Hot answers tagged internationalisation
117
Option 2 is the best option, because you'll recognize your own language regardless of your knowledge of other languages (be sure to also provide charactersets if you support for example japanese)
Problems with options 1 and 3
Option 1. If you don't speak / understand the current language you may not recognize your own language. In the example germans would ...
80
Option 2 is the way to go as you should always show languages listed by the way they are written in that language. It is the way both Wikipedia and most companies that deal in many languages do it. Here is how Apple handle it:
Problems with the other options
Option 1 is a headache to maintain as you need to have the name of every language in every other ...
18
Option 2 is the best, since user can always recognize its own language.
There's is a small pitfall though. If you present language selector as dropdown, user won't see any values except current auto-detected language, unless he clicks it. And if user doesn't understand currently selected language - say, already mentioned Chinese, he might won't even notice ...
14
If you're going to bother localizing your interface, you might as well do it fully and respect the language or region's common practices.
As you mention localization, I assume this means that you will change the placement of the currency symbol based on the locale setting of the user's interface, rather than the locale of the currency symbol used.
Take ...
14
People can reach non-front-pages of your website by many means, so you should have some indication on every page that it is possible to switch languages. If the clean design is that important that you don't want the complete language switching widget on every page you should at least provide an obvious link to the page (or pop up) that enables language ...
13
The short answer is no, don't use country flags.
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200604/indicating_language_choice_flags_text_both_neither/
The preferred method is to use the name of the language in the language itself (and watch out for diacriticals, language specific capitalization, etc).
13
The problems with this approach are:
You're choosing languages to demonstrate this that have an arguably stronger association with specific countries, so the solution seems better than it is.
You are also assuming that everyone that speaks Spanish knows what the Spanish flag looks like, which is not necessarily true. Someone from Nicaragua doesn't have ...
12
My thoughts:
In Switzerland, where multi-language websites are very common, the normal thing is to use the two letter language codes (DE, FR, EN, IT etc.) or - if there is enough space - use the full name (i.e. Deutsch, Français, English etc.).
But I think key for a good experience is how the language detection is handled. IMO it should work like this:
...
11
Isn't this also a question about granularity? Choose the highest common factor that adds or differentiates value in your service.
For example - does a service actually differentiate between users from Scotland and users from England. If yes, include both. If no, stick to the United Kingdom as in Katie's linked list.
If there is no differentiation between ...
10
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark
In Albania, Belgium, Bosnia, Estonia, France, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and much of Latin Europe as well as
French Canada: 1 234 567,89 (In Spain, in handwriting it is also
common to use an upper comma: 1.234.567'89)
In Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, ...
9
Choose a standard and stick by it.
Here is a link to the International Standards Organisation country names and codes. http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/country_names_and_code_elements.htm
8
Generally, the official flag is an accepted representation of the country (not language as OP mentions) because each country has only 1 current civilian flag. However, there could also be separate flags for the navy, for the head of state, the military, and other special purposes. The official flag shouldn't create any controversies or misunderstandings.
...
6
Yes, especially if you have a mix of international users filling out the form.
We in the U.S. sometimes forget others need to use our forms.
I think the way you have it makes the most sense because each field relies on the next.
(i.e. If they live outside the US they will not be in a state.)
6
As a UX analyst for multinational companies in the Arab world (where we have designed the same sites with an English version and an Arabic version) the UI elements are pretty much the same. There is no difference between using a drop-down combo box here or there or whether radio buttons work somewhere but don't work for others.
We have noticed however that ...
6
To expand on:
You're challenging national identities. If someone is from Austria, they need to choose a German flag. While that may not be a big deal to you, to many Austrians it is.
Germany vs. Austria or US vs. GB are relatively harmless examples. I assume in most cases you'd get mild annoyance from the side you didn't choose. But for other countries ...
6
If you only have two languages on your site, a clean option would be to simply list the other language in a meta navigation that many big websites will have anyway in the top right corner of the header. As a text link, display "Spanish" when the user is on the English site, and "English" when it's the other way around.
This allows the user to switch ...
6
Mnemonics don't translate well and retaining their mnemonic nature. However, that isn't a critical issue.
For example, the common ctrl(or command) + X, C, V, A, W, Q are the standard shortcut in many languages even when they have no associated mnemonic. Even in English many common shortcuts have no mnemonic link.
Consistency is significantly more ...
5
For the hunting down the list you can check out the answers from Adding USA at the top of dropdown list of countries. OK practice or not?. For example:
automatically copy popular countries to the top of the list
detect the user's location and select that or add it to the top
allow for plain text typing and auto complete countries that match
Also, if you ...
5
There are some politically correct suggestions that we use ISO 639.1 language codes, but the reality is that to most people they mean very little. They are an engineering solution, not a UX solution.
If you go with country flags, there are some people that will not like the fact that you showed a US flag for English rather than for Navajo. The same way ...
5
Great idea - I love the notion of providing per-country address forms and save users from having to put up with a convention that does not apply to them.
I agree that it's somewhat uncommon to have the country field that early in an address form - but what about asking the user which country they're from before even starting the address form interaction, ...
5
I am sure this has been asked before, but I cannot find it. Anyhow, there are a few of rules generally to apply to this sort of thing.
Do not confuse currencies with countries. It gets very complex. They are NOT the same, even though many countries and currencies do match one-to-one.
Do not use IP lookup to guess users location. This worked for a while, ...
5
There is little point in localizing just a part of a currency presentation and using non-localized or wrongly localization notations otherwise. It may confuse, and it gives the impression of half-hearted localization efforts. The CLDR database contains information about the placement of currency denotations, too. They would not have included it if they ...
5
I don't think there is a significant difference between these two url from the perspective of SEO. if you want to improve your SEO by telling search engine crawler the language you are using, using html meta tag is a better approach:
< meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
Furthermore, I don't think bothering users with "which language do ...
5
My vote goes for option #2. If you're looking to change the language because you don't understand whatever the default is, it will be a lot more effective to see the choices in a language you do understand. That's kinda the point, right?
I also ran across this article from 456 Berea Street where the author prefers a combination of your options 1 and 2, ...
5
One thing to remember is that languages can be common across countries but they might be spoken differently. For example, Spanish in Spain will be a little different from the Spanish spoken in Mexico. A recommended way to handle this would be to go with the approach Microsoft has which allows the user to select the language based upon the country and the ...
4
The only counter I can think of is the order by which the languages are displayed (eg some languages first character changes when you change to it's own). Since this has become quite a standard practice I think that's less of a problem though. Your reasoning seems right and I agree with it.
You could, if needed, include the functionality (link, etc) to show ...
4
While I agree with @jbreckmckye to ask for the country, not the country's telephone number as that can be inferred from the country, I do think that most people know the telephone number of their country and can spit it out at will.
That said, I would not split the telephone number in separate fields at all.
I would ask for the for the country in a ...
4
You haven't specified whether the app itself is international or whether it's just the users, which may make a difference in how this should be handled. Here's how I might approach it with just international users:
Allow any name, Latin or otherwise. Depending on the makeup of your site, I don't know that you'll run into too many conflicts where a name is ...
4
It's no formal index, but the Big Mac Index is probably one of the most fair and complete sources for this sort of data. The economist recently published an "adjusted" Big Mac Index to ajust for GDP per person which matches purchasing power a bit better than the classic BMI.
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