-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 305
New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
RFC: Remove flags from language representations #313
Comments
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 |
Maybe a config field is a good idea. |
Also, please do not confuse the ISO 639-1 language code with the ISO 3166-1 country code.
This is quite a hairy issue, best avoided 😬🤯😅 |
Thanks for the info! Will fix it. |
Good luck with that :) 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. |
@edgerunner wow, thanks a lot! How do you get the results? Do you have any tools or just by manually checking? |
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 😅 |
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 codeTwo 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 |
You're getting things done at breakneck speed 🚀 ❤️ |
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
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: