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Account Settings: Preferred Language

Started by Auke, July 22, 2014, 04:07:34 PM

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Auke

Not a bug, but something I think could be improved: if a member goes to Profile Settings to change the language, he can do so under Preferred Language. However, regardless of the language you are in, these languages are all in English (on my own forum I can choose between 'Dutch', 'English' and 'French').
I think it would be good if these given languages would actually show up in the language they present, thus 'Nederlands', 'English' and 'Français'. It would be even better if they show up in both the current forum language and the presented language, thus something like 'Nederlands (Dutch)', English (English)' and 'Français (French)' on a forum with the set language as English and as 'Nederlands (Nederlands)', 'English (Engels)' and 'Français (Frans)' when the set language is Dutch.

Thanks for considering!

mashby

Having some experience in multi-lingual web environments, I have seen sites do it like this:
http://www.nike.com/language_tunnel
And this (click the flag in the top right):
http://www.lexmark.com/en_US/
The challenge in the forum world is the mix of languages possible. You can see that here of course.

To sum it up, you'd like to see the language options in the language a user would select. Seems reasonable.
Always be a little kinder than necessary.
- James M. Barrie

Auke

Yes, those are what I mean.

Quote from: mashby on July 22, 2014, 06:15:54 PM
The challenge in the forum world is the mix of languages possible. You can see that here of course.

I would say that each installed language needs each possible language just spelled out in 2 languages ::).
Because we're writing in English here, I will take French as an example: 1st, in its native spelling 'Français' and 2nd, in the language that the member is seeing at that very moment. In a Dutch environment, that would be 'Frans'. If someone would make a list of all native spellings (English, Français, Nederlands, Deutsch, Español) and send that to all language developpers, these developpers could add the spelling of their own language. A Dutch developper would thus add the words Engels, Frans, Nederlands, Duits and Spaans to these languages.

To me, it doesn't look that difficult. But I'm not a programmer of course!

mashby

But that scenario isn't quite right. If you know the language that you're going to select, there's no need to really translate it. If I don't know Français, I'm not going to select that as an option even it were labeled as French. :)
Always be a little kinder than necessary.
- James M. Barrie

Auke

True.

Just languages in their own spelling then. Would seem a nice improvement to me in comparison to the present situation.

Kindred

And yet, nearly every site I have ever been on, including my company site just displays the language list in the current selected language...

So, in English,mew have English, French Spanish, German, etc,
In German, we have Deutsch, etc...
In Spanish, we have espanol, Aleman, etc

Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Auke

I know, and I think it's rather strange. It means you should read in the language you cannot read to find the language that you can read. Please, find an Indian site and decide which language you would like the site to be in:
जर्मन, फ्रेंच, स्पेनिश, अंग्रेजी, डच
You see the problem? ;)

It makes just so much more sense to let people choose something they understand instead of making them guess. Wikipedia is a great example of how it should be.

Antes

I think this is not a big deal, since SMF 2.1 has drop-menu to select language, we can simply ask our translators to add their language in local to it.

Quote from: Kindred on July 27, 2014, 10:47:38 PM
And yet, nearly every site I have ever been on, including my company site just displays the language list in the current selected language...

So, in English,mew have English, French Spanish, German, etc,
In German, we have Deutsch, etc...
In Spanish, we have espanol, Aleman, etc



Not really actually, we are not gonna translate it completely but add extra to it. like Turkish (Türkçe), other languages will be like that but we are not gonna translate the English - German etc... into our native language.

I'll ping Localization team about that.

Arantor

You can't do it properly in 2.x owing to encoding issues.

Antes

oh so this needs UTF8 upgrade... :/ hmm thanks.

Arantor

Unless you get every single person to provide their translations in entity-only form, yes.

I thought about this months and months ago.

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