Neither
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
37 points (87.8% liked)
Asklemmy
54555 readers
612 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
English. Arabic is very neglected translation-wise and mixing LTR and RTL is mindnumbing
Oof I can imagine
When I started computering, there where no localised systems. When they started translating, the German was often misleading, incomplete, or just didn't fit in the button or whatever. So I stuck with English. Somewhere along the line I switched to en_UK, though.
And yeah, in this day and age I have no clue how good the translations are, because I never checked them.
or just didn't fit in the button
Most German problem ever lmao. I just noticed you have Pos1 for Home, which makes sense ig, I was just never expecting a numeral on a key that isn't a number key
At this point it's almost 2 decades of English uis only everywhere I can. Phone, computers, tv, etc.
Just makes life easier.
Sometimes I see or interact with someone else phone or computer and my brain just freezes in panic because I have no idea about the words and concepts that people see in my native language.
Pc in English phone in mother tongue for some reason. Probably because it didn’t bother me that much. I can’t be assed to debug my pc and translate all the buzzwords in my head and programming is better when the keyboard shortcuts work without having to set them up manually.
Speaking of programming, I’ve noticed that all the commonly used symbols are easily accessible in a US layout. In many other layouts, some common symbols might be begging several keystrokes.
English, every tech device is in English. Mostly because out of habit. I grew up using tech before proper translations into my native language started to appear and now it's just really odd to see tech in my native language.
In addition, troubleshooting is easier. Most troubleshooting guides are in English and translating it into my native language can sometimes have odd translations. So it's easier to just skip that extra layer.
Yeah all of the software terms like 'wizard' 'manager' or 'shortcut' have super weird sounding translations in my language
same. i cant even touch type on our insane national layout.
In addition to everything said, people underestimate how god awful some translations still are. Stuff like date pickers where May is translated as "maybe" or "three days left" where "left" is translated as "opposite of right". Even for websites I'll prefer the original language even if I don't exactly speak it, and then translate myself the part I need.
If you see bad translations in open-source projects, please help by fixing them :)
It's a straightforward way to contribute to open-source, even if you know nothing about coding, and it helps a lot. It's hard for open source projects to find good translators.
The other thing that really helps is improving documentation. Developers hate writing docs :)
I remember seeing dates displayed in the wrong case. It felt like reading "June 15th of the mondays". (and it would translate back to something pretty close to that)
Here are the reasons why I use all of my electronic devices in English:
- I already know English, so it’s not a burden.
- Localization is never perfect. Just dig a bit deeper into the settings in Windows, and you’ll always stumble upon some English here and there, no matter what the language setting says.
- Troubleshooting sucks if you have to use another language. There are a million posts, answers and articles about your problem written in English, but only 9 written in your local language. Among the million articles in English, you’ll also find a few that were written by people who know what they’re doing. The 9 articles and posts in the local language were all written by clueless idiots.
- With some applications, like Excel, localization really hurts usability. I guess it’s fine for people who make calculations only a few times a year, but people who use Excel on a daily basis just hate the translated function names. If you already know your way around the English functions, using a translated version means you’ve got your both hands tied behind your back. What used to be trivial, suddenly becomes an epic voyage, just like it is with those who use Excel only once a year. Good luck trying to get anything done with the translated version. It might even be be faster with a pen and paper.
Excel translating function names surely has to be among the most pathetic decisions of software history
Dunno, isn't logo older, with the whole frigging language translated?
When you see someone using it in another language, you can immediately tell that they aren’t doing anything serious.
Holy fuck, I despise translated Excel with passion. That's a crime against humanity and the dumbest thing Microsoft ever did - and that's a stratosphere-level high bar already.
I kinda get it where MS is coming from with this decision, but I don’t approve of it at all. They want to be more user friendly with all audiences, so that they can sell excel to small farmers in France, who definitely don’t speak a word of English. I guess that attitude should tell you that doing serious calculations wasn’t the main goal here, even though nearly everyone is using Excel that way.
This application is a victim of its widespread success. People make some pretty intense things with it that definitely call for switching to Python, R, C#, fortran or whatever. Because of that, serious professionals can’t avoid it any more. They can’t just treat it as a fun little toy it really is.
Oh god! Localization on function names must be one of the stupidest things Microsoft does. A literal anti-pattern.
If you’re a small strawberry farmer in rural France, it’s fine. If you’re doing something even a bit more serious like making technical or scientific calculations, you’re using a wrong tool. Excel wasn’t designed for that even though pretty much everyone is constantly pushing those limits.
Upvote: I use English
Downvote: I use my local language
Can confirm that Hexbear does not support downvotes.
Nor does Beehaw, I just remembered
FYI, there are instances on which down votes are disabled. Reddthat, for example. I can't see or make downvotes on this profile.
I think Reddthat enabled downvotes a little while back. I still don't use them, because I prefer the "upvote only method... rather than downvote, I'll just comment why I disagree or ignore entirely. I feel it encourages discussion to not be able to downvote
Still disabled.
And I like it. I agree with you, it encourages me to ignore the bad faith trolls and the bigots quicker. I apply a user tag to them and move on without getting bogged down into reddit-style fights.
Oh, I didn't realize that
On .ml it shows me a nice overview of votes in both ways
English language, local keyboard and formatting
Reading through this thread really makes me wish Esperanto or some other auxiliary language caught on
Isnt that english?
Esperanto is a romance-adjacent language using the Roman alphabet. It has its own grammar and phonetics, with rules that are flexible enough that a word-for-word translation from English or German will have a fairly correct sentence structure. As someone who speaks English, knows a little French, and has heard German, I expect it is closer to Spanish or Portuguese than English, but it isn't just like those, either.
English, English is the standard medium of education in India, I don't even know most academic concepts in my native language so no point in making it harder for myself, also read English faster and easier too simply because that's the language I was educated and read in.
Oh right also I'm dumb, India is in the anglosphere.
I have mine set to English because it's shit from ass to troubleshoot anything computer related in my native language.
Yeah. Also I never learnt all the unnatural sounding translations for software terminology like '... manager' 'wizard' 'shortcut' etc. so it would just be really confusing to me (the word for 'shortcut' in my language literally translates to 'representative')
I used to translate things in Debian, but I stopped for this reason. It's making it harder for everyone. People in sweden don't know the swedish technical word for "routing", but everyone knows what a router is. (Trivia, the word is "dirigering".)
Well that's just the sound a bicycle bell makes, no wonder nobody takes it seriously
My GNU/Linux computer has been set to Basque language for three decades. It works good.
Thai language
English. Except my phone because of how it handles keyboards
I prefer english UI everywhere, and then my danish keyboard layout ive used since forever
Just set up a Debian computer with a really strange mix of localisation settings. Keyboard layout and number formats are local, but the UI is in English.
Do you use qwerty or qwertz? I force qwerty on all of my keyboards
Qwerty
But scandinavian layout
English, with custom key bindings for accents etc. Mostly because I hate AZERTY with a passion.