you will represent a language with a primary country and not every language spoken in that country. On the chance that a company has opted to go all in to support region specific dialects of languages where 100+ choices will be listed, then no…of course flags wouldn’t work. But in most cases you’re lucky to get 2 languages at all with potential for a couple more for all but the largest of companies. Virtually every other site is just going to use one and churn out some Google translations or ask you to do that yourself. After considering all that, yes…just use flags.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Plus, when the language codes include a country it’s a natural UI decision. Un-natural UI decision then if a language can exists in more than one country, and one country can have many languages?
- galgalesh 5y ago
  Yeah, just use flags and confuse the fuck out of multilingual countries. Belgium has Dutch, German and French as official languages. So what would a Belgian flag mean? What flag should I choose? If I choose the flag from the Netherlands to get Dutch, I'll probably be confused by a whole bunch of terminology since the dutch of different countries differs vastly more than the English from different countries. "People who complain about flags are nitpickers" is a perfect way to say "I grew up in a gigantic monoculture where you can drive 5 hours in any direction without encountering a different language, if you ignore the natives"
rg111 5y ago
Anything but the flag. Why not use full language names? I am very tired of seeing one flag represent my language where that is the newer nation using that language as national language. But that language is spoken for a thousand years or more in other regions.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > I am very tired of seeing one flag represent my language where that is the newer nation using that language as national language. But that language is spoken for a thousand years or more in other regions. I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but I'm curious: What language is over a thousand years old and still recognizably the same language?
  - badLiveware 5y ago
    Icelandic and old norse perhaps
  - Hjfrf 5y ago
    US English comes to mind, not that middle English is particularly readable.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      I was thinking of English as a counter case when I wrote the comment:) Skimming the history section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#History , I don't think I would really describe anything before "Early Modern English" (1500-1700) as meaningfully the same language; if you took a modern English-speaker and gave them a sample of Middle English, they wouldn't be able to read it, and if you stuck them in a room with a speaker of ME neither would be able to understand what the other person was saying. Although in fairness, it does now come down to a semantic argument about what counts as the same language, and I acknowledge that a reasonable person could disagree with my narrower view.
      - 5y ago
grishka 5y ago
I've seen English represented as a flag made of halves of UK and US flags
uoaei 5y ago
We've had two-letter designations for languages for a long time now.
- darrenf 5y ago
  Two letters in the Latin alphabet, I assume - does that assist those who primarily read Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese, Arabic, Thai, Tamil, … ? Localisation basically never has a simple “we should just…” solution.
  - uoaei 5y ago
    I'm sure if Mandarin were the default language, English speakers would quickly learn to recognize the character for "English" and be able to find/click it on a webpage without too much hassle. Language comprehension is unnecessary when all you need to do is recognize a character.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    My first reaction was to agree, but, all languages also use Latin characters for all sorts of things, especially brand names. A lot of native languages just aren't adding native words fast enough to keep up with technology and so the English words end up getting subsumed. Sometimes they'll be converted into local glyphs (e.g. Katakana in Japanese), but sometimes not. I doubt there are many humans alive who can't recognize Latin characters, even if they have absolutely no understanding of what the meaning is or how to pronounce them.
908B64B197 5y ago
> but what is the next best alternative? Use the user locale. Expressed as a geographic region (which you can use to compute the best possible region to serve the user from) and a language (used to render the page). If you do it correctly you can support weird combinations, such as a German speaker living in California (expects prices in USD). Or the country of Switzerland (one territory, 4 official languages).
amelius 5y ago
> what is the next best alternative? This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028593
- looperhacks 5y ago
  This doesn't help the user choose a language. The language my browser sends to the website is not necessarily the language I want to view the webpage in.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Then you have to change your browser settings. https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-prioritie...
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Well, the problem is I'll sometimes go to a site like Wikipedia and then switch to the Japanese version because the Nihongo 日本語 version of the article has more information than the English one.

Beltalowda 5y ago

They don't have a language selector, they have a region selector which sets the appropriate currency, VAT (presumably), and also language, yes. It's an entirely appropriate usage of flags.

3np 5y ago
It is not. I can be present in Germany and want my laptop delivered there. That does not mean I speak a word of German. Language and physical location are disjoint. Even worse when I know the original content is in English, my preferred language, but someone decides I only deserve the partial translation.
- schleck8 5y ago
  You can switch the region then, it takes 3 seconds and persists across visits.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Sure, and now I can not select shipping destination "Germany" anymore, as somehow it's an impossibility to match the existing language contents and shipping destinations... This is such a frustrating trend. Google has already been mentioned as an offender - it is an annoying procedure to keep resetting the language for every fresh session - but at least their texts are mostly properly translated... Going to the Amazon site of my country (a smaller one where I am a native speaker of the language and most but not all products listing are machine-translated), I have to constantly change my language preferences to get the non-machine-translated version of various texts, as "prefer original language" doesn't seem to be a thing. Some things are just so hilariously wrong that doing this is the only way to make sense of everything. Oh, and they (framework) also force the currency tied to the nation. My credit card is not necessarily in the native currency of either my shipping destination or my preferred language. Just let us set all three independently, please :/ aliexpress and iherb are two sites that do this right.

redthrow 5y ago

> Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages There's even a website for this issue http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...

zild3d 5y ago
Don't think the site is going against these. It says "Choose Location and Language" and offers for example: - :us-flag: United States [USD] - :ca-flag: Canada (English) [CAD]
- kstenerud 5y ago
  What it should offer is two separate options: One for the store location, one for the language. This becomes especially important in Europe because you have so many people who live in a country where they don't speak the associated language natively. This is such a basic UX rule that I'm a bit surprised to see them fumble on it...
- kilburn 5y ago
  The issue there is that "being in country X" and "wanting to see the site in language Y" is going to be against some users' preferences. Examples: - Canadians from Quebec may prefer the site in french (but use CAD as a currency and see Canada's taxes where relevant). - Expats in Thailand very much prefer to use the site in English. - I'm in Spain and my browser is setup to reflect my preferences (Catalan first, English if that's not available, Spanish last). I prefer English to Spanish because international companies either have a strong presence here (and will probably have Catalan as an option) or their Spanish translation will be worse than the original language in English which I understand better than low effort translations. Frame.work is going for a locale selector but they don't even support all the official locales of the regions they already operate in (e.g.: they don't support fr_CA). Even if they did, there are always users that would prefer a "non-official" localization (en_TH, en_ES following my examples above). In the end they would be much better off letting users pick the language, region and currency separately. It's less effort from their part and a better solution for the users. In that case, flags for languages are bad and flags for regions are fine but can still rub against some users' feelings. Example: pro-independence Scots having to pick the UK flag. Is it really that terrible to have auto-complete and/or select fields for these 3 things?

schleck8 5y ago

Do you have an alternative iconography for language selection? It undoubtedly makes the UX better, especially with many languages