This always annoys me. I land on a site that’s in a language I don’t understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and… it’s all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië…
How does that make any sense? If I don’t speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. “German” in Polish is “Niemiecki”… :|
Wouldn’t it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?
Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?
It wouldn’t be too much work to hook the request language up to a CMS and then a translation service. You could produce in a couple of popular languages upfront and then when someone with a new language visits a landing page, translate it at high priority (few seconds), then the cascade the next most likely click-throughs in order of popularity (or callout weight if it’s new). The translations can then be queued for review, and it will mean you only translate when you need to, and the user only experiences a second or so delay as the translation streams the content above the fold.