11 ms·

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.

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.