I suppose, when faced with a menu like the second, you try the options in sequential order until you find the one you want, and pray that they're arranged the same in all languages (rather than alphabetically in each language, for instance)...
They’re not in quite the same order in fact - I think the “current” one is always first. For speakers of European languages it might be sufficient to find something which uses the Roman alphabet but I can imagine Chinese users being completely stymied.
Well, I know "English" in English, French and German and could probably take a good guess in Spanish... the Chinese I'd have no idea (but as it happens 'select any other language' puts it in something I understand). If it included Japanese, Russian or any other non-Roman-alphabet language *and* changed order with selection you could be at it all day!
The worst case is when a menu like that for language setting is a one-time installation setting, and changing it later is an option deeply buried in a preference menu somewhere....
Oh the fun we used to have de-virusing non-English machines. An awful lot of "well it's in _this_ position on my machine". Did a Chinese one once but had the owner with me to do translations
(Semitic and Indic languages are still in English in that list due to rendering issues, as well as Thai, and something is a bit buggered about Kazakh. Somebody did manage to get Hebrew working better recently.)
After thinking about it, it seems to be alphabetically by ISO 639-2 code, but how many people know their code?
Sorting the list of languages either by English transliteration or by Unicode code points would probably make more sense ... in a list that size, you can just about read through the entire thing looking for "your" language", but if it gets much bigger you want to be able to rule out large chunks by recognising the ordering so that you only have to check a much smaller portion till you find yours.
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ewx
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 10:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 10:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 10:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-14 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-15 03:47 pm (UTC)"French", though.
Just like the last one isn't "virtue-ese" but "German". (And the one between them is "Spanish".
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-14 09:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 11:25 pm (UTC)Did a Chinese one once but had the owner with me to do translations
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-14 10:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-14 10:57 pm (UTC)Not to brag about not getting this hopelessly wrong or anything
(Semitic and Indic languages are still in English in that list due to rendering issues, as well as Thai, and something is a bit buggered about Kazakh. Somebody did manage to get Hebrew working better recently.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-15 03:49 pm (UTC)After thinking about it, it seems to be alphabetically by ISO 639-2 code, but how many people know their code?
Sorting the list of languages either by English transliteration or by Unicode code points would probably make more sense ... in a list that size, you can just about read through the entire thing looking for "your" language", but if it gets much bigger you want to be able to rule out large chunks by recognising the ordering so that you only have to check a much smaller portion till you find yours.