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…
I wonder if they just want some more data they can then sell off to others.
Even worse when a version is actually different. I had to check the US prices in a store once, it decided “nah mate, your IP’s not American, clearly you’re a bloody idiot, here’s your native version” and even when I manually changed the url to US English, as they did languages based on part of the path, it still decided clearly I must not know what I want. I couldn’t even try to infer the price, as the product didn’t exist on my version of the site.
And aside from that and language pet peeves, what if you’re on Holiday? Or live in an area that speaks a lot of languages close together?
As Cousin Mose said, the language is in the header, the fact that some web devs decide the IP address is clearly a better way to figure out what language you want is insane
Yes, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Even when a website does that, they might still have a switcher to let you override.
We do both.
A) use the language set by the user in their os/browser B) switcher shows the language name in that language
Done, easy, etc. IMO the hard part are great translations and designs that work in languages where every word is a novel. And yet, here we are.
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.
I have my Google Account set to English, but YouTube still autotranslates all video titles of newer videos to German for some reason…
My pixel set to Australian English works fine in metric. I presume you chose British English where they use miles rather than kilometres, of course that works for me as I also want Australian spellings
That’s just how locales work. When you set the language, you also get the associated date/time representation, unit system, etc
But you should be able to set the locale separately from language. You can easily do that on any Unix/Linux system. In your locale.conf, set LANG to your language and all other LC_* variables to your preferred locale.
Systems that do not allow this are badly designed. For a lot of multilingual people, locale and preferred language are independent.
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.