[Mr Fred]

doing a new design for the nhs

They have information available in a number of languages.

whats the best method of showing this. ie flags, country names, list of langauges, list of languages that are translated.

They are aiming for AAA or at least AA so that has to be thought about.

[emil]

I hate flags. They're so 99.
Never had to deal with more than 2 languages though (for which case I just stuck a link in the respective language at the top)

[lukasarts]

BBC have a small list of languages on the left sidebar. Agree with Emil on the flags thing.

[Snowshiro]

You should write the name of the language in that language's character set, so non English speakers can recognize their own tongue. Flags can be very confusing, especially considering it's the NHS and they're probably supporting a bunch of languages from the Indian sub-continent which don't always follow geographical boundaries. Given the fact that a lot of people won't have the appropriate font, you'll need to make a small graphic for each, so it doesn't look like wank in people's browsers.

Here's an example from a site I was working on recently (it's just a small piece of the language bar, so it looks a bit crap on its own). The site was only in 2 languages (English/Japanese), so I stuck a little flag on as well to tell the other users what it meant. In your case I would just have the language name.

This is "Japanese" in Japanese.

[Mr Fred]

went for this method:

EUROPA - Gateway to the European Union

[steveb]

Yup, that's the way to do it. The name of the language IN that language. Avoids all kinds of oddities like if you're selling to Belgians, what flag is used for French and Flemish? Do you alienate Brits and Canadians by using the Stars and Stripes to denote English? Swedish-speaking Finns don't identify with Sweden and dislike clicking on a Swedish yellow-blue cross.

Odd that the language selector should be hidden away in the corner on the EU site. Took a bit of searching.