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I want to create a web page from which a user can select the language and if its a suggestion or a complaint, I was thinking of creating six links, two for each language one to take him to the suggestions page and the other to take him to the complaints page, is this a good way to do it? is there any similar ca

edit: Just to clarify what i was thinking about is a button for each as follows, I wanted to keep in mind that any person will be using this page which will be displayed in a public place, the user will click on a link and it take him to the corresponding page, after saving his complain/suggestion it will take him back to this page:

complaint (language1) complaint(language2) complaint(language3)

suggestion (language1) suggestion(language2)suggestion(language3)

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  • Please don't offer me choices in languages I do not understand. You've served up the page to me in one language - stick with it.
    – gef05
    Feb 25, 2011 at 12:50

5 Answers 5

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Language selection is a site-wide property. You'll want it to apply to other pages too. Feedback type is an activity sub property. You only want it to apply to this activity. Don't mix their selection. It's confusing.

If you're supporting multiple languages, you need to guess the language from browser information, and then allow the visitor to change it - the idiom of a row of flags with the language name written below them, in English, is widely used. Carry that information from one page to another in the query string, e.g. using &hl=en.

Here's a somewhat extreme variation on region selection:

Without the disable_redirect you won't see the language choice, but the flag for currently selected language will take you to the full language selection. Also watch for distinction between language and region. Selecting the Irish flag gives English (spoken more widely than Gaelic in Ireland) whereas France gives you French.

If you're expecting feedback in multiple languages, then presumably you're expecting significant volume of feedback - and the likely number of types of feedback you will want to distinguish in time will grow. Radio buttons to select which type can initially be on the same page as the feedback form and set which fields to show. Later, if the feedback becomes more finely categorized and the forms more varied, on a page preceding the textual feedback.

Have a look at these for feedback type selection:

The way the radio buttons when clicked lead to more precise explanations of the kinds of feedback is very well thought out, not overloading the visitor with information.

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There is no use in having a complaint and suggestion link on any other language than the language the the entire page is using. If the user don't understand "complaint" (if the site is in english) how will he/she understand anything from the page?

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I'd discourage that approach. It will clutter your page, and it doesn't scale well. Consider if you add just one or two more languages. The number of buttons increases by 2x. It's best to have a general language selection button (or set of buttons) like many European online shops do, and then provide the buttons you want for the function. In this case "Complaint" and "Suggestion".

I might even suggest one step further: one button for "Feedback". They can choose on the feedback page whether this is a complaint or a suggestion. This will also help the design scale if you come up with new feedback types like "Question" or something of that sort.

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It is better to do 2 links to change current language to other ones. Really it will be 3 links (one will be allways hidden). So every page can detect language from query string, for example, and display a content according to the current language.

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Suggestions and complaints are text, right? Let the user enter it in whatever language they want--text is text. At most, you only need a drop-down for the user to specify the language. That drop-down value can be used to drive a translation engine to convert the text to the desired target language.

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