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?

  • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I can’t follow the point you seem to be trying to make.

    The point is that it’s really easy to point at stuff after the fact like it’s obvious. Take for example your mention of flags; the World Wide Web Consortium recommends against their use, because countries aren’t languages, and so the use of flags to represent them is potentially contentious depending on what market you’re selling your product in and which flag you choose. Any screwup you make there would be really easy for some smartass to show up afterwards and say “well obviously you shouldn’t use a Taiwan flag to represent Traditional Chinese if you’re selling in China, dumbass, you shouldn’t need special training to know that… and while we’re at it, at least a few of the 8 million Ukrainians who speak Russian probably aren’t keen on identifying themselves in their profile with a Russian flag either”.

    Again, and I feel like I’m repeating myself here, my point isn’t that you’re incorrect, it’s that getting on your high horse about it and calling people dumb is kind of a neckbeard move because every aspect of i18n has the potential to make anyone look dumb.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 days ago

      well obviously you shouldn’t use a Taiwan flag to represent Traditional Chinese if you’re selling in China, dumbass, you shouldn’t need special training to know that… […] at least a few of the 8 million Ukrainians who speak Russian probably aren’t keen on identifying themselves in their profile with a Russian flag either”

      fair enough, that is a good point.

      Again, and I feel like I’m repeating myself here, my point isn’t that you’re incorrect, it’s that getting on your high horse about it and calling people dumb

      No, I wasn’t calling people dumb, I was calling “most web developers” morons, and I stand by that. Most web developers are morons. And the language topic at hand is just one of many symptoms of that. Way more annoying than that is that almost all websites have been fubared with stupid frameworks and interactive sites transmitting each keypress and reloading parts of the page while you are trying to use them / whatever was in your focus before. Interactive websites can be done right, but most of the time they are not, and it’s the fault of stupid marketing people and crappy web developers / designers who do NOT refuse to implement shitty marketing ideas.