The Language Icon Blog

Apertium uses language icon

2009-03-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

Apertium which is an open-source machine translation engine and toolbox, uses language icon at their pages.

Apertium offers both text translation, along with the translation of documents and surf and translate. You can also do online dictionary lookup and test out the bleeding edge versions of our translators.

You can see their implementation from their webpage at : http://www.apertium.org/

Technical Implementation Examples

2009-02-08T21:19:00.001-08:00

We have updated our page to include the technical implementation examples, please read it full at http://www.languageicon.org/examples.php

Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult? [Original Title]

2009-02-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

Very often flags are used as symbols of languages, on the Web and elsewhere. For instance, a Web page might contain an "English flag" which acts as a link to an English version of a document (which itself is in another language). It is usually bad practice to use images as anchors of links, but this document concentrates on the theme why flags are particularly unsuitable anchors.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for explicit links to versions of a document in different languages. Even in this imperfect world, the Web might evolve so that a server and a user agent smoothly select a version according to language preferences which the user has given when configuring the browser. (There are methods for such negotation in the HTTP protocol, but they are rarely used in practice so far. See Techniques for multilingual Web sites. This should not be confused with the misguided "forced redirection" e.g. by Google, which uses undisclosed heuristics to send the user to a page in a particular language.)

We suggest you to read the full article at http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html

Translators Needed

2009-01-25T19:40:00.001-08:00

We like to translate the language icons site (http://www.languageicon.org) into all languages, please send me a mail if you are interested: omcdesign@gmail.com, we will put your link to homepage as a contributer.

FocusAbacus prefers the Language Icon

2009-01-25T19:27:00.000-08:00

FocusAbacus - Who are a real estate portal integrated the language icon to all Focus Abacus Network Sites: focusabacus.com, focusabacus.net, focusabacus.org, focusabacus.biz, focusabacus.info, focusabacus.mobi (mobile real estate), Emlak.im (Türkiye real estate), Immobiliarsi (Italy real estate), FocusAbacus.cn (China real estate), VnNhadat.net (Vietnam real estate), Emlakim Türkiye (Turkey real estate), Aqaratona (Gulf real estate), ManoNamai.net (Lithuania real estate), FocusAbacus.HK (Hong Kong real estate) and Sumi Sumu (Japan Real Estate)

Colnect uses language icon.

2008-09-12T00:17:00.000-07:00

We are happy to see that Colnect - Collect and Connect network decided to use the language icon in their next release.

Extract
I've considered the option of using flags but have ruled it out because:
1 - Flags represent countries, not languages. Consider English which is widely spoken in the US, UK and Canada. On the other hand, consider Canada which has both English and French as official languages.
2 - Adding 25 flag icons for every page is an extra communication load with no good justification.

A solution?
An interesting project I've came across is the 'Language Icon'. They've decided to create an international icon to mean the word "language". Here it is: Classic Icon 32 x 32
It's supposed to look like a tongue though personally I don't find it resembling a tongue. If it'll catch on, however, it could be of great use to websites / application around the world. Kudos for the idea!

Read the full article here, or visit their site.

Positive Feedbacks!

2008-08-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

This is a fantastic global icon --- and quite clever to use the color
of the tongue as the universal constant... which is also, of course, a
rarely used color, adding to the applicability of this visual to
represent a universal action: choose language. -
Bayarea RH

Please send all your feedbacks here!

Webpage Update

2008-08-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

We have updated our webpage and added standard size banners and more examples..

Which websites implement the Language Icon?

2008-08-24T13:49:00.001-07:00

We will keep this page for all who implement the language icon, please leave a comment here with your webpage adress, we will be adding you to the list!.

Currently Language icon is used by:

FocusAbacus Real Estate Network: emlak.im focusabacus.cn, vnnhadat.net.. (20+ sites)

apertium.org

Domain Update

2008-08-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

Hi, we have moved our server to MediaTemple, our domain is still languageicon.org, .com, .net, .mobi, or .info also works.. however the old website also works.

Vector Source and Color Variations Available

2008-07-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

We have uploaded the vector source and 480+ different color/size icons to a flickr set. You can view the set here or you can go to the vector source from here. The vector source is Fireworks PNG.

Language Icon Badges

2008-07-17T19:17:00.000-07:00

We have created more than 700+ badges (click to view flickr set) to use in your webpages to support our initative or just have fun, please, if you could link to us as well that would be more then welcome.

The Language Icon

2008-07-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

Hi all, we would like to share the language icon with you. Please visit LanguageIcon.org, you can leave any comments, feedbacks to this blog, we will also be posting more examples and supporters on here.