A Strategy for Internationalization and Node.js | Hacker News Reader

A Strategy for Internationalization and Node.js

ejohn.org

70 pointsjeresig17 comments

Languages are not countries. This website described in this article has the flag of the USA followed by "English", which as a British person I find both alienating and historically bizarre.

Likewise, you shouldn't be serving up content to Latin-Americans with the Spanish flag on it! How about the German flag for German-speaking Austrians? Or the Chinese flag for Mandarin speakers in Taiwan?

Isn't it just a phrase? Like "USA English"?

Flags provide quickly recognisable iconography, much easier for me as a brit to recognise a union flag in a long list than the word "English".

But yes there are dilemmas, for example most Portuguese speakers live in Brazil.

A couple quick points: 1) If anyone ever comes up with a location-agnostic language icon for English, I'll implement it in a heartbeat. Using the Japanese flag for Japanese seems very safe. 2) Based upon the traffic to my site so far, all of my English-speaking audience is from the US. 3) The only time you'd be seeing the "US" flag (which does represent en-US, in my case) is when you're on the Japanese version of the site.

Why do you need an icon? Google Translate doesn't.

Why are British people so bothered by this? Why is anybody bothered by it?

I'm an American and have used plenty of (European) websites and product manuals where English is identified by a British flag. I have no problem with that. And plenty of (American) websites and product manuals where English is identified by an American flag. Which makes sense to me. Why is that such a problem to you?

It's true that languages are not countries, but languages almost always do exist in country-specific versions. British English is not American English. Brazilian Portuguese is not Portuguese from Portugal. Spanish in Mexico is different from Spanish in Argentina.

Is doesn't seem that unreasonable to use the flag of the country-specific version of the language being translated. If you're doing Spanish, you have to choose which Spanish in the first place anyways. The Portuguese can deal with a Brazilian flag if they hired a Brazilian translator. And for super-huge sites, you'll probably have different sections for USA and Britain anyways, since they'll have different pricing, different products, etc.

Cultural imperialism is not acceptable. It is arrogance, and we British are acutely aware of that given the legacy of Empire.

You're failing to understand the magnitude of the insult which occurs when you conflate a flag - which is a transient political statement, with a language - which is cultural and fundamental to one's identity. Instead of a drop-down menu of languages, the developer ends up creating a drop-down menu of political allegiances.

Do you think that my friend's mother who fled the Iranian revolution wants to stare at the flag of the Islamic Republic just because she wants to view sites in Farsi? No. She has relatives who died because of what that flag represents. Furthermore your assertion about country-specificity doesn't work: she speaks the Iranian-specific form of Farsi.

Political statements really matter, people live and die for flags. Right now there are riots in Ireland over the British flag http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57563606/police-attacked... Would you suggest that we display the British flag to the Irish to represent "English"? They don't have a country-specific form of English either.

How about we show the British flag in Zimbabwe, where it is the first language? It's probably a crime... Maybe the French flag in Quebec? Oops. How about the Cuban flag for Cuban-Americans who fled the revolution? The list goes on, and on ...

So really, really, don't mix up political symbols with languages. For many people, it's a matter of life and death. You're not going to have a specialised version of your website for every country on Earth.

I was thinking to a similar project, once I saw the poor quality of modules out there. Very happy to see someone like you working out the problem.

There are javascript's i18n libraries by Alex Sexton.

https://github.com/SlexAxton/Jed https://github.com/SlexAxton/messageformat.js

They are great libraries! Alex replied to my post and I replied with:

"I’m very familiar with your work (on both Jed and messageformat) – I hope to have a need for them some day! In my personal application I have no need for gender (there are no user accounts or socialization) and only very limited pluralization requirements (which can be mitigated with just basic one/other string replacement). Perhaps as the application grows something like that might be useful. We’re looking at possibly using your work for some upcoming i18n work at Khan Academy, we’ll see how that progresses!"

Is there something wrong with the content negotiation header "Accept-Language"? My understanding was most browsers set it to the system language?

HTTP provides a mechanism, why does nobody use it?

Yes, it's broken in most browsers. For example my system language is set to en-gb which is British English, but my browser reports en-us which is American English. Most websites don't distinguish between these two languages though.

The main reason that Accept-Language is problematic is that it forces the user into using the system language, so a Sweedish person in London at an Internet cafe ends up with websites in English, so there must always be an easy way to change the website language within the browser.

But a browser-wide setting would just annoy bilingual people who want content is different languages depending on context.

And this is the reason why I don't force anyone into viewing a particular version of the site -- I only use it for displaying an opt-out notice guiding them to the version that I think they may prefer.

Most SEO people will end up telling you that sub domains endup splitting your page rank up since they are considered different domains. We ended up keeping our different languages under different sub folders. so:

whatever.com/

whatever.com/es/

whatever.com/de/

Why "ja." for Japanese when the ISO country code is JP?

There is a difference between language codes and country codes. "ja" is the language code for japanese (ISO 639-1), "jp" is the country code for japan (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2).

Wow, thanks for that. I knew about ISO 3166 but not 639 (and somehow just assumed Japanese would match Japan). This leads to the rather surprising result that TLDs use .jp for Japan yet subdomains use .ja for Japanese, e.g. ja.example.co.jp. I imagine most laypeople would not well understand the distinction and think "Oh why can't those IT people ever make things easy?"

Well, never mind anyway, because it's google.co.jp, but google.com.sg. IT people really are annoying! ;-)

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