Hot answers tagged language
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 ...
29
Perhaps just the opposite of what you wanted but we have in a few cases of municipalities with diverse ethnicities resorted to displaying the top languages by name and adding a globe icon for other translations.
You could also try making icons with abbreviations of the language name next the actual name.
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 ...
17
I see two different questions being asked:
how to represent a language, and
how to represent a country
These are entirely two different things. Representing countries is easier because there is a one-to-one correspondence with flags, you can use an approach similar to this one:
For representing languages, I like how the BBC does it, showing the ...
17
Do not insert hyphens, not even soft hyphens ­ (which only appear if the browser forces a line break). This is because the user might hand-write it or read-dictate it to someone else with the hyphen. Which would be inaccurate and bad.
You could however use the <wbr> element to indicate an optional word break opportunity. This will tell the ...
16
As much as it pains me to say it (as a Brit), if you're not going to have any localisation go with American spellings. This will be the preferred spellings for the vast majority of users - either as native speakers (Americans far outnumber the British) or as second language speakers (though there are significant number of those who use British English ...
15
There is no good graphical language representation.
Flags work in some situations, when there are limited choices (up to 4-5 flags) and no ambiguities. They fail for multilingual countries (e.g. India, China), and can look jarring for multi-country languages (e.g. English, Spanish).
ISO 2-letter codes are often confusing and unfamiliar. For instance, BS ...
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
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).
12
Its going to be really hard to respond to this question unless we can see a screenshot of what your interface or site currently looks like. However here are some reasons as to why you are not getting a 100 % right to left F pattern for your site:
Your interface might not be totally right justified as explained by this article :
Our usability studies ...
11
It could be useful in the following circumstances:
When the user's native language isn't English, but they are more familiar with English labels than the native equivalents.
For users who need to switch keyboards (and auto-complete dictionary) using both their native language and English (or another secondary language).
For users that give their old phones ...
9
Have you looked at Google translate?
If you hover/click the suggested translation, you'll get a dropdown list of alternatives as well as an input field where you can enter another suggestion.
It is also possible to rate the current translation.
9
No. Oranges: 50 is not correct in French. In french, you have to write Oranges : 50, with a non-breaking space before the colon “:”.
In traditional print, including in English, we put this non-breaking space. It is nicer.
9
There is no evidence that I have seen that deems the term 'Blacklist' to be offensive; in fact it is valid computer terminology. Being blacklisted is a negative term, but that is the point of the word: Black and White are contrasting.
If you need other terms then it's easy to go with 'Blocked List' but then you're left with the opposing side being an ...
8
I was thinking of this topic for the last 1 day while I was working. It's quite hard to make people interested in a topic like this. It must be playful or valuable (feeling of learning or teaching, high level of participation), otherwise there won't be enough motivation.
Notes (the mockup is far not complete of course):
be able edit or rate with one ...
8
Stock reply: It all depends on the users of the site. :D
Non-stock reply: I'm with you and your colleague. If you're of the opinion the user needs the option to translate, make it high on the page, so that a non-native speaker doesn't have to hunt for as long. I'd also make sure it doesn't have huge visual weight to detract for native speakers.
There's a ...
8
I agree with Erics, do not add a hyphen.
Another option might be to add a css text-overflow attribute of ellipsis, which will "crop" the link:
a {
max-width:50px;
display:inline-block;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
Unfortunately, this prevents the entire text of the link from being visible. It does allow users to copy the ...
6
Sorting through a large list of flags has never been helpful to identify your content. Having to identify your specific requirements amidst such a huge plethora of graphics is cute for designers, but unhelpful to users, who, unless they are familiar with the particular icon set and/or every country flag, will have a hard time visually processing and sorting.
...
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
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
Two options I see, is to (A) move the back button up to the top right, where it is traditionally on a browser and iOS devices. This gives you room on the bottom to put the language option. Or (B) the language button could grow onto the logo bar, since it is more of a global setting ...
6
I think a user using an app like that (text rendered with no accents when accents are expected) would find it to be very unprofessional.
As the accents play an important role in the language, leaving them out could:
Cause users to just passed off as bad grammar.
Change the meaning of what you are trying to convey.
Look like gibberish.
As for languages ...
6
I am not aware of any heuristics or best practices since there are different use cases depending upon the countries you are designing for. However this excellent article Global by Design : Creating a world-ready web design gives some valuable inputs:
Look at the scope of designing a global template (except in unique cases) : A availability of a global ...
6
For most sites asking for locale information hurts UX by having a more complicated selection. However, there are sites for which this information may be necessary.
Usually locales are interesting when you need to change how you format data to match that locale. For example in one country you may want to show € 1,000.00 while in another € 1.000,00, while ...
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
If this is a major feature, and not just a minor nicety, I would offer controls in the header or navigation area, and not more hidden in the profile.
To differentiate between site language and article language, I would just use explicit verbiage. Use "Select site language" for setting the entire site language, displayed as a label next to a drop-down menu. ...
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
So you have two options. Option 1 will always work, and option 2 will usually work - only work if all the languages follow the English convention.
It may be that option 2 will work, but you might just as easily find languages or situations down the line where that isn't a good idea. So why choose option 2? What do you gain by not using the localisation ...
5
I won't go for the note in the footer since the primary use of such a selector is when landing the very first time on the website, as soon as the user sees that he does not understand the site language, he must not have to scroll to the footer to switch language.
But this should be a secondary action. So given the cultural context, I'll put it on the top ...
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