Hot answers tagged localization
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 ...
30
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
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 ...
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 ...
16
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
13
First, I would blog about it :). This is a gem, and I don't mean it in a derogatory way, it really is a beautiful case.
And in more practical terms - benchmarking. Look at other chinese websites, see how they solve this issue. I know that chinese elevators say 1-2-3-3A-5, or alternatively 1-2-3-5-6. This is not a solution in this case, since your problem is ...
13
The trivial, most general answer is that sorting by last name makes sense when users are matching based on last names and sorting by first name makes sense when users are matching based on first names. Of course, this gets you absolutely nowhere because the hard part is figuring out which is likely to be the case!
It's not possible to do this ...
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 ...
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
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.
8
I would make sure the user can see all localizations at once, otherwise you might end up with one variant getting edited without its siblings getting updated to reflect the possible change in translation. So avoid solutions #2 and #3.
I'm wondering whether these localized variants are usually required or optional? If they're required, you may want to ...
8
Removing formatting runs the risk of making numbers ambiguous. Currency signs help indicate the size of a figure of money, and have obvious importance for anyone doing business internationally. They also help users pick out money data in long rows of numbers, as it's much easier to look for numbers that begin with symbols than try and follow column headings ...
7
Back to the question where the answer is yes, it improves readability, at least if you listen to Jakob Nielsen who (yet again) wrote an article on 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability where #112 says:
112) Use a thousands separator appropriate to your locale for numbers that have five or more digits. For example, in the United States, fifty-three ...
7
Whatever you do, telling someone that they can't access certain content is always going to be a poor experience. The only thing that you can really do to deflect the negative feeling is to explain why you can't show it.
"... due to US sanctions, we are not legally allowed to show this content in your country"
"Copyright agreements with XYZ publisher mean ...
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
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
Automatic translation should not be considered as an option. Too much will go wrong. It is possible to automate part of the translation work, of course; translation agencies do it all the time. The crucial question is: how much does it cost to maintain the site in two (or more) languages? If the Spanish version is not maintained synchronously with the ...
6
The UX answer is that people tend to think of which key they are pressing rather than the position of the key. So it makes more sense to keep the shortcut linked to the key than the position of the key - even if that position is awkward.
While it could be beneficial to add profiles for different applications, you would have the situation where one program ...
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
I think the CMS designers are probably right. The problem is that it is perfectly possible that certain pages are not valid in other languages - the entire site structure MAY be different between languages, and so the current location is not necessarily valid in a new language.
Of course, your particular site may well be identical across languages, but if ...
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
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 ...
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