Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 527 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#131

Post by pmontra »

lmm wrote: post #87
JimDabell wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about literally billions of people, not “occasional edge cases”.

How do you figure that? Billions of people would mean over 10% of the world population having exceptional names, which seems very implausible.

In way you are right.

From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family. It's about 330 M people vs 8 billions, 4%, which is less than 10%.

But then you add the exceptional cases for every country or culture. From the other comments we already know that even in Western Europe there are many differences. So if you sum all those exceptional cases you get the 100% of the world population.

Edit: 330 M, typo was 353 M.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#133

Post by jll29 »

This is not just an Asian thing, Hungarians put their family name first (another reason not to call it a "last name").

Not to forget the special case that people may only have one name (for which some immigration offices had to invent the rule to repeat the single name twice, as first and last name, to comply with online and offline forms that have these often mandatory fields). So we may add two patterns to your pattern list:

  Only, Only
  Only
Localization is tricky, not just for names, e.g. postcodes (GB) and zip codes (US) come after the city ("London SW4 0AF", "Beverly Hill, CA 90210"), in many other places before (e.g. FR, DE, e.g. "91054 Erlangen").

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#134

Post by throwaway2990 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #42
gandalfgreybeer wrote: post #5

Personal opinion. As an Asian person, don’t overthink this. Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two. Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity. Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for someth…

Don't do this. In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common. The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong. And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outsi…

No.

Either the name serves some legal purpose and they need to write it in full and 2 fields supports that.

Or the name serves no purpose and they can write what they want in those 2 fields.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#135

Post by weinzierl »

muzani wrote: post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same."

This is the way to go.

"The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here."

It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal standpoint they are all equal. There is no first and second given name and most certainly no middle name. Consequence is that in everyday life today I can be Hans and tomorrow Fritz. I can be Hans Fritz or Fritz Hans too, but not Hans-Fritz (with a hyphen) except if it's written like that in my birth certificate and then the order is fixed and I can't decide to be Hans, Fritz or Fritz-Hans.

The trade-off in this system is that it is much harder to change your name here then in most other places.

In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first, exactly like in Asia.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#136

Post by sarabande »

jval43 wrote: post #112
MandieD wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo >!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. >," and formal "Sie" (grammatically third person plural, but also the formal second person). First names and familiar second person grammar are very much reserved for family…

It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this. Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain. German companies often spend a non-trivi…

It's your personal preference to be addressed with _Sie_, but languages change and German is seeing shift to the use of _Du_ even for transactional business [1]. Target audience, region, familiarity etc. will all affect which word is used. Claiming the use of _Du_ in customer relationships as "wholly inappropriate" again is an expression of personal preference, not fact.

[1] https://www.abendblatt.de/wirtschaft/article233949947/firmen...

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#137

Post by seszett »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #42
gandalfgreybeer wrote: post #5

Personal opinion. As an Asian person, don’t overthink this. Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two. Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity. Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for someth…

Don't do this. In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common. The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong. And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outsi…

> In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

Which reminds me of this problem: she might have sisters called, say, Nguyen Thi Anh May and Nguyen Thi Anh Minh, and in quite a few countries this will result in them having identical names on their identity cards and most communication, either "Nguyen Thi", "Nguyen Thi Anh" or even "Nguyen Thi Anh M."

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#138

Post by MandieD »

jval43 wrote: post #112
MandieD wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo >!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. >," and formal "Sie" (grammatically third person plural, but also the formal second person). First names and familiar second person grammar are very much reserved for family…

It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this. Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain. German companies often spend a non-trivi…

Not saying she's unreasonable for feeling that way - just wondering if this is also something that should be considered in Asia, too, and giving a bit of context for people who aren't familiar with Germany. I know that Japanese has an even more "complicated" (to non-native-speakers) grammatical distinction of familiarity, but not much more about it, and have even less idea about how it works in other Asian languages/cultures.

Knowing what name to display isn't always enough - you also need to think about how the rest of the text around it should be translated to match. For German, the safe answer is still third-person plural Sie, unless you're absolutely certain your audience are all children, and missing that distinction might be taken by your audience as either that you're trying to be creepily over-familiar, or that you think they're children.

A sibling comment says that "Du" (second-person familiar) for business is becoming more common, and while that's true, I would NOT recommend using it without a good knowledge of German culture and your specific audience.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#139

Post by pmontra »

Ekaros wrote: post #117
JimDabell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name. I have a completely “ordinary” name from a western perspective – first (given), middle, last (family). I live in Singapore, which has a few different popular naming conventions from a few different cultures. I’ve received documents with my name in every single variation possible. I‘ve been Mr First Name, Mr Middle Name, Mr Last Name, and so…

It seems that with things like ticket there should be explicit "as in passport" instructions. Not that people will follow those...

Some people have more than one passport (multiple citizenship) and could use a different one to enter different countries because of visas. The name could be partly different on those passports. But yes, they probably know the passport they'll use since the time they buy the ticket.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#140

Post by [deleted] »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #108
wmeddie wrote: post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

Very interesting however >People have exactly one canonical full name. What is on your passport then?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN