We again have the situation to let the user enter a text in multiple languages and thinking about how such a control should work.
Situation:
A web-admin plans a maintenance window for its site. On the maintenance window detail page he enter start and a end-time. Then he needs to fill in (or choose) a text message shown to visitors of the site during the maintenance window. This text needs to be in more then one language (actually 4 number of supported languages may increase in the future). How should that message text-box be shown / work best?
Findings:
We discovered two models used:
1) If many fields need to be entered per language there often is a drop-down or something like this to switch the language of the current input-form so one can fill the entire form in one language, then switch the language and fill in the next language specific texts.
2) If there is only one field that is multi-language enabled it is rendered multiple times. For example: if four languages are supported the message text-box is rendered for times and each is labeled with the language it represents.
In our case we have situation two: just one field that needs to be filled for N languages. The rest of the data is the same for all languages.
Question:
Is there a better way to do something like this then 2) ? Any ideas?
Update: Just imagined a third option: having a language dropdown on the left and the text-box it language it switches on the right of it. So kind of doing option one but only locally for the one multi-language textbox. But for me its also not the "wohoo" killer option.
Update #2: My colleague does it like this: place the text with a summary/preview text-box (in our case we can save the texts as templates so it shows its ID). Next to the text-box he placed a small "..." button. Clicking this button opens up a screen showing a label/text-box combination per language one can fill. Accept that screen finally goes back to the previous screen with the summary/preview text-box updated. This option is also not bad but not the killer either.