[asiachick]

I've run into this problem but I don't know there is a good solution. Let's say for whatever reason the app guesses the user wants Japanese. The app has no way to know what to present to allow to user to switch languages. Should they put a button that says "Language", how does that help a Chinese language person, a Korean person, a Thai person? Should they put "English"? Same point as above. As you complain, they'll likely put 言語, the Japanese for "language" and only if you click it will you see other languages, and it may be buried under 設定 (settings). Sure it's not useful for you, but neither is "English" or "Language" useful for a large part of the world.

I don't know there is a good solution. Checking my iPhone it's 設定ｰ>一般ｰ>言語と地域ｰ>iPhoneの使用言語 so fairly buried in language not useful for someone who doesn't know Japanese. Checking apple.jp, the place to switch is at the bottom right and it just says 日本, no indication that if you click it you'll get a list of countries and if you don't know Japanese you'd likely not know that means "Japan".

[david_allison]

Try symbols in the preferences. As an example:

Settings - https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/cog

Language - https://materialdesignicons.com/icon/translate

Example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/62114487/94086518-...

[brigandish]

National flags - who doesn't know their own flag or any of the major ones enough that they'll miss a Union Jack, Stars and Stripes or a Hinomaru?

[david_allison]

A few issues:

You can't trust that flags will be available, and you open yourself up to political/territorial disputes.

Windows doesn't render the Unicode flags (likely due to maintenance and territorial disputes).

Mainland Chinese iPhones don't render the Republic of China flag

Would you use the current Afghanistan flag, or the Taliban flag for Pashto (Afghani)?

Some languages don't have recognisable flags (our translation platform doesn't have a flag for Cantonese)

Flag to language is a many to many mapping. My Android lists ~107 available languages under 'English'.

[brigandish]

Why would anyone pick anything other than:

- a Union Jack, because that’s the origin

- an American flag, because it’s the largest English speaking nation

- or their own flag (e.g. Australian)

if the language is English?

[david_allison]

(1) You're proposing displaying a Union Jack to users in the Republic of Ireland

(2) You have a dependency on the number of states in the US. British people tolerate seeing the US flag, but it implies en-US, rather than en-GB

It's much more simple to avoid these issues by using a generic "A/文" symbol

[brigandish]

> (1) You're proposing displaying a Union Jack to users in the Republic of Ireland

Yes. They're on a website, not watching an orange march go through their town.

> (2) You have a dependency on the number of states in the US.

Eh?

> British people tolerate seeing the US flag, but it implies en-US, rather than en-GB

Who cares? It's a website.

[bloak]

National flags are not in general a very good way of labelling languages. There are far more languages in the world than countries. In any case, since people are looking for a language they understand it's good enough to write each language name in the corresponding language, like Wikipedia does (wikipedia.org).

But that's not the question, anyway. The question is how to label the button that lets the user change the language when the user might not understand the current language at all. Perhaps a big bright "?" ...?

[Joker_vD]

National flags are actually a very good way of labeling languages for two reasons: first and most important, almost everybody already understands that a flag-looking icon (or two-flags-stacked-on-each-other icon) is used for switching languages. That's already a very strong practical reason to use them. Second, for like 70% of the most popular languages there are flag assignments that won't mortally offend the speakers of those languages — maybe they'd rather see a different flag but generally they'd grumpily agree that "guess it conveys the intent good enough, whatever, I've managed to chose the actual language I want to use".

[Symbiote]

Another good option is a letter A and a Chinese character.