This always annoys me. I land on a site that’s in a language I don’t understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and… it’s all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië…
How does that make any sense? If I don’t speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. “German” in Polish is “Niemiecki”… :|
Wouldn’t it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?
Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?
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 label for the language picker is an issue, but the choices themselves? In the target language. You want French? You pick “Français”. You want Japanese? You pick “日本語”. You want english? You pick “English”.
Supposedly, if you’d rather have a website in a given language, you must have some level of understanding of that language, and picking its name should not be a challenge in any case. If you somehow change a site/app to a language you don’t know, as long as you can identify the language picker, you’ll be able to change to something you understand.
It does leave out the case of a user wanting to change to a language they do not understand, but I do not care for those.
Perhaps a universal icon for “pick language” would be helpful, like we have a icons for volume control and share. Good luck getting it adopted though.
Why not do both tho? Like "日本語 (Japanese)” So that if I fuck up my languages for some reason, I can turn back
But you can. Hopefully, you know how your language is called in your language, right?
the language of the listed language. Lots of language switchers do it that way
Have the language in the current language setting and the target language native tongue so you would get フランス語 / French “Alphabetic” sorting would be difficult, so it wouldn’t be perfect, but at least a lot more understandable. Still, just having a search option would fix that easily.
日本語。