Re: [i18n-discuss] How to order items in a multilingual list of languages? (#20)

On Thu, 13 Jan 2022, 18:55 Fuqiao Xue, ***@***.***> wrote:

>
> There are two problems to solve: 1) how to find the user's preferred
> languages, and 2) how to order the languages that follow.
>
> About the first problem, one way is to select the language according to
> the browser language preferences of the user, and another way is to let the
> user configure the preferred languages by themselves.
>

An alternative is for a site to learn what languages a user selects and
prioritise them. Lots of different ways of doing that. But better stored
client side. Although it's always ideal.

Browser language preferences tend to be suboptimal.

Users selecting their own preferred languages only really works for sites
or services that require a user to create an account.

An alternative is to use path names or subdomains allowing a user to go
straight into the language they want.

For large numbers of languages a language selection landing page might be
necessary.

Other alternatives for large language selectors is a search field which
presents language selections as you type. For a more multilingual selector
you can draw language name data from CLDR.

No easy solutions.

As for sorting the languages that follow, I think one way is to use the way
> the language is called in the currently displayed language. If the current
> page is in English, the list of languages should be sorted alphabetically.
> If the current page is in Japanese, the list of languages should be sorted
> according to the order of the Japanese syllabary. Another way is to use
> some fixed order (such as the BCP 47 language subtags) in all language
> versions.
>

in the past I have used geographical based selectors, sorting based on
native language name using CLDR collation algorithm, phonetic based
ordering.

Sometimes the solution is also dependant on the backend and frontend
frameworks being used.

>


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Received on Thursday, 13 January 2022 09:36:42 UTC