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Falsehoods programmers believe about languages
(www.lexiconista.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Now that's a pet peeve of mine, a bizarre belief surprisingly often held by people, who must be oblivious to the existence of tourism.
Now there you have one more pet peeve of mine, language preference settings that pretend that all language versions are equal, that shitty translations aren't abundant. If the original text is in a language that I can read then I want the original, not some shitty translation. It shouldn't be that hard!
This. When I was in Mexico on my honeymoon, Google kept redirecting me to their .mx version of Google; despite my inability to read Spanish.
And I always want the english version instead of the german version, despite me being german. Literally only google fucks that up. Every other site, even the small local german Uni website or the canteens meal site, respects my browsers setting. Google does not, and serves me german.
google.com/ncr
It would be a useful way to predict it possibly, but presumably the author meant if you have support for localization, you also provide an obvious and easy means of changing the language.
More importantly, you should be using the language an existing user has already used in the past.
Edit: come to think of it, this is less a programmer problem, and more of a UX problem. Obviously as programmers we need to take UX into consideration, but in all my products I've worked on, UX is specified already by a UX designer.
It's not even that, there are multiple languages spoken in the same region. Webpages should just use the language the browser tells it to use.
I had assumed the author didn't limit his statements to web browsers. If it's an application on a user's box, they should be using the language the OS provides.
In the case of less complex hardware, IoT or embedded devices with localization support, you would likely have another strategy if it doesn't have a setup process. For something without internet or GPS, you can't do this obviously. For something without a GUI, it's unlikely to have localization support without direct design consideration for it's destination.
I hate when apps use my number formatting setting to determine display language - despite Windows having a display language as well. Even Qt does (did?) that.
yup I too remember getting YouTube ads in Hungarian when I was there as a tourist - despite not understanding Hungarian at all and watching videos only in other languages, they really ought to know that