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?

  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    That’s just how locales work. When you set the language, you also get the associated date/time representation, unit system, etc

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 day ago

      But you should be able to set the locale separately from language. You can easily do that on any Unix/Linux system. In your locale.conf, set LANG to your language and all other LC_* variables to your preferred locale.

      Systems that do not allow this are badly designed. For a lot of multilingual people, locale and preferred language are independent.

      • LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 day ago

        Yeah, Japan as a country uses kilometers, and Rawhide Kobayashi has an easier time reading things on his phone in Japanese, but his heart craves the measurement units of his true home, Texas.

    • scoutfdt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      Yeah but it didn’t say locale or location, it said system language, that is what i was confused about language =/= location.

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      And that is just an example of horrible UI. Locales should not be tied to those things. Maybe set the defaults but not forced.