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by Ghoelian 275 days ago
> Why would you want to translate "My Account" into another language?

When you don't know the language or what "My Account" means? Not everyone speaks English.

1 comments

And you also can't understand the icon? And the context? And the translations I provided?
A menu with "我的帳戶" in it, and often a generic icon or no icon at all, doesn't really have sufficient context to determine what the button means. If the website is already translated into your language then great, but many websites aren't (because it's a small site, or you don't speak one of the most common languages, or it's aimed at a different audience, etc.)
Ah, so the website had bad UX? I think we've found the issue!
Bad UX is the result, from the combination of disabling text selection and being in a language you don't understand. Ideally both would be fixed - since unselectable text causes UX issues even when in a language I understand (when I want to select as I'm reading to keep place, or copy a partial link, or right click -> search/define a technical term, or copy-paste to tell someone what button to click, etc.)
Here are the official languages of my country:

- English

- Mandarin

- Malay

- Tamil

Did you provide translations for all of those? If we expand to the immediate vicinity you can also throw in Thai and Vietnamese as well. Plenty of Japanese and Korean people live in Singapore too.

If you want to experience the frustration of text not being text, take a look at one of the main train ticket booking websites in China https://www.12306.cn/index/

Plain old text that can be selected is always going to be the most user friendly to non-native speaker users.

The question then is on the balance of trade offs which user group experience is the one you want to cater more to, non native speakers or keyboard-only users.

Edit: I love how one of the icons is 票 - perfectly self explanatory to Chinese speakers. Good luck if you don't speak Chinese which goes to show that icons are cultural to some degree

I think we can admit that Chinese always does it in its special way, so it's not really a great example. Not many Chinese people would use their web client to book tickets, the mobile app is much more user-friendly - as long as you have ample knowledge to navigate through the system.