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I speak Russian, I don't live in Russia. Never have, never was a citizen of. Why the hell do I have to select the flag of Russia if I want to use something in Russian?
See? You’ve already managed to figure out which flag to click despite your VERY exceptional situation. This is great UI design.
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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.
Quite obviously you never interacted with any software which defaults to the language you can't read, despite having a support for the language you do understand.
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The only time the Ukrainian would have to pick the Russian flag would surely be if they selected the Russian language, and not the Ukrainian language which is not the same as Russian and doesn't even use the same alphabet. The languages and alphabets are undeniably similar and somewhat mutually intelligible, but they are not the same. Only time this is a problem is when the Ukrainian localization isn't even supported…
I know Ukrainian and Russian are different languages, that’s why I specified “a Russian-speaking Ukrainian”. Plenty of Ukrainians are native Russian speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine Speaking a language natively is not the same thing as nationality or allegiance to a flag, and it can be grossly offensive to confuse the two.
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> This is only an issue if the flag is the only information provided. The next step is acknowledging that the flag doesn't contribute anything, but may cause confusion or negative associations with the flag's country. So what exactly is the point of using it at all?
It does contribute something though. One very useful property of flags is that the flag is the same in any language, even if the names for the languages are not. Having a colorful icon is also helpful if you have problems reading text. Means you don't have to read all the languages' names that are on screen, you can do a coarse visual match by colors and then confirm by only reading the one name. Modern low contrast…
Which Apple's version does.
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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.
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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.
I speak Russian, I don't live in Russia. Never have, never was a citizen of. Why the hell do I have to select the flag of Russia if I want to use something in Russian?
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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’.
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See? You’ve already managed to figure out which flag to click despite your VERY exceptional situation. This is great UI design.
It’s not an exceptional situation. This is quite commonplace, even in the English-speaking world.
But my point is more like, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Your frustration with the Russian flag is justified, but so is the frustration of everyone else having to read through dozens of entries, possibly in a foreign language.
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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.
Really? When I first saw it I understood it must have to do with changing languages.
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…
This doesn't seem obvious to me. I don't think the word "English" is likely to confuse any English speaker.
> anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin
Are you saying this with the personal experience of being from a country that now speaks the language of its colonizer?