this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
108 points (95.0% liked)

Programming

18565 readers
558 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I can’t believe nobody has done this list yet. I mean, there is one about names, one about time and many others on other topics, but not one about languages yet (except one honorable mention that comes close). So, here’s my attempt to list all the misconceptions and prejudices I’ve come across in the course of my long and illustrious career in software localisation and language technology. Enjoy – and send me your own ones!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 55 points 20 hours ago (6 children)

Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] dohpaz42 9 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 16 hours ago

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.