Sorry for the dearth of updates of late, been hackin!

But it is a good excuse to use the word “dearth.”

Web design geekery ensues…

In a previous post, I rather snarkily opined on the futility of using flags to identify languages. I still think flags are a lousy way to distinguish languages, but my kvetching doesn’t really address a solution to the problem:

What kind of web interface do you use to select from a long list of languages?

The obvious answer, and the one I sort of implied in the aforementioned post, is just to give a list of the languages in their native scripts. But such a list can quickly become unwieldy if it’s long enough.

So I figured I’d look around see what other sites do. One could do this sort of thing forever, so I’m just going to look at some big international news sites today: BBC World Service , Deutsche Welle , and Voice of America News. (Add square quotes around “news” in accordance with your politics… as far as Blogamundo is concerned, I have none.)

(Please leave comments with links to other similar sites if you know of any, particularly those in non-European languages.)

Deutsche Welle, oddly enough, has the same language chooser twice, as highlighted here:

DW seems (as far as I can tell) to restrict their language choice interface to a simple dropdown box, whereas BBC World Service (which hosts a similar 33 languages) has an entire “language portal” — exclusively for selecting languages: BBC World Service | Languages. I think they did a very nice job of combining a geographical and textual method of listing the available languages:

However, there are some rather confusing inconsistencies in the hierarchy to ponder here: compare the entries for Portuguese:

• Americas/Portuguese (BRASIL)
• Africa/Portuguese (PORTUGUÊS)

However, there is no analogous subentry for European Portuguese. (perhaps BBC World has no such service?) The rest of the list is similarly unsystematic; but the BBC tends to be pretty careful about interface details — they may well have reasons for that particular categorization.

I find the Voice of America language interface the most useful, as it combines both the BBC and DW approaches. There is a simple graphical chooser on the main page that looks like this:

This small world map has four clickable regions: more or less corresponding to The Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa/Middle East. Each of those areas have their own page, which can in turn be viewed by language:

Or country:

If all goes well and we end up with content translated between lots of languages, I suspect we’ll do something similar to the VOA approach — a “portal” page for several geographical regions, further sortable by language or country (the data in the Common Locale Data Repository should prove useful in localizing this).

Wikipedia sticks with a simple list all languages in their native script (UTF-8 encoded, naturally), sorted by the number of articles.

(Of course, Wikipedia being Wikipedia, there are a thousand alternative ways to view that list, including by country or language, see the List of Wikipedias.)

I’m sidestepping another difficult question: which languages to include in the first place. A recent thread on the Wikipedia mailing list, and Ultimate Wiktionary guy Gerard Meijssen attest to the difficultly of deciding on a language coding standards.