Low-hanging fruit: the language-selection drop-down box

A natural, and high-profile, application of Esperanto would be its use in language-selection drop-down boxes on the web. This would be easy to implement: only an infinitesimal amount of knowledge of Esperanto would be required, and only an infinitesimal change to the software. This is low-hanging fruit (no pun intended) if there ever was such.

Currently, a typical language-selection drop-down box on the web simply shows the name of the language in the language itself. At the very least, this discourages exploration and experimentation. For example, if you are curious what the app would look like in Korean, but don’t have a clue what Korean script looks like, then you don’t know what to choose from the language-selection drop-down box to do that bit of what-if analysis. At worst, you could get stranded, as I was for a while when I tried to take a look-see at another language in Google Scholar (i.e., I selected another interface language). In this case all the language names are given in the host language (English in this case), so when I changed to another language, all the language names in the language-selection drop-down box showed up only in that language. I had a tough time hunting and pecking and guessing until I could get back to English, because I didn’t know what “English” was in this other language! Of couse I first tried re-booting, but Google Scholar diligently remembered my latest choice of language! It is obvious what is needed: simply tack on the Esperanto name of the language right after the national name for the language in the language-selection drop-down box. For example, for English, the entry would be:

English – la angla

One place where this could be immediately implemented would be the www.esperanto.net website, which, instead of using a drop-down box, displays all at one time the names of the 62 languages available, each in its own script. This takes up a lot of the screen space, so tacking on the Esperanto name to each would probably best be done by corraling all those language names into a drop-down box like everyone else on the web does.

What do you think?

- Mike Jones