UI language setting

General
1

Hi. my OHM user interface is an unfortunate mix of German and English. How do I switch to EN entirely?
Background. I am located in Germany, but my Brave browser is set to English as primary language.
thx in advance
Matthias

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2

Click on your user name at the top-right corner; in the menu that appears, click on My Preferences, then click Edit Preferences. Place en before de. Note that some settings, such as date and number formats, may be based on your operating system’s region setting rather than the language.

3

ok, thanks. Eventually it worked. A few usability issues along the way. But hey & hello, the bilingual UI did not make a good first impression on me.

4

If you have the time, I’d like to know more about the usability issues you encountered. Also, we could use some help to translate the rest of the interface to German on Translatewiki.net, for those who aren’t as comfortable using OHM in English.

Unfortunately, our customizations to the iD editor currently can’t be translated yet, but this is a priority for the team:

5

a) User expectation: use same UI language as browser setting or system setting
b) Merge My Settings and My Preferences. [German: Einstellungen and Benutzereinstellungen] :: They are mentally the same and the other gets overlooked.
c) Provide some hints what the textfield for the languages is all about. For me it was initially just [de ]
Ok, I am clever and I entered en,de which resolved my issue. But entering “en” is not obvious. Idea (not the best solution): Offer a dropdown with all supported languages.
A pragmatic poor man’s solution would be to add an explanation for the textfield; something like “Enter ‘en’ or ‘de’ to set the interface language to English or German.”

d) I remember a one option radio control during registration. It says “(•) Rest of world”. Well, I still have no clue what it does. It is related to the language setting?

6

Thank you for the details. Much of our software is based on OpenStreetMap, so we’re somewhat beholden to their decisions, inasmuch as we haven’t been able to write something custom, but it’s still helpful to know the pain points so we can better guide new users.

I agree, this is confusing in English too. There was a discussion about this split a while ago in OSM, even before My Preferences got split out.

A fix is in progress:

In OSM, this form displays different legal text depending on your jurisdiction. However, we have just one version for OHM, because our legal situation is somewhat simpler. So, the short answer is that it does nothing. :sweat_smile:

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