This always annoys me. I land on a site that’s in a language I don’t understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and… it’s all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië…
How does that make any sense? If I don’t speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. “German” in Polish is “Niemiecki”… :|
Wouldn’t it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?
Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?
My Pixel started giving me distances in miles once because I had the system language to English. I needed to change it to English (German) to show me meters. I don’t know if they reverted that but at this point I am too afraid to change it.
That’s just how locales work. When you set the language, you also get the associated date/time representation, unit system, etc
But you should be able to set the locale separately from language. You can easily do that on any Unix/Linux system. In your locale.conf, set LANG to your language and all other LC_* variables to your preferred locale.
Systems that do not allow this are badly designed. For a lot of multilingual people, locale and preferred language are independent.