We had a conversation the other day about how the concept of an icon that says "change language" was a . . . formidable . . . design challenge. I mentioned that I'd brought this up to the Design Guild a few months back, and we spent several hours talking about it.
They had some far-out concepts. But the end boiled down to something like this:
Obviously, this is something I threw together in about 20 minutes. I pulled glyphs from the WP logo for it; the proportions are way off, and i don't know that it's going to work below 32 pixels.
Here's the thinking:
Indicating *languages* is next to impossible.
Indicating *scripts* is less so.
People will be more likely to recognize foreign scripts than foreign language names (e.g., if you don't speak a Latin script, "English", "Deutsch", and "Italiano" are going to look the same to you).
Opposition research showed that most of the more intelligent switchers depend on script-recognition than actual word recognition.
Thoughts? I'm eager to think about this because I'm working on the "Wikipedia 2015" designs, and it's important to have a handle on this for them.