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Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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

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

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.

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.

Same for country and date/time/number formats.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...)

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

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).

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...

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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