RFC: Remove flags from language representations

[edgerunner]

There's a strong argument against using flags to represent languages. Flags are symbols for countries, however, a language may be spoken in many countries while a single country may have multiple official+unofficial languages. This makes flags at least a weak, usually blatantly wrong, and in some cases offensive representation for a language.

Here's a good summary resource for this argument: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/

I believe it would be a good decision to drop flags from the progress report panel and anywhere else in the UI.

The exception may be when the language key includes a locale. en is English without geographical context, so it could be for UK, Australia, Malta or India, or even Japan, you wouldn't know. en-US is clearly for United States, which makes it ok (but still unnecessary) to use a flag.

I believe the best representation would be the name of the language in itself, optionally followed by the name of the language in the language of the editor/OS

• English
• Français - French
• Svenska - Swedish
• Türkçe - Turkish

[antfu]

Emmm... I don't know. I am happy to provide a config field to disable flags if anyone feels being "offensive" (although it's absolutely not intentional).

Anyway, I am feeling that I am not knowledgeable enough to make the decision (to completely drop it). I have pinned this issue and labeled rfc. I would love to hear comments from anyone. Thanks in advance.

[PeterPanZH]

Maybe a config field is a good idea.

[edgerunner]

Also, please do not confuse the ISO 639-1 language code with the ISO 3166-1 country code.

ca in ISO 639-1 stands for the Catalan language, spoken mostly in Barcelona, Spain and surroundings, as well as being the official language of Andorra (whose population can fit entirely in FC Barcelona's stadium with room to spare)

ca in ISO 3166-1 stands for Canada, across the Atlantic ocean.

This is quite a hairy issue, best avoided 😬🤯😅

[antfu]

Thanks for the info! Will fix it.

[edgerunner]

Good luck with that :)
Made a spreadsheet for you with the fake match between country and language codes.

Out of the 186 language codes and 250 country codes, there are 110 codes that match. Out of those 110 matches, only 22 of them have some semblance of connection between the country and the language (ie. at least it is an official/major language there).

88 matches in that list are almost totally wrong outright.

[antfu]

@edgerunner wow, thanks a lot! How do you get the results? Do you have any tools or just by manually checking?

[edgerunner]

Just went through the list and marked the (somewhat) relevant ones. Took about 3 minutes. I may have missed one or two. (update: I missed four apparently. The score is still 26-84)

My point is: This is a bottomless hole. Don't jump in 😅

[antfu]

I am trying to find some balance point to this issue.

Now in v2.2.4

Config to disable the flags

"i18n-ally.showFlags": false

Not to use language code as country code

Two letters locales are not be used as country code to display flags anymore. While BCP-47 with region/country code will try to match a flags

If you have preference on mapping a two letter locale to country code, you can do it in config:

"i18n-ally.localeCountryMap": {
  "en": "br", // show UK's flag instead of US's
  "zh": "cn", // show Chinese flag for 'zh'
  "ko": "ko", // show Korean flag for 'ko'
}

Let me know if you have any comments. Thanks

[edgerunner]

You're getting things done at breakneck speed 🚀 ❤️
I think it is great as it is :)