61–70 of 328 posts
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So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)
No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.
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But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I…
So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)
Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages.
But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I…
Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages.
I feel obliged to point out that while flags do not represent languages perfectly, there is no good, user-facing symbolic alternative for languages. No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages. For the most common languages,…
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If someone see's the spanish flag on a language learning site, they're going to know it's spanish. No one looks at that and think, "hmm, no, I don't want to learn basque." It may be technically correct , but it's pretty obvious to people what it means. It's extremely common.
Its only being reinforced due to this kind of dumb presentation.
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I develop a language learning tool that uses flags for languages extensively. I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one. For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficul…
Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly. Then of course the multitude of languages spoken in many european languages such as Spain (catalan, gallician, basque). Or the latin american variation. Or what about Switzerland who dont have their own language (they speak french, german, italian and romanch). Even your example of Swed…
Nuenki supports European Spanish (though now you mention it, I ought to make that clearer). If it were American Spanish, I'd probably use Mexico. I handle Portuguese that way.
Switzerland is easy, because I have no need to include their flag. German is covered by Germany (yes, I know of Austria), French by France, etc.
And I'm highly unlikely to add Romansh, if only because it'd be very difficult to translate with good quality. I would if I could though, I find it fascinating. For a flag, I'd find an online Romansh community and ask what flag people would find most respectful + representative, or if people would prefer I forgo it.
You argue that it's misleading. I see where you're coming from. It isn't perfectly explicit and unambiguous. However, I don't think it's misleading in practice.
Nobody looks at a Spanish flag and thinks it's denoting Catalan - I'd probably use a regional flag there - nor do people look at a Union Jack or an American flag and go "no idea what that's for". When looking to see if Nuenki supports Finnish, nobody looks for the Swedish flag. They look for the Finnish flag.
People know what the stereotypical flags are, particularly when they're learning that language.
So imo it's about absolute precision vs UX, and the UX of reading through a textual list of languages is awful. It's a complete pain to scan through without any kind of visual indicator. That's why, in practice, everyone uses flags.
I didn't previously use flags so widely. Adding them everywhere (e.g. the dropdowns on the demo) was a result of feedback from people who felt it would make it nicer to use. Also, they're generally alongside the full name (aside from the aforementioned cloud), to clear up any ambiguity.
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> I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages Says who? Probably not the actual users of websites, I'd wager.
Say people from countries with multiple languages. E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English. Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
Switzerland seems pretty easy -- French, German and Italian get the obvious flags, while Romansh gets either the Swiss flag or the Grisons flag. No?
> Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
So it kind of seems to me like they've lost. They might be banging the drum, but in the real world the flags are useful.
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But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I…
We had a good budget for localization at my previous place and had like 10 Englishes and some countries had both their local language and English as options.
Just let me choose ‘Netherlands - English’ and I’ll be on my way, please and thanks.
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> I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages Says who? Probably not the actual users of websites, I'd wager.
Say people from countries with multiple languages. E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English. Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
Or are you claiming that they don't know what the French or German flags look like?
Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green flag, it's more dubious that most users would recognize the flag of the OIF.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.sv...
https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internati...
