Birth Country always showing up in Spanish

Ever since I was called as stake clerk, I've noticed that in the on-line directory that the birth country of a member's listing always shows up in Spanish, while the rest of the page of information is in English. Platforms iOS 6 and MacOS 10.6.8, Safari both, and Firefox on MacOS.

Xxxxxxx, Xxxxxx Xxxxx (Head of Household)
Age: NN
Spouse: Xxxxxxx, Xxxxx Xxxxxx
Priesthood Office: Xxxxxxxx

BIRTHPLACE
San Diego, San Diego, California
BIRTH COUNTRY
Estados Unidos de América

Any ideas?

Is that for all members, or just the ones that have been though or are in a Spanish-language ward?

Members in both English and Spanish wards. My record shows my birth country in Spanish, and I've never been in a Spanish ward. This has been since I received my stake clerk access last November that shows extra detail in members' records.

A search of the Wiki queries me to create the page instead.

That does seem odd. I'd call Local Unit Support and talk to them. We're primarily user-to-user support. So unless someone knows of something you can do, or a church employee happens along, I think LUS is your best bet.

russellhltn wrote:That does seem odd. I'd call Local Unit Support and talk to them. We're primarily user-to-user support. So unless someone knows of something you can do, or a church employee happens along, I think LUS is your best bet.

Note that although you've posted in the Directory forum, you must be talking about the Leader and Clerk Resources site. The birth place is not shown in the Directory, even for leaders, and the format of the data in your example below is definitely from Leader and Clerk Resources. If you talk to LUS, you should be clear about which site you're talking about to avoid confusion.

eblood66 wrote:Note that although you've posted in the Directory forum, you must be talking about the Leader and Clerk Resources site.

That's been fixed.

you must be talking about the Leader and Clerk Resources site

Good point. Since it's fairly seamlessly integrated into the LDS.org log-in, it's not always easy to glean when I'm on a different place, unless I have to log into it (such as some of the other available to leaders). I'll mention this to LUS (assuming that's Local Unit Support?)

That's been fixed.

What has been fixed?

Just looked again (in Firefox, the latest, since it just upgraded itself) on a random member in our stake.
---------

Other Information

Birthplace
Brooklyn, Kings, NY
Birth Country
Estados Unidos de América

Just submitted an on-line feedback, but think that calling might be better (talking to a live person). Lots of the responses to the on-line feedback from the Church Web site come from volunteers, and this looks like something for one of the "pros" (software folk).

Thank you for your feedback.

Because of volume, we are unable to respond to every message, but please be assured that your feedback will be read.

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cheerioboy wrote:

That's been fixed.

What has been fixed?

He meant that he moved the topic to the more appropriate Leader and Clerk Resources forum, not that the bug had been fixed.

eblood66 wrote:

cheerioboy wrote:

That's been fixed.

What has been fixed?

He meant that he moved the topic to the more appropriate Leader and Clerk Resources forum, not that the bug had been fixed.

Correct. I indicated that by quoting the part about this being in the wrong forum.

Ah.

Online support said to delete cookies and clear cache. Didn't work, no further response so far.

I spoke with LUS after the previous, but I guess this oddball thing is really low on the totem pole. A couple of months later (now), and all members' birth country are still showing up in Spanish.

----------------
BIRTHPLACE
Bountiful, Davis, Utah
BIRTH COUNTRY
Estados Unidos de América
MISSION COUNTRY AND LANGUAGE
Estados Unidos de América, Inglés

I agree this is strange. lds.org has a strange habit of showing up in Spanish sometimes, but it's odd that just some of the information you see is in Spanish and the rest is in English.

Have you tried changing your lds.org language to non-English and non-Spanish and see if the country and mission are still in Spanish or if they've changed to your new language?

I just looked at a few membership records and tried changing my lds.org languages. What I found is that the birth country and mission country/language remained in English for me while other labels changed. I even looked at individuals who were born out of the USA and their information was in English (although they have been here since before records were getting computerized the way we have it now). I also looked at individuals who used to be in a non-English speaking ward. I saw their information in English.

All I can think is that these fields are somehow special and aren't translated with the web site language. Maybe there's another setting somewhere that's causing that information to be translated.

This is really odd. I've been a software professional for over 30 years. I can understand that crashes in the mobile device software might have priority over things things like this.

Changing the language preference to French displays everything in French, except the country of birth and mission/language pair, same as in English. I'd have to find a place that has a different name in French than in English for the birthplace to see if it's trying to put the birthplace in Spanish or the selected language. Very strange that it appears to be hard-coded in some fashion.

LIEU DE NAISSANCE
Bountiful, Davis, Utah
PAYS DE NAISSANCE
Estados Unidos de América
PAYS ET LANGUE DE LA MISSION
Estados Unidos de América, Inglés

After changing the page language back to English, it's still in Spanish. I'd try Russian or Chinese, so the alphabets should certainly change. And they do, somewhat:

Russian:
МЕСТО РОЖДЕНИЯ
Bountiful, Davis, Utah
СТРАНА РОЖДЕНИЯ
Estados Unidos de América
СТРАНА И ЯЗЫК МИССИИ:
Estados Unidos de América, Inglés

and Chinese:
出生地
Bountiful, Davis, Utah
出生國家
Estados Unidos de América
傳教的國家和語言
Estados Unidos de América, Inglés

I hope this would be helpful to the s/w folk.

cheerioboy wrote:Changing the language preference to French displays everything in French, except the country of birth and mission/language pair, same as in English.

Your latest experiment is simply testing how text elements in the web application are displayed in different languages. It's not at all surprising to me that those text elements change based on the language being used to display the user interface.

But the country of birth, as well as the mission country and language, are quite different elements. This is information that comes from the membership record itself. It's entirely possible (quite likely, I would say) that the display of such information goes through an entirely different path in the code than labels in the user interface. Given your experience, it seems certain that the display of that country information is controlled by a different setting than the language setting for LDS.org.

I have two thoughts:

• You've never mentioned what this information looks like when you examine it in MLS. My guess is that it will be in English, not Spanish. But it would be interesting to know.
• The only other language setting I know of that is tied to you (and not to the browser language, the language selector on LDS.org, or the MLS installation) is in your LDS Account. You can go to ldsaccount.lds.org and change your preferred language. I would think that if that is set to Spanish you would have Spanish showing up more places than this, but it's worth checking out.

I wouldn't expect the birthplace to be translated. It seems like it would be a lot of work to maintain such translations with limited usefulness (unless the Church already maintains such a database for something like Family Search).

However, things like the country name and language would be fairly straightforward with a small set of data to maintain for the 100 languages presently supported on lds.org. Apparently there is some system for that and it thinks you speak Spanish

mevans wrote:(unless the Church already maintains such a database for something like Family Search).

Yes, they do.

I checked that -- my LDS Account settings are English. Looks like that setting controls the language of the e-mails from topics at LDS.org. As of last stake conference, our stake records indicate that it is an English-speaking stake, so I'm not sure why that would result in Spanish birthplaces for everyone in the stake. I'm wondering if something as minor as the name of the stake, which includes the name of a city in California which is a Spanish name (as many are: San Francisco, San Leandro, Santa Clara, etc.), would trigger this. Would a name like Anaheim put the birth country in German? Solvang in Danish? The mission info (which comes after the birth country in display) is also in the same wrong language. My mission language was not Spanish, and my mission country wasn't a Spanish-speaking country.

This is information that comes from the membership record itself. It's entirely possible (quite likely, I would say) that the display of such information goes through an entirely different path in the code than labels in the user interface. Given your experience, it seems certain that the display of that country information is controlled by a different setting than the language setting for LDS.org. aebrown

Then there's some kind of error deeper down if this is so.

Did you ever call the service center? You mentioned that online support said to delete cookies and clear the cache. Were you referring to the service center in that post? Maybe contact them again?

Too bad none of the church employees have jumped in on this thread. I think this would be a pretty interesting problem to figure out...and it's reproducible with your stake, so that's even better.

I submitted feedback last night about the page, and the volunteer responding said to clear cache, delete cookies and "other data" -- "it worked for him". (This is a repeat of the advice a couple of months ago.) This occurs not just on my computer, but the stake computer, and a brand new computer. Browsers other than Safari: IE and Chrome. :-/

cheerioboy wrote:Would a name like Anaheim put the birth country in German? Solvang in Danish? The mission info (which comes after the birth country in display) is also in the same wrong language. My mission language was not Spanish, and my mission country wasn't a Spanish-speaking country.

I find it very hard to believe that the apparent language of a place name somehow connected to you would have the effects you report.

There are two additional scope questions that would be helpful to know (one I've already asked):

• What does MLS show on membership records for the birth country and mission country and language?
• Do any other clerks in your stake and/or ward have this same problem, or does it affect only you?

If you could answer those two questions it would help to narrow down the possible causes for the problem.

Our stake presidency see it, too. I will find out about our neighboring stakes.

cheerioboy wrote:Our stake presidency see it, too.

Just a hunch: have you checked cdol.lds.org to see what your stake's languages are listed as (under "General Information")? Maybe Spanish is listed there.

In CDOL the stake is marked as English for written language. For spoken language it is marked as 84% English (this is the primary spoken language) and 14% Spanish. It would be very odd to be using the minor spoken language for a 'written' website.

JonesRK wrote:It would be very odd to be using the minor spoken language for a 'written' website.

Yeah. I think we're beyond this being a "feature". I sure looks like a bug. For some reason those fields are making a different call to determine the language. We were just curious as to just where it could be pulling that from. The fact there is a matching minor language suggests the call might be the equivalent of "StakeLanguage(1)" instead of "StakeLanguage(0)", or StakeLanguage(1) instead of Language(1). BTDT.

Since for most of use the two calls return the same thing, it hasn't been an issue.

It's got to be on the data rendering side. I forced my window to be in Spanish by altering the "?lang=eng" at the end of the URL to "?lang=spa". The pages render in Spanish, but the data fields are untranslated. I'm trying to poke around the JavaScript using Firebug, but can't seem to find where that particular data field gets pulled.

In CDOL the stake is marked as English for written language. For spoken language it is marked as 84% English (this is the primary spoken language) and 14% Spanish. It would be very odd to be using the minor spoken language for a 'written' website.

Those number had just changed after the last stake conference. We had updated the stats to reflect our demographics. That may be helpful. Previous to December/January, the stake had been listed as 100% English for spoken language. As far as written language, I guess we'd left that alone.

I verified that IE at the stake computer displayed country of birth and mission information as being in Spanish. I haven't gotten around to querying the neighboring stakes.

cheerioboy wrote:I verified that IE at the stake computer displayed country of birth and mission information as being in Spanish. I haven't gotten around to querying the neighboring stakes.

I'm still curious what your stake MLS says for the birth and mission info. That's quite a different question from what any browser might say on the stake computer.

LDS.org sets two language cookies. I wonder if one of them is wrong.

MLS renders in English.

I checked the surrounding stakes, and our wards. All stake folk who answered (4 of 8) reported "everything in English". Of them, all except one are 100% English/100% English. That clerk (English & Spanish) reported everything in English as well. Of the ward clerks reporting back in our stake, those that did reported English. I had one try rendering the page (via the LDS.org Web site) in another language. He picked German, but the birth country and mission and mission language were still displayed in English (though the labels [translations of Birth Country and Mission and Language] were in German).

Geburtsland United States
Missionsland und -sprache Germany, German

Way wrong, same way.

Here's something else: when I chose a foreign language, the dates show up in English (April, May, etc.).

Something must've happened. No notes in this thread about it being fixed, however, the information is all in English now. Thanks for whatever was done.