[hyperman1]

All of this is so recognizable, but I'd add one more: Make sure the user has a way to switch the translation back to English.

I have some sites showing in, say, Chinese, where even the current language is a Chinese glyph. Nothing on such a page is readable for a non-Chinese speaker. So you get to click around randomly until some menu opens where you see the word 'English' which brings you to a page you can read enough to get to your own language.

[brigandish]

Some sites, like Google, will helpfully change the language depending on your current IP address. Trying to find how to switch to English from say, Korean, when Google surely knows that I'm English and don't speak Korean (I'm reminded of this[1]) should be forced upon the chimps writing their UIs.

What's wrong with using national flags? It's so easy for the user, don't designers care about us?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28336850

[317070]

National flags and languages are not a 1:1 map. Some flags have multiple languages, and some languages have multiple flags.

And that can be "close enough", until you for example serve English speaking people in Ireland the Union Jack. Both languages and flags can be sensitive topics in certain parts of the world.

[yorwba]

Also, often the country and language settings need to be independently modifiable, e.g. for pricing vs. product description.

[brigandish]

Agreed. The symbol for pricing could surely be the actual symbol though (€$¥£ etc).

[yorwba]

It's not just about the currency, but also the value of the price. To use an example I have on my table right now, German newspapers and magazines usually target Austria and Switzerland as secondary markets and have different prices for each of them. So an issue that's 3.95 € in Germany can be 4.30 € in Austria and 6.30 CHF in Switzerland. Even though Germans and Austrians use the same currency, they don't pay the same price.

[brigandish]

Why conflate the choice of language with the choice of currency? If there's a need to differentiate by those countries, give them that choice. If not, don't.

Or you could display everything in Korean to those with a Korean IP even though in some cases it will happen to be an Austrian who'd be thankful to see a German flag (or any flag!) on the screen to help them change the language. Then they can worry about the currency.

[account42]

Same for country and date/time/number formats.

[sundarurfriend]

In fact, the first external link in TFA is to a whole website [http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...] apparently dedicated to this.

[brigandish]

First example is English:

> How will users from these countries react to an English, British or American flag?

I stopped reading right there because no one cares. If you have users that care then provide them with choices, just don't let them get stuck wandering around a page in Russian or Greek or whatever because you thought someone might be offended by a flag. Perhaps they're offended by crappy websites with no obvious way to change the language? I know I am, show me any flag from any part of the former British empire and let me get on with what I was doing.

[brigandish]

If anyone in Ireland is offended at the use of a Union Jack to signify the button for English language then they need to grow up. Fast.

[names_are_hard]

I don't know much about Ireland, maybe it's not that sensitive an issue there. So how about this: what's the correct flag to show for Arabic in Israel?

Last time I fiddled with some automated kiosk at Ben Gurion airport I noticed they used a Jordanian flag for Arabic. That's an interesting choice, because if I had to guess most of the people choosing Arabic at that kiosk would not choose that as their flag.

[brigandish]

They're not choosing their flag, they're choosing a language.

[duskwuff]

So have another example: if you were to translate your application into Tibetan (for some reason), what flag would you use for it?

(The Tibetan flag is literally illegal to display in Tibet, as the Chinese government considers it a symbol of the separatist movement. So you probably don't want to use that...)

[brigandish]

I'd show them a picture of the Dalai Lama's face. Would that cause trouble? For whom?

[kakkun]

I've had issues with Google's localization choices for a long time. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue with other language combinations.

I'm a bilingual Japanese/English speaker. Searching Google's search languages to English and Japanese causes the following:

- Random Japanese words show up in things such as Google Maps, even though my display language is set to English.

- Japanese results will be prioritized over English ones. For example, If I search for "the beatles", it will show the Japanese Wikipedia page as the top result before the English version. For some sites (like Discogs) only the Japanese version of the site will show up.

If just set English as my search language, searching in Japanese can bring up results that are entirely in Chinese, even though I've set my preferred languages as English and Japanese (in that order).

[sofixa]

Yep. I'm trilingual English/French/Bulgarian, and i have all three as languages in Google search, and they're mixed up too often. I can understand Google proposing the French spelling of an English word and results for it, but almost every time when i search something in Bulgarian i get results in Russian, even when i use words that don't exist in Russian. The languages aren't even that close, and they aren't the only Cyrillic ones...

[Joker_vD]

Well, those are quite close to each other from the orthographic point of view, I guess: Ukrainian or Serbian are visually very distinct from either Russian or Bulgarian, while to tell the latter two apart you need some actual knowledge about the differences of those languages: say, that the abundance of letter "ъ", words ending in "ът"/"та"/"то" and tons of prepositions (i.e., often repeated two-three letter words) are a pretty good indication of a Bulgarian text.

[kakkun]

Yeah, it's annoying, especially since I've told Google explicitly the languages I know. I do suppose that a lot of people haven't set their languages, and the automatic detection works well enough, most of the time.

[brigandish]

I’m learning Japanese and I’ve had a very similar experience... although I haven’t noticed the Chinese results, which is surely a result of my slow progress! (o_0)

[junar]

In my experience, the Chinese results tend to happen when the entire query is in kanji. Queries that have at least some kana generally aren't an issue. If it doesn't make sense to use kana, then I'll sometimes add "site:jp" as a workaround, since most Japanese-language sites do use the .jp TLD.

[jakub_g]

BTW re:google products, sometimes this is really annoying and not easy to find where to change lang in UI.

A trick that often works: add ?hl=en to the URL.

[asiachick]

I've run into this problem but I don't know there is a good solution. Let's say for whatever reason the app guesses the user wants Japanese. The app has no way to know what to present to allow to user to switch languages. Should they put a button that says "Language", how does that help a Chinese language person, a Korean person, a Thai person? Should they put "English"? Same point as above. As you complain, they'll likely put 言語, the Japanese for "language" and only if you click it will you see other languages, and it may be buried under 設定 (settings). Sure it's not useful for you, but neither is "English" or "Language" useful for a large part of the world.

I don't know there is a good solution. Checking my iPhone it's 設定ｰ>一般ｰ>言語と地域ｰ>iPhoneの使用言語 so fairly buried in language not useful for someone who doesn't know Japanese. Checking apple.jp, the place to switch is at the bottom right and it just says 日本, no indication that if you click it you'll get a list of countries and if you don't know Japanese you'd likely not know that means "Japan".

[david_allison]

Try symbols in the preferences. As an example:

Settings - https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/cog

Language - https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate

Example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/62114487/94086518-...

[brigandish]

National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars and Stripes or a Hinomaru?

[david_allison]

A few issues:

You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open yourself up to political/territorial disputes.

Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to maintenance and territorial disputes).

Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China flag

Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban flag for Pashto (Afghani)?

Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our translation platform doesn't have a flag for Cantonese)

Flag to language is a many to many mapping. My Android lists ~107 available languages under 'English'.

[brigandish]

Why would anyone pick anything other than:

- a Union Jack, because that’s the origin

- an American flag, because it’s the largest English speaking nation

- or their own flag (e.g. Australian)

if the language is English?

[david_allison]

(1) You're proposing displaying a Union Jack to users in the Republic of Ireland

(2) You have a dependency on the number of states in the US. British people tolerate seeing the US flag, but it implies en-US, rather than en-GB

It's much more simple to avoid these issues by using a generic "A/文" symbol

[brigandish]

> (1) You're proposing displaying a Union Jack to users in the Republic of Ireland

Yes. They're on a website, not watching an orange march go through their town.

> (2) You have a dependency on the number of states in the US.

Eh?

> British people tolerate seeing the US flag, but it implies en-US, rather than en-GB

Who cares? It's a website.

[bloak]

National flags are not in general a very good way of labelling languages. There are far more languages in the world than countries. In any case, since people are looking for a language they understand it's good enough to write each language name in the corresponding language, like Wikipedia does (wikipedia.org).

But that's not the question, anyway. The question is how to label the button that lets the user change the language when the user might not understand the current language at all. Perhaps a big bright "?" ...?

[Joker_vD]

National flags are actually a very good way of labeling languages for two reasons: first and most important, almost everybody already understands that a flag-looking icon (or two-flags-stacked-on-each-other icon) is used for switching languages. That's already a very strong practical reason to use them. Second, for like 70% of the most popular languages there are flag assignments that won't mortally offend the speakers of those languages — maybe they'd rather see a different flag but generally they'd grumpily agree that "guess it conveys the intent good enough, whatever, I've managed to chose the actual language I want to use".

[Symbiote]

Another good option is a letter A and a Chinese character.