Dear CDPR Web Developers/Designers...

[volsung]

I don't think flags are too troublesome. As I said nobody speaks THE language, and we couldn't possibly cover all dialects and variations anyway. People speak different types of English but regardless, the language carries an association with a region (army and flag). We wouldn't see the flags of Canada or Switzerland, because there's no language commonly referred to as Canadian or Swiss. We would have the flags of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and so on. I know this may cause national resentment, but that's where the language comes from. Imagine having the flags or whatever for each national dialect in Hispanic Latin America, when all of these variations together with those in the Iberian peninsula are simply called Spanish.

If the variations are strikingky different I suppose more options could be added, such as American English or Latin American Spanish. But yes, this relation is not bijective and the only real solution would be an exhaustive set of language and regional dialect options.

In the end it depends on how much granularity you want, in which case we would have really long lists no matter what.

How about asking the person to type or speak their preferred language, in their native language? If not available, the "next best thing" could be offered.

 

[Vincentdante]

@Aegis_Kleais hey man welcome to the forums. Sorry your first visit had such a colourful welcome. This is a friendly place, I swear.

As a UK resident it irks me somewhat seeing the flag to represent the English language be represented the the US flag. Damnit we invented that language, use our flag

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

@.Volsung.: Problems with flags start when you try to assign them to artificial languages like Esperanto, Quenya, Ithkuil and etc. Or to languages without official status like Romani, Yiddish and so on.

 

[aegiskleais]

@Aegis_Kleais hey man welcome to the forums. Sorry your first visit had such a colourful welcome. This is a friendly place, I swear.

As a UK resident it irks me somewhat seeing the flag to represent the English language be represented the the US flag. Damnit we invented that language, use our flag

I love the British accent. You guys always sound classy, even though I'm not a fan of how they pronounce "military". It's like they take the middle 'i' out. Milli-tree!

I guess language, flag and country are like the assumption that "month" is a standard unit of time, no? The world's just never that black and white I guess.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

the language carries an association with a region (army and flag).

Not exactly. Such view is common in standard nationalist approach (introduced mostly in 18 - 19th century). Historically languages weren't associated with "army and flag". With regions yes, but also to a lesser degree.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

There is no ideal answer. I think Apple's comes closest.

See how Google does it (bottom right on this page): http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
Similar idea to what I described with a selector.

 

[GuyNwah]

See how Google does it (bottom right on this page): http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
Similar idea to what I described with a selector.

Not good enough. Text cannot be scanned as quickly as images can. You can do the same thing with icons + text on the selector. And they didn't distinguish English locales, lumped everything in Latin America together, and if they're going to claim to support Latin America, they have to do Portuguese. Haphazard.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

I didn't mean they differentiated the languages well. I meant the UI layout idea. Something of that sort - i.e. some simplicity in the UI with one top level selector and many options inside.

 

[volsung]

Not exactly. Such view is common in standard nationalist approach (introduced mostly in 18 - 19th century). Historically languages weren't associated with "army and flag". With regions yes, but also to a lesser degree.

You didn't get what I meant. Of course I don't think "languages" are an indicator of a land and/or homogeneous culture. What I mean is, since we're talking about languages here, that there is no such thing as a person speaking any given language. What we refer to as "language" is already a generalization of all the core grammar, syntax, semantics, phonetics, etc. employed by a number of people who speak "it". Everybody speaks dialects, and the set containing all of these common dialects is simply what we call "language". If we want to differentiate regional and cultural differences to the level where we include all countries that speak the same "language", then we might as well include all the hundreds or more variations of any given "language" that already exist within a given country. What the linguist meant when he said "a language is a dialect with an army" is that languages have a higher status than a dialect simply because they have social and political acknowledgement and/or recognition. Same thing with a flag.

The problem is that "language' is such a broad term, and it may mean different things to different people. What I was suggesting has nothing to do with nationalism, but with our own conception of what a language actually is. But yes you are right, many languages do not have associated visual symbols, like all of the native american languages or artificial languages like Esperanto. On the other hand, you are not likely to find as many categories as Pacific Northwest English, West Coast English, New England English or Appalachian English. You'd most likely only find (American) English.

Take a look at this map of German dialects, for instance. How specific should we get?

 

[GuyNwah]

I didn't mean they differentiated the languages well. I meant the UI layout idea. Something of that sort - i.e. some simplicity in the UI with one top level selector and many options inside.

Simplicity is in the eye of the user, not the artist or the engineer. Simplicity is that which allows the user to do what he wants to do, with the least time and effort. That's why we do use case analysis.

You want the user to waste no effort and experience no confusion in selecting the language in which he views the forum.

Drop-downs require a minimum of two clicks, plus the time in between to react to a new control appearing and to find your selection once the drop-down has appeared. Their justification is in cases where the selections are too many to give them persistent screen space. They are too much effort when the selection is limited such that it can be made in a simpler way.

Text in the absence of other visual cues requires reading. Nothing about text draws the user's eye directly to the choice he wants to make. This results in the user being forced to scan multiple lines, some of which he will not understand, or employ strategies like bisecting a list that may or may not be clearly enough ordered to do so easily.

In short, I don't like it, CDPR's flags are better, and it's a waste of my time to use poorly thought out, haphazardly executed user interfaces like the Google example.

What CDPR did wrong is what the OP complained of: they used a well-known, instantly recognizable symbol -- but then executed the localization incorrectly.

As to whether a language is a dialect with an army or a flag, I disagree. A language has a literature. Nobody speaks a language that has nothing worth reading or singing or reciting. Nobody speaks a language in which nobody has experienced anything. In that sense, Quenya is a language, but Esperanto is not.

OK, not exactly. There is one movie made in Esperanto: Inkubo, with William Shatner before he was Kirk. You can see the whole thing here: Incubus (Inkubo, 1965) You can also see why there was not a second movie.

From a practical point of view, though, a language has a presentation. It has ways of writing dates and numbers, ways of presenting paragraphs, outlines, and direct quotes. It has vocabulary that must be used correctly when important matters are to be understood quickly and without confusion. For example, a page localized to US English must use "Exit" where the same page localized to UK English may use "Way Out".

 

[aegiskleais]

Actually, Guy N'wah, I never complained about any of CDPR's localization. (the discussion about localization came later)

My original suggestion had to do with a faulty age gate system that lacked labels on the input fields, and when I enacted under my presumption of mm/dd/yyyy format, I was held up by the process because the system expected dd/mm/yyyy instead. That's why I had suggested a simplified process of just a single input field that asks a question which gets the same info, and does not suffer from localization issues: What is your age? (vs. What is your birthdate?)

 

[GuyNwah]

Well, that's really just what localization is for. In a site properly localized for US English, the date fields would have been in the order you expected: month / day / year. Your confusion would not have arisen, because the site would have done what US speakers of English found natural. The art of getting it done that way is a standard practice.

 

[dragonbird]

Well, that's really just what localization is for. In a site properly localized for US English, the date fields would have been in the order you expected: month / day / year. Your confusion would not have arisen, because the site would have done what US speakers of English found natural. The art of getting it done that way is a standard practice.

Yes, but isn't that an unnecessary complication for a site like this? It may be an American flag, but it isn't a USA / Poland option, it's an English/Polish option. Putting labels above the fields signifying that it's DD-MM-YYYY would be sufficient to resolve the issue.

I've lived for most of life in countries that give it as DD-MM-YYYY, but now live in one of the few countries that uses MM-DD-YYYY. I'd definitely prefer labels to assumptions based on IP address.

 

[darcler]

Culture-dependent things are some of the worst problems for a developer. There's literally shitload of details you have to not only be aware of, but also have to take under consideration.

As for the age gate thing, I suppose CDPR decided to follow the customary mechanic used in the English-speaking part of the Internet. They could just as well use the "Do you certify you are over 18 yo? y/n" page customarily used on Polish sites, for instance.

Then again, perhaps the "tell us your DoB" page allows them to gather some information (wildly inaccurate, I would imagine) about their audience.

 

[Sagitarii]

There should be a description, even despite DD-MM-YYYY format being a standard in vast majority of countries.

 

[aegiskleais]

All formatting issues are put aside if they simply asked how old the user was. I'm sure they are not collecting this data for any legitimate form of metrics; it is simply an age gate as part of some legal recourse that they are "protecting" younger viewers from age-related material, even though the system puts the user on the honor system.

One question ("How old are you?") One field (Age in years), boom, bang, done. The only localization you need is internationalization, ie, the verbiage.