Carolyn Marenger said:
That works very well for a small number of languages, but some
sites, HP.com as an example, are available in dozens, if not more,
languages.
The name of the language still works, but you could organize things so
that each language name is preceded by the language's two- or three-
letter code and the entries are in alphabetic order by that code.
The
http://www.hp.com is a descriptive example of how things should
_not_ be done. When you view it with JavaScript disabled, it
idiotically babbles "Current date is displayed here by JavaScript code"
and contains a select menu that does nothing. It mixes country choice
with language choice, which opens new problems.
Concentrating on the language selection alone, you _might_ consider
using a select menu for the language links to save space, but then you
should at least have a server-side backup for the actual selection.
Besides, the European Union site, for example, seems to deal with the
language choice issue mostly with links, despite the increased amount
of languages. They often have two-letter character codes as links, and
this might be a tolerable compromise. After all, it is not unreasonable
to expect that a person learns the two-letter code of the language he
knows best, such as "en" for English.
The best long term solution is getting the browsers and
servers to communicate language preferences and select the
appropriate language version of each page.
The real problem here is to make _users_ involved and educated. This is
something that Web authors cannot do; the technical side is manageable.
I think I already mentioned this material of mine:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/
It is strictly a personal site, but I am working on one in English
which will be translated to French, German, Dutch, Portugeuse,
Czech, Slovak, and maybe Spanish. Excluding the language someone
is reading, that would mean at least seven links to the equivalent
language pages.
That's surely manageable if you can produce the actual content in that
many languages.
