Ask Lemmy

In an international context, not everybody speaks English. A Japanese customer wants to switch to French. Which language should the language picker be in?

Alternative is to put the flag of each language next to the name in the picker. That way, whoever doesn't read the current language can at least pick by icon.

The language selectors in the system I have built are either English or native. And I can tell you, implementing and verifying over 100 languages in their native writing is quite a challenge.

If people really insist then at least have a flag emoji

Perfectly comprehensible if you speak english, look:

I've seen language switchers with translated language names that were sorted by the English name. So "Deutsch" was sorted under G.

Just bad UX design. Typically this should include flags or the language's name in the language if they really did a good job.

Because they didn't think it through.

The reality is, it varies.

I just opened the language picker on the first site I had in my browser tabs (happened to be Epic games) and they display the language list using native names for the target language, rather than current language (screenshot attached)

I agree it's much better to do it this way.

As a developer, why it doesn't happen sometimes could just be by accident. If you intentionally set out to localise a site and put all text and menu elements into localisation files to be translated, then the language names are going to end up getting translated too. It takes conscious thought and UX design to realise that it's better for accessibility if that single part of the site is actually just static text, regardless of what language is selected.

And before anyone suggests using country flags in your language picker as a cool solution - please don't, because that sucks too. There isn't a 1:1 relationship between countries and languages and so the flag approach is a flawed compromise at best, and actually insulting at worst.

There's plenty of examples of software doing this right and displaying each language in the selector in that language, it's hard to say why they've localised it here. Most likely they just didn't consider how the user interacts with that element and localised it the same way they translate everything else, but that could be down to anyone from the developer habitually running everything through localisation to company policy where they couldn't get an exception for that element.

You'd have to ask support for whatever software you're using for more detail, chances are you won't get anything useful back but if you're lucky they might fix it.