this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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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?

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[–] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 44 points 1 day ago (2 children)

the last one piss me off so much, especially when they redirect you and you don't have anyway to load the English version...

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

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] EisFrei@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

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...