Jay Paroline

Alternate title: Why is the flag for Spanish the Mexican flag?

As you have probably already noticed, Grooveshark is translated into a couple of different languages now. The language selection dropdown contains the name of the language (in that language), and a tiny icon of a flag. The main purpose of the flag is to be eye-catching, in the hopes that it will be more obvious to non-English speakers that there might be a language that would work better for them. The secondary purpose of the flag, is to indicate the locale. This is where it fails miserably.

The people of Spain are, apparently, quite proud of their country. We frequently receive the complaint that we are Wrong to use the Mexican flag for Spanish. The good people of Argentina, Chile and Colombia don’t seem to mind, but the Spanish, they want to see their flag up there. I guess I can’t really blame them, I mean it is sort of the native home of the language, after all.

The observant will also notice that English shows the American flag, even though English really belongs to the English (that is to say, by that definition, English should have the UK flag next to it). In both cases, the country flags indicate the variant of the language being used. English has the US flag because it’s the US dialect. In the case of Spanish, the translations were done by our very own Carlos Perez whom by now you may have deduced, is from Mexico! Grooveshark uses the Mexican flag for our translation of Spanish because it is written in Mexican Spanish. For that reason, it would be disingenuous for us to use the Spanish flag.

Grooveshark doesn’t have anything against Spain. In fact, Spain is the only Spanish speaking country I have visited, and I found it to be quite nice. Grooveshark has nothing against Britain either, though I have never been there so I can’t speak to the niceness of said country. In any case, as soon as we have the chance, you can bet we’ll be getting the site translated into Spain-Spanish and UK-English, although as you can imagine there are lots and lots of other languages that we need a bit more urgently, such as French, Germain and Russian. Although it might hurt a little bit to see the “wrong” country up there, at least Spaniards can read the site in their native language, aside from the little idiosyncrasies that arise from it being a different dialect.