2009/3/5 Shawn Boyette <[email protected]>: > Mike Rylander wrote: > >> As for what is best, I don't have a strong opinion because I am quite >> unilingual, but I will say that I would personally prefer to see the >> English name of languages displayed when I'm in the English interface. >> Though my reasoning for that is selfish -- I just want to know what's >> available, for curiosity and testing. > > I think in a public terminal setting, the right thing to do is to display > language names as natively as possible -- it is impossible to know what > languages the next person to come along will speak.
Yes, this is the optimal approach. The W3C Internationalization Activity group uses this approach (see the "Translations" dropdown at http://www.w3.org/International/) and so does the ultimate arbiter of all Web design decisions, the Google (try http://www.google.cz/). See in particular the "Translate Options" section of http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-navigation-select > And, playing devil's advocate, what if you, monolingual English speaker, sat > down where someone had just been using the Japanese interface? How would you > know to pick 英語? :) Exactly. -- Dan Scott Laurentian University
