Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

When you’re trying to build a multilingual site, as we are, one of the problems you have to solve is how to help people choose between languages. A traditional approach to this is to use flag icons.

I think that method of choosing between languages is a mistake. Why? Well, aside from the fact that you’d have to futz around with a bazillion tiny icons, put it this way:

Quick! Choose your language.

I ran across a 2002 article from Jukka Korpela which makes just the points I’ve been thinking of. Despite its age, it’s more relevant than ever, because we have widespread Unicode. He describes the right way to designate languages:

Why you should not use a flag as a symbol of language.

There is a perfect symbol for any language which you can use on the Web: the name of the language in the language itself, e.g. English (or British English or US English, if needed), svenska, suomi, Deutsch, français. … If a reader doesn’t know the name of language X in X, he
probably does not know X enough for the link to be of use to him.

And, I would add, if the user doesn’t have a font installed to read, say, বাংলা or Česky or 中文 or Македонски or 日本語 or whatever… the links will probably show up as a bunch of question marks or boxes something (as some of those language names may have for you).

Flags don’t represent languages!

One could argue such unreadable links constitute a usability problem with your site, but if the user doesn’t have the fonts for the language in question, why would they follow the link anyway?

An alternative is something like the following, with the localized translation of the name following the name itself:

• বাংলা Bengali
• Česky Czech
• 中文 Chinese
• Македонски Macedonian
• 日本語 Japanese

(These would probably be links or perhaps radio buttons.)

Or even use the increasingly ubiquitous language codes to give folks without the font in question a hint (Ignoring for the moment that the ISO 639 language codes are a bit of a mess themselves.):

• বাংলা [ben]
• Česky [cze]
• 中文 [zho]
• Македонски [mac]
• 日本語 [jpn]

And then there is the question of how you want to mark up the choices — assuming your list isn’t too terribly long, a drop-down might suffice:

(That select box doesn’t do anything, of course…)

In any case, use the language name, not a flag. Wikipedia’s front page has the right idea.