[Sigia-l] Re: Question on multilingual sites

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Wendy Painter
| 
| But let's go one step further and talk about languages that don't
| even share the same basic character set. 

This is picking nits, but still: the correct term is actually
"script," or "writing system".

| I recently visited a site that was completely in Japanese, mostly
| text, displayed in a character set I had no hope of deciphering.
| The ONLY thing I could make out on the entire page was the button
| that said "English".  I clicked it, and voila, I got the content I
| needed.

If they'd written "English" in Japanese you wouldn't have stood a
chance of even realizing there was English content available (I'm
assuming you can't read kanji; I hope that's OK :). I think this is a
good example of why the name of the language needs to be given in the
language itself. And if that means that 95% of the readers seeing the
link titled "nihon-go" have no idea what it means that's OK, because
if they don't understand it they have no need for the content on the
other side anyway.
 
| Whenever I'm faced with this sort of argument, I always argue first,
| the user's comfort level.  It's tempting to assume that "most
| people" can figure out which button will bring up their native
| language version.  But why should we introduce even a small amount
| of discomfort or guesswork into their experience, when it would be
| just as easy for us to present the same information in their native
| language?

Strongly agreed.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >