Displaying language lists: Which language should I use? [closed]

Question

Every once in a while I'm confronted with displaying a list of available languages, and each and every time I ask my self:

Is it better to display the language in:

• the currently selected language
• English
• in the language according to the button/list item

Examples:

• English
• German
• French

or

• English
• Deutsch
• Français

Is there any convention on which one should be used, is more polite or better in any other way? Are there other options?

Answer 1

I would say it's best to display the language in "its own language" (option #3). You can not necessarily expect the user to know the currently selected language, nor expect him to know English.

What's tricky is how to display the "Select your language" button in a language neutral way. I usually go for a flag indicating the current language since that tends to get the message across eventhough there's not always a 1:1 mapping between country and languages.

Answer 2

I definitely think you should display in the language that matches the item in the button list.

Reasons:

1. If it's not the language you're interested in, you won't mind if you don't understand it, as long as you can find your own language.

2. Think about the last time you called customer service. How many times have you heard something like, "Para Espanol, marque dos"? It's very common, accepted practice to mix different languages in one UI (whether visual or audible).

3. Think about how you'd feel if you went to a Spanish site, and you couldn't find your language under "E". Maybe, eventually, you'd notice "Ingles", and think it probably translated to "English", but it's definitely better to save the user the trouble of translating and mentally alphabetizing.

Answer 3

The standard (in both senses of the word, i.e. what is actually used in the real world, and what the IETF/W3C/ISO says) is to use ISO 639-1 Alpha-2 language codes. Maybe augmented with either the full name of the language in English, the language itself, a romanic transliteration of the name in the language itself or any combination thereof.

So, to keep with your example:

• [de] German - Deutsch
• [en] English
• [fr] French - Français
• [ja] Japanese - 日本語 (Nihongo)