Popular choices are icons of a globe, or a flag, or a globe in a flag, as Apple does. A language dropdown menu using neutral iconsĭesigning an icon conveying the meaning of “Changing Language” is hard. What about Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic? Basically, you may hurt people’s sensitivity. Besides, English isn’t the only language spoken in UK. Also, an American user might not like to see the Union Jack banner. Users visiting your website from the United Kingdom may not like to see the stars and stripes banner. The downside is clear: country flags represent countries, not languages and some users won’t like it. They also are universally known and people understand that they might be able to change some kind of regional setting here. On the upside colorful flags attract attention. Some multilingual websites who make the choice of using an icon often use a country flag which changes with your choice of language. A language dropdown menu using country flags This is where an icon helping foreign users identify the language switcher would come handy. As you can see on the image below I would get lost on the Chinese version of Stripe’s website □ The downside is that it lacks clarity for a user browsing the website in a language that he doesn’t know. On the upside, it takes up less space in the footer compared to the previous solution. This is what Stripe does this for instance. You can also insert a drop-down menu set by default on the current language, like English for instance. Facebook trims it to the list of the most used languages and adds a “plus sign” to view all their supported languages. The downside is that it takes up a lot of space in your design, so you might be temped to only use this on your landing page. On the upside, your users will eventually find a language that they know if it’s listed there. English for English, Français for French, Deutsch for German, etc. People expect this list to be in your footer, and the languages should be listed in their original, non-translated names. This is what Facebook does that and so do we. The most simple and effective way to let people switch language is to just list the languages you support. Here are 4 classic ways to implement a language switcher, plus a lesser known way. Finding a simple visual cue that can be inserted on your front page to notify your users that your website is available in several languages is a tough problem to solve.
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