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?
Valid comment to some degree, but putting language options in the selected language is always dumber than providing them in the only world language.
Nobody’s arguing that it’s the right way to do it, we’re just saying that breaking out words like “dumb” after the fact from the comfort of our keyboards, over problems that aren’t necessarily obvious at development time if you’ve not had i18n training, is kind of harsh.
The only thing I know about i18n is that it is an annoying shitload of language installer packages for both firefox and libreoffice ^^ That said, however, how you need training for a localization package to provide a language menu(!) - not the translations, mind you - in English, is beyond me. I can’t follow the point you seem to be trying to make. There’s no reason to not hardcode (in English) a language selection menu, and then display the list of available site languages (and these should be a country flag with the name of language next to it in what may be the language itself)
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.
fair enough, that is a good point.
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.
Most web developers are morons in the sense that most people are morons. They’re not especially moronic.
A lot of problems on the web aren’t coming from the developers. They’re management pushing for stuff.
Like, at an old company the UI had really bad mouse tunnels (mouse over menus and sub menus that close if you mouse out). Terrible interface. But someone in management liked it and no one would approve changing it. Easy to look at it and say we’re all morons, but most of the stupid there was from leadership.
If more people had a backbone and spoke out / refused to implement shitty stuff, this wouldn’t happen. Also, many design choices are entirely on the web developer. Thus morons. I’m not gonna change my opinion until websites become usable again, you’re wasting your time on me.
Thus, it’s more than just the web developers 😄 . Product needs to have a backbone to stand up to their boss, too. I fought really hard to get rid of the mouse tunnels at that job, but was blocked by product and one of the directors of eng. It was mostly [office] political nonsense
Not at most of the companies I’ve worked out. There’s a design person or team. Eng can give feedback, but it’s pretty rare for them to be given a blank check.
That’s fine. Some web developers are morons, but some of everyone are morons. We can partially agree.
Partially agreed :p
The languages in a language menu should each be written in their own language. So German should be “Deutsch”, English should be “English”, Japanese should be “日本語”, etc.
I could live with that, as long as the language menu button itself is labeled in English and not e.g. “Sprache ändern”