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Flags Are Not Languages

flagsarenotlanguages.com

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Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#31

Post by matthewmacleod »

cabirum wrote: post #12
JimDabell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the wrong symbol for something is worse than the inconvenience of not having a symbol.

Wrong symbols are everywhere . Ever seen a save button with a floppy disk icon? Its not about pedantic accuracy -- if something works, do not touch it.

I wouldn't personally think of that as a "wrong symbol" though – it's just an anachronistic representation used to establish a visual representation of an abstract concept.

I'd be concerned if I saw a save button with a printer icon on it though – they're both recognisably computer peripherals but they're definitely not interchangeable!

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#32

Post by sverhagen »

I had this fight for a few years while I worked on the development of parking systems (ie. kiosk/pos systems used in parking garages). The use of those flags was so deeply engrained in that industry... For Dutch speakers, folks in Belgium had to choose the flag of the Netherlands. French flag for the Wallons. Flag of Germany for that small part of Belgium that speaks German. Sometimes blended Dutch/Belgian and French/Belgian flags were used, but never a blended German/Belgian flag. Also, the French and Dutch flags have the same colors. It was a mess. But the coworkers wanted it, the customers wanted it, I probably gave in, I don't remember...

Edit: I had a similar fight over the difference between time zones and time periods.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#33

Post by kapep »

davedx wrote: post #6
James_K wrote: post #2

Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.

Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship. This is a good move by Apple. Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.

Every unicode emoji has an offical short description. As far as I know screenreaders handle them by reading that description. Mouse over to show that description in a tooltip sounds like a useful accessibilty feature. Does any browser or OS have that feature?

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#34

Post by 082349872349872 »

jackvalentine wrote: post #24

I fairly often find myself deciding between flag of the United Kingdom or the flag of the United States of America as a choice for ‘English’ wondering will this just be different spelling or will there be some other ill effect of choosing the wrong one. I live in neither country, of course.

I like the post-Brexit solution of using the Éire flag.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#35

Post by telmo »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #14
JimDabell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the wrong symbol for something is worse than the inconvenience of not having a symbol.

Not necessarily. It completely depends on the situation. As another example: gendered bathrooms. The icons used on gendered bathrooms have a woman wearing a skirt, and a man wearing trousers. These icons are "wrong": a man can wear a skirt, and a woman can wear trousers (in fact, nowadays most women do). It's nonetheless certainly more useful to have a "wrong" icon than none at all in this case.

Bathrooms need icons because they have to assume users who can't read, or don't know the local language. None of these two problems apply to language selection 99.9999% of the time: if you can't read, you can't use a system based on reading no matter the language, and if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#36

Post by cableshaft »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #19
cabirum wrote: post #10

If asked to make icons for languages, whet else would you even use instead of flags? Icons help find things faster, and the users are used to seeing flags next to language labels. In some cases, a single flag indeed does not sufficiently describe an option. In this case, combine, like, two flags, e.g. (flag of Spain)(flag of Columbia), or invent some other clever icon to disambiguate selection.

> Icons help find things faster, [...] I _highly_ doubt that being able to input the name of the language (or country or whatever), both in its native and translated form, is slower than scrolling through all possible icons.

Example where entering the name of the laqnguage would be slower than scrolling through options: a video game with a controller.

I don't think I've ever seen that as a 'type in the language you want' option, only scrolling through options.

Also it might only have 5-10 options to begin with, since localization of a video game into a bunch of languages can be pretty expensive, especially if it's a text-heavy game.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#37

Post by nkrisc »

bradrn wrote: post #22
mik1998 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally had no idea that icon let you change the language of articles (a concept I explicitly looked for before). Still confused at what the icon is actually supposed to mean.

It’s a Chinese character and a Latin letter. The idea, presumably, being that of ‘multiple languages’.

But I don’t know Chinese so I don’t know that is an arbitrary Chinese character with the Latin A for contrast. I’ve seen languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet occasionally intersperse Latin letters before so until I was told just now I assumed that this Chinese character with A had some significance in Chinese.

So I don’t think it’s very effective at that.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#38

Post by bsza »

JimDabell wrote: post #9
James_K wrote: post #2

Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.

Having the wrong symbol for something is worse than the inconvenience of not having a symbol.

It really isn’t. You presumably live in a country. That country has a flag. If you click that flag, there is a high chance you’ll get a language you understand - and if you don’t, you probably already know the reason and how to fix it (diaspora, multi-lingual country etc.). A few easy-to-address edge cases are no basis to fuck up everyone else’s experience.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#39

Post by RobotToaster »

ncclporterror wrote: post #30

The website argues that using a flag for a language may confuse or even offend users. It argues English would most appropriately be represented by the flag of England, but few people know the flag of England, so English is usually represented by the flag of the UK or the US, neither of which are appropriate because other languages are spoken in the UK and English does not originate from the US. I would argue that usi…

English is the official language of the United Kingdom, so their argument doesn't make sense.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#40

Post by huygens6363 »

peterhi wrote: post #4

But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语

Agreed. Some flag, US, Chinese, I don’t care, signifies “language” in the context of software. That is an easy, universal UI pattern.

I don’t see the need to upend this for some notion of offense or other type of PCness.

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