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Flags Are Not Languages

flagsarenotlanguages.com

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Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#191

Post by sedansesame »

mik1998 wrote: post #15
quadhome wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages

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.

The popular reason is likely because 文 is used across East Asia in Chinese and Japanese (Korean and Vietnamese too, though written differently)[0], with the ideograph standing in as a sufficiently different contrast to the Latin alphabet, and as a reference to a major non-latin-alphabet based user market, while being simple enough to render (compared to something more "difficult"[1] like 语/語)

It's also been used in the Google Translate logo as well.

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[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%96%87

[1] Not only because of Simplified/Traditional/Japanese renderings (文 is mostly the same across all three), but more strokes for a small icon is a bad idea regardless

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#192

Post by ahtihn »

eloisius wrote: post #188
watwut wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. I don't want the same language on all apps and the one I have on apps is not necessary the one I want on your site.

That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the…

I'm bilingual, I prefer apps and websites to be in their original language of if it's one of the languages I speak, because that gets me the best experience.

There's nothing worse than apps that are badly translated with no easy way to switch them to English just because they decided that they should use the OS language.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#193

Post by watwut »

eloisius wrote: post #188
watwut wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. I don't want the same language on all apps and the one I have on apps is not necessary the one I want on your site.

That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the…

The setting I have on the top has nothing to do with anything on some website. With website, I want it in original language, whatever it is, especially if I know the language at least a little.

With apps, I want to pick the translation per app, again what I have set into windows has nothing to do with what I want in app.

Me setting a windows language should not cascade to any webpage. And I never ever want the automatic AI translation.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#194

Post by eloisius »

watwut wrote: post #193
eloisius wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the…

The setting I have on the top has nothing to do with anything on some website. With website, I want it in original language, whatever it is, especially if I know the language at least a little. With apps, I want to pick the translation per app, again what I have set into windows has nothing to do with what I want in app. Me setting a windows language should not cascade to any webpage. And I never ever want the automa…

That’s quite a rabbit hole, but I agree. I wouldn’t want things to start being machine translated to match my OS locale. But I would prefer maps.google.com not to default to Georgian just because I get IP geolocated there. It should give preference to my OS config.

I’m saying this as someone who’s bilingual and lives in a foreign country. I usually want things in my mother tongue, but I’d prefer the original language to some crappy translation.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#195

Post by davedx »

bsza wrote: post #51
davedx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship A flag paired with a name, which the UI used to show, is as close to that as you can get. You can’t get exactly that because languages are not mathematical objects, they are organic, amorphous, ever-changing living things.

:be_flag_emoji: Belgian Dutch

:nl_flag_emoji: Dutch Dutch

This doesn't make sense. The language is the same in each country, it uses the same official rules and grammar. Pairing languages with countries is just incorrect.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#196

Post by deepsun »

ahtihn wrote: post #192
eloisius wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the…

I'm bilingual, I prefer apps and websites to be in their original language of if it's one of the languages I speak, because that gets me the best experience. There's nothing worse than apps that are badly translated with no easy way to switch them to English just because they decided that they should use the OS language.

Same thing (trilingual), but haven't seen such a poorly translated website to be nothing worse. Translated websites, even if poorly, are better than a language I don't speak.

Typically website translations are pretty good, when they already invested resources into translations.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#197

Post by wan23 »

As a typical American, I have no idea what the flag of England (or the UK) looks like despite being fairly well educated. When this flag for language thing comes up I usually end up doing some kind of guess and check thing to find English. Since this doesn't happen very often I always forget which one I'm supposed to pick.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#198

Post by mam2 »

quadhome wrote: post #8
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

Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages

this is one of the most horrible design. there's at least 10 times where I had to look more than once to actually find this button

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#199

Post by bsza »

davedx wrote: post #195
bsza wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship A flag paired with a name, which the UI used to show, is as close to that as you can get. You can’t get exactly that because languages are not mathematical objects, they are organic, amorphous, ever-changing living things.

:be_flag_emoji: Belgian Dutch :nl_flag_emoji: Dutch Dutch This doesn't make sense. The language is the same in each country, it uses the same official rules and grammar. Pairing languages with countries is just incorrect.

Pairing languages with anything is incorrect, because “language” is an ill-defined term, an attempt to loosely group together similar methods of communication. But not having a flag is even more incorrect, because then all you have is a list of words, and the meaning of a word depends on the... language!

> The language is the same in each country

Then you can select either. I don’t see how this detracts from the usability of the UI.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#200

Post by iggldiggl »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #167
deepsun wrote: post #129

Still a lot of websites (including Google) ignore "Accept-Language" header, and show language based on my geolocated IP address. Dude, if I'm visiting Netherlands it doesn't mean I speak Dutch. At least I can guess some words cause it's Latin alphabet. But when I visited Georgia I had no idea what მიღება even sounds like.

Also, the Accept-Language header supports multiple languages. I want to read everything I can in the original, rather then having everything translated, but even websites that use the language header often only consider the first entry.

> I want to read everything I can in the original, rather then having everything translated, but even websites that use the language header often only consider the first entry.

Unfortunately that's not solvable with the current system which only allows listing a preferred order of languages and that's that. Like if I'd list English first, I risk getting English content even on pages originally written in my native language, if I put my native language first, then e.g. MSDN puts up so so-quality machine translations instead of the original English.

In theory you'd have to differentiate between at least native text, high quality translations and low quality translations. Now good luck creating an UI for that and also good luck for getting publishers to classify their websites and its contents according to such a scheme…

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