#Language switcher design plus

For example, some Chinese shoppers in our study wanted to shop on South Korean sites, but they didn’t speak or read Korean at all. In other cases, Chinese shoppers had to rely on Chinese versions of foreign sites, because they didn’t know the language at all. “It’s great for them to have a Chinese version because I can’t imagine buying supplements on an English site - I would need a translation. He was happy to discover a Chinese version of this site. Despite being able to read some English, he was worried about pharmaceutical terms and jargon. Some preferred Chinese sites because of their unfamiliarity with specific category and product names –- for example, on pharmaceutical websites.Ī Chinese participant wanted to buy some fish oil for his parents from an Australian pharmacy website. Once they entered a site written in a foreign language, users’ first instinct was to look for a Chinese version.

#Language switcher design plus

Offering Multiple Language Versionsĭuring an ecommerce study in China, we found that offering a translated Chinese version or a dedicated Chinese site was a big plus for international brands. An increasing number of sites are offering multiple language versions to meet global audiences' needs and expand their customer base. Here is a good example of the language switcher that is used for Spotify.Many international customers want to shop on global sites, but they often aren’t comfortable shopping in another language - even when they can speak that language. If, however, you are targeting different countries and not specific languages, then flags are perfectly legitimate. Even when a site is presented with American English spelling, the UK flag is used (again a misrepresentation).Hence, it would be incorrect to brand the English language as the UK. There are more English speakers outside of the UK.England itself has flag but this would be unrecognizable to many. The United Kingdom includes England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.There are a number of reasons why this is the incorrect approach: Many individuals use this to represent English. Some people may take offense for having to select the flag of a country they don’t identify with but share a common language.Ī peculiar example is that of English and the UK flag. If you were to use flags to represent languages, which flag would represent English? Should it be the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes? The same can be said of Arabic and Spanish. Many languages are spoken across countries. Flags represent countries which cannot define a language.

Using country flags, however, is usually quite a sensitive topic as it can touch on a number of cultural issues.

Below is an example from the website for the Science Museum in London. Dropdown Language Switcher with Country Flagsįlags are identifiable as different countries and hence are a popular choice for many sites. In this blog I will list various approaches and evaluate their benefits and drawbacks. Fortunately, we have taken a look at a number of different approaches used by companies with global websites. These are all questions that you may be asking yourself as you embark on the internationalization of your site. Where should you position it? How would you present the different languages that you offer and what languages will the text be in? This is not immediately clear as what may work for you, may appear foreign to a number of individuals in other regions. If you have decided that a language switcher is the best choice for your site, you may be wondering what best practices were applicable. If you wanted to avoid this, the best way would be for users to manually select their chosen language using a language switcher. Hence, there is the possibility that Google may be indexing your site for the wrong languages. However, it is unclear how these redirects will affect your sites indexing. It will then index your site from multiple IP addresses and attempt to resolve the redirect rules. However, in 2015, Google announced that it’s Bot now followed all browser language redirections and interprets it is as another URL. They would automatically be taken to the site which spoke in the language they preferred. This was thought to be a good idea in the past as there was little confusion for the user. If you are reading this article in another language than English, it has been automatically translated by our WordPress Multilingual Plugin.

If you have a site with multilingual content, you would possibly consider using redirects based on the language chosen on a user’s browser.