Don’t use Flags dummy!

dzovan states”You Should Never Use Flags For Language Choice“

And I agree!! it’s legally libelous for you to have a Taiwanese flag in China and it’s not nice to have it elsewhere if  it’s a political situation. [will there be software updates given any global political situation?]

Flags are political colors–who cares if the main language group a political region is X if another similar political group shares the language or worse–HATES that political affiliation?  Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are the most important and typical examples for a very good reason. As recently as the Olympics in China the Taiwan flag was replaced with the Myanmar [Burmese for the Americans!] because of political reasons…

If you are found to use the “wrong flag” in your software for localization [or other] purposes you can be fined, restricted from trade and otherwise “screwed” by the political apparatus of a given country for no good reason.  If you think that ZN-CH or ZN-TW or ZN-HK is really hard to visualize, then you don’t really care about localization.

There are arguments within the Simplified Chinese linguistic community as to what should be what, but adding a cultural bias to it [Taiwan] creates an unnecessary level of confusion, conflict and potential legal problems if someone doesn’t approve. Why risk it? Pretty colors that get confused when displayed in TINY pictures you can barely read?

No, let’s click one and then figure out that the language is not what I wanted, yes, that’s twice as bad. Now I can’t navigate out of the menus to change the language back…

Maybe we should focus on usability in a universal sense and localization in a “local” sense? I think that would mostly work.