Thoughts, Code, Other

Over at retaggr , we've been blown away by the interest from non-native-english speaking countries. It really is a global village, and its fantastic to be part of that. Naturally the first thing you have to consider is regional differences, particularly in language. You'll find a lot of resources out there about how to localize your web application, but what about the seemingly mundane question of what icon to use to represent the concept of "language" in your UI?

This is no trivial point. If your visitor reads only Japanese, the word "lang" will mean nothing to her, and so all your efforts to translate your page will be lost. Guessing the presentation language based on the browser's settings is an option, but not always the best one (not in retaggr's case for example).

Flags don't cut it for various reasons. You'd think that in this village of ours, we'd have a universally understood icon for this purpose. The folks at http://languageicons.omcomc.com have done exactly that. I've inserted it below - read their site if you're interested in the motivation behind the design.

I think it's a great icon, and will be supporting it. If you do to, just maybe it will become de facto.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.