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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[–] blaue_Fledermaus@mstdn.io 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Flags don't make sense.
Otherwise this is completely valid:

( ) German 🇧🇷
( ) Italian 🇧🇷
( ) Japanese 🇧🇷

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 0 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Tell me... Where did, roughly speaking, German originate? Germany, perhaps?

Does Germany have a flag?

Not sure why this is some sort of hidden secret code.

[–] Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

German language as we know it now, predates Germany by at least 500 years, originated, roughly speaking, in the area that is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and in small part Belgium and Netherlands.
It only simple and easy if you don't know about it and don't care. But people who use the language, surprisingly, do care.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 12 hours ago

Please try and look at this as a reasonable person.

Do you go to Italy, see a QR code on a table in a cafe, and berate them about their online menu showing an Italian flag, but the Italian language predates the Italian Republic?

It's simple because this is someone coding a site in one language, and then likely running it through Google Translate to get other options. Maaaaybe with a single human reviewing it of they're lucky. But likely not even that.

Not every website has a translation team of 20 or 30 PhDs working to ensure optimal linguistic understanding and anthropological and historical accuracy. Likewise, no, I'm very sorry to tell you that people very often don't really care about others. If pay 3 people in India, or ask an LLM, to code a website with German translation, either the drop down will say Deutsch or it'll say that and have a German flag. What should Austria have, a tiny picture of Mozart but the site is still just German?

[–] blaue_Fledermaus@mstdn.io 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

There are some German dialects that only survive (barely) in Brazil.

And the German language is much older than Germany.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 13 hours ago

German dialects are still....German language, yes?