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?
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.
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…
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.