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Comment by kurtisc | Hacker News Reader

The NHS serves one dialect of one language. If you translate 'menu' into another language, you may need a classifier, an article, a case, a longer word, a non-alphabetic script, changing the reading direction, or more.

Scaling this to a website that serves people internationally and needs to have a consistent branding is much harder than using an icon.

There is a learning curve, it's just one you climbed when you learned the language (which may not be your own).

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The same learning curve applies to icons. If you think you can simply use the same icons in another language, you're going to confuse a lot of users without the shared cultural context. I once overheard a woman on an international flight from Beijing to Moscow explain to her daughter that the "house" icon of the in-flight entertainment system represented the "main page". The whole metaphor falls down as soon as there's no "home" in "home page".

I never considered this. Metaphors are very difficult to translate because while the primary definition of a word may be easily translatable, that translated word may have slightly different linguisitic properties that make the metaphor a little more abstract.

In this example, "Home" in english doesn't always just refer to somebody's primary residence, we also use it as a descriptor or prefix (hometown).

In china, the direct translation for "home" probably isn't also used as a descriptor, which means that they aren't used to using "home" in a more figurative sense.

> The NHS serves one dialect of one language.

They also do Welsh.

https://www.nhsdirect.wales.nhs.uk/default.aspx?locale=cy

You may find this article, where they talk about using local slang instead of formal words: https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/pee-and...

The Welsh site has different styling

If you're building a website for more than one language, you'll need most of these anyway, for the content of the site...

Exactly, for accessibility you need all icons to have a text replacement, so you can just use that text instead of the icon at no extra translation cost.

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