French (français) – Page 2 – Flags are not languages

Montreal Canadiens: powerful and clever language selection

Many Canadian websites provide content in both French and English. The Montreal Canadiens, an ice hockey team based in French-speaking Quebec, have employed a powerful and clever way for users to choose the language they prefer for their site.

One half of a player’s face links to French, and the other half of another player links to English. Both links are accompanied by the Canadien’s motto: ‘rise together’ in the appropriate language.

An inspiring way of integrating language selection with the motto and ethos of a sports team.

"Romanians are smart" campaign and the problem of similar flags

The website Romanians are smart has an interesting and noble objective: change the results associated with “Romanians are…” on Google into something more positive.

If you go to Google and type “Romanians are” in and wait for the autocorrect to kick in and you’ll see for yourself how racist the current results are.

The site encourages users of different languages to click on a link that enters the term “Romanians are smart” into Google (in their language), hopefully moving the more positive search term further up Google’s list of autocorrect options.

On the homepage there are links in English, French and Romanian. These languages are also complimented by flags. Romanian has a Romanian flag and English gets the United States treatment. But as for French, it appears the site has the wrong flag.

Light blue on top, white in the middle and red on the bottom — the flag used for French is far more similar to Luxembourg’s flag than that of France’s.

France

Luxembourg

French is spoken in both France and Luxembourg

However, the flag used could also be seen as the Dutch flag — could this flag choice confuse a Dutch user thinking they were accessing content in Dutch?

Netherlands

Luxembourg

The Netherlands and Luxembourg share an almost
identical flag but share no common language

Obviously this is probably just a simple design oversight — the French flag is simply upside down. But it still demonstrates the problem with using flags to represent languages.

Continue reading "Romanians are smart" campaign and the problem of similar flags

Tate Art Galleries: 12 languages, 9 flags

The Tate Galleries in the UK are a word-class collection of galleries and have a great website — with the exception of the language links on the homepage.

The most interesting part of this design choice is that there is obviously a cultural awareness that flags may not properly represent the Arabic and Chinese languages — so these languages are just written in their local equivalents.

But not so for French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Russian or Polish.

Furthermore, the flags are repeated in the content area of the pages these links lead to: of course with the exception of Arabic and Chinese.

(It’s also worth noting the BSL — British Sign Language — link. The hand icon here seems very appropriate for this).

Another issue with the choice of flags for some languages and the language name for others is also simple consistency.

Wouldn’t this design work far better if it just showed the language names?

Simple, consistent and uncontroversial?

Front against language flags

Researching the issues of flags as language in Belgium, designer and researcher Tine Lavrysen sent me through to a brilliant site entitled ‘Front tegen taalkeuzevlaggetjes‘ — or ‘Front against language flags’.

It prompts the user to select their language by using flags: Dutch, French or English. However the flags chosen are from small countries where the languages are still official — Suriname, Monaco and Ghana respectively. A very clever take on the issue of flags as language.

avaaz.org: simple yet effective multilingual content design

Social activism site avaaz.org is beautifully designed: both visually and experience-wise.

The site is available in 14 languages: each easily accessible from the top banner and presented in their local formats. Furthermore, the site autodetects the users language and redirects them to a localised version (if one is available).

A simple yet very effective way of presenting multilingual content.

The Metropolitan Police: 16 languages, 12 flags

The Metropolitan Police website provides language content in 16 languages other than English: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Somali, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. That’s quite a diverse range of content.

Met Police

From the homepage, a neat and attractive row of 12 flags links through to a landing page listing 16 languages.

12 flags, 16 languages: are some flags missing from the homepage?

Let’s follow the link and go to the next page:

Starting with the positive, each language is displayed in its native name and script (and also repeated in English).

But other than that, this is all wrong. It’s probably the single best example of why using flags for languages is so fundamentally flawed.

The biggest problem on this page is the use of the Indian flag three times for Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi. With the former, it’s worth noting that there are actually over double the amount of Punjabi speakers in Pakistan (60 million speakers) than in India (27 millon speakers).

Saudi Arabia’s flag has been chosen for Arabic on this page, yet on the homepage the flag of the Arab League has been used.

Arab League

Saudi Arabia

Arab League or Saudi flag — is either an appropriate representation of the Arabic language?

Consistency aside, obviously there’s been some trepidation here about how to represent the Arab language with a flag. More reason, of course, to avoid using any flag for language representation.

A final gripe: the homepage flags, for their inherent flaws, do look rather nice. However, the quality of the flags on the landing page is simply awful (not to mention the poor legibility of the native language names). Give flags some respect and please save them with an appropriate level of quality!