This always annoys me. I land on a site that’s in a language I don’t understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and… it’s all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië…
How does that make any sense? If I don’t speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. “German” in Polish is “Niemiecki”… :|
Wouldn’t it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?
Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?
It would be way more user-friendly to use the language in the HTTP headers. As a web developer the fact that websites are too stupid to do this really grinds my gears. This is just as bad as assuming the language/region from the geolocation of the IP address.
C’mon guys…
the last one piss me off so much, especially when they redirect you and you don’t have anyway to load the English version…
It’s like all the developers in the field got handed access to some IP dataset and they’re just looking for reasons to use it. Screw the users I guess?
The customer gets what the customer wants.
I’ve tried countless times to convince them to just use the browser locale, but most of them somehow keep insisting on using geolocation…
Yes, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Even when a website does that, they might still have a switcher to let you override.
My Pixel started giving me distances in miles once because I had the system language to English. I needed to change it to English (German) to show me meters. I don’t know if they reverted that but at this point I am too afraid to change it.
Accept Language headers are sadly an easy browser fingerprint. I therefor have it set to English even though that’s not my native language.
There’s also the case where you might have misclicked when changing your language, so your argument isn’t really a complete solution. It just helps but doesn’t fix the main problem.
The reality is, it varies.
I just opened the language picker on the first site I had in my browser tabs (happened to be Epic games) and they display the language list using native names for the target language, rather than current language (screenshot attached)
I agree it’s much better to do it this way.
As a developer, why it doesn’t happen sometimes could just be by accident. If you intentionally set out to localise a site and put all text and menu elements into localisation files to be translated, then the language names are going to end up getting translated too. It takes conscious thought and UX design to realise that it’s better for accessibility if that single part of the site is actually just static text, regardless of what language is selected.
And before anyone suggests using country flags in your language picker as a cool solution - please don’t, because that sucks too. There isn’t a 1:1 relationship between countries and languages and so the flag approach is a flawed compromise at best, and actually insulting at worst.
this is a region switcher, rather than a language switcher (the website may of course be conflating the two, though)
You are right, it is a region switcher. I didn’t realize that, maybe because the “change region” button was in a language I didn’t know? :)
Be that as it may, I honestly don’t see what difference that would make in regards to OP’s point… While it is spmewhat rather ironic, their argument over choice of word(s) in this particular situation is - imo, anyway- not one of semantics, but more of localization.
Either way, whether this is a language selector or region switcher (or any variation on such a theme for that matter), I believe the point OP was - correctly, if you ask me - making is: Whenever a UX/UI element is needed to prompt for proper display language, each language should be displayed however it appears in its native tongue as opposed to how it appears in whatever language is currently selected.
As an added bonus, this also solves the problem of a user inadvertently changing the language (or forgetting to lock their workstation when leaving briefly and returning to find it changed to “help them remember to lock their station when not in active use” allegedly… not that that’s happened to anyone I know or anything) and being unable to change it back due to not knowing how to spell “English” in Japanese, for example.
Because they didn’t think it through.
Just bad UX design. Typically this should include flags or the language’s name in the language if they really did a good job.
Flags don’t represent languages and therefore shouldn’t be used to represent languages.
There’s plenty of examples of software doing this right and displaying each language in the selector in that language, it’s hard to say why they’ve localised it here. Most likely they just didn’t consider how the user interacts with that element and localised it the same way they translate everything else, but that could be down to anyone from the developer habitually running everything through localisation to company policy where they couldn’t get an exception for that element.
You’d have to ask support for whatever software you’re using for more detail, chances are you won’t get anything useful back but if you’re lucky they might fix it.
This is Fairphone’s website. I’m not that anal about it, doesn’t bother me too much, but I did see it on several websites, and I’m just confused…
Since Fairphone is Dutch it kinda makes sense they’d make this mistake. I suppose if you’d e-mail them about it they’d be open to making the change. They’re probably not even aware of it.
It gets more difficult if even the script is different. I once installed some Chinese app that would put the language picker in Mandarin and their symbols. I really didn’t know how to change it to anything I could understand so I’d go by all of them one by one until I found a language I understood.
because most web developers are morons :/
Eh… why would including English help?
Ideally you keep each language in their own language so it can be recognized by native speakers. Flags help. Adding English to the native name… does not.
And of course if you’re selecting a country, not a language, then it makes sense for the country list to be in the language you have selected. Why would you not know the names of countries in the language you chose for the interface? As somebody points out below, those are not language names in the screenshot.
this is what he is saying actually
I’m not saying it should include English, I was just using it for clarification. I think each language / country should be in the native language.
I only realized the list is a region selector after it was pointed out to me. Maybe this proves my point, I didn’t know what the button I pressed was for :) Having the region/country name in the website language does make sense. Language names however…
Flags do help, but there are none in this example (mobile or desktop version). Sometimes flags can be confused too (Romania, Moldova, Chad).
I don’t have a solution, and I’m not the usual ranter, I mostly post in the cooking community :)
Yeeeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting UX question. For language selection, sure. For country? There are plenty of reasons why you may need to select a country name and not be clear on the native spelling of its name. Plus how do you end up in a country selector list in a language you don’t understand?
I’ll say that flagging the language selector for international users is even harder than the list itself. If you don’t have an icon for it in particular. You can make the name cycle, but depending on where it’s at it can be distracting or impractical. Accidentally changing the language to Hungarian (which may as well be an alien language, for how unrecognizeable its roots are if you don’t speak it) was one of the few times I ended up having to delete a config file just to be able to use a piece of software again because I just could not find the lanuage selector after that.
