Change order of languages in your account settings

This is a minor change, but I find a little bit annoying that the order on the “Edit Your Account & Profile” scrollbox is alphabetic order in the language that you are currently using. I think that is more logical to have the order be in alphabetical by the name of the language in their own language.

The current setup is very “aesthetically pleasing”, but I find it unpractical; imagine for example some monolingual english speaker changing the language by error to turkish; that person then has to search for “İngilizce” (english) in a turkish alphabetical order scrollerbox (probably without knowing how english is said in turkish). Another problem is that if you are a multilingual user that likes to change between languages to search for translation errors for example; you probably are going to search “english” when you want to change to english, and “español” (for example) when you want to change to spanish, and not viceversa.

Edit:

I have just now been informed that there is already a feature down in the iNat page to easily change the language. In this feature the languages appear in the order that I think that is more practical, so not sure why in the “Edit Your Account & Profile” is the other way around

I completely agree. Language selection menus should primarily be labeled and sorted according to the target languages, not the actively selected language, as the point is to help users easily find and select their preferred language. This is standard practice on most major platforms.

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As someone who has used Chinese for 15 years, I agree that something like this needs to be addressed. I can’t imagine being a native Chinese speaker and trying to find languages in English. For those “English only” folks, I’d like to say two people speak Chinese for every English speaker. And English comes in third in terms of native speakers worldwide (or fourth depending on who you ask). I’d write something in Chinese here but most western computers will “translate” it into ??? or small squares if the language is not installed on their computers. More specifically, while everyone under 30 in [mainland] China has been exposed to English in school, there are still plenty of people who could not read most of this website. Dealing with dozens or hundreds of languages may be intense and expensive, but it is also useful and inclusive, rather than exclusive.

So you would like the Local menu in the Account Settings page to pretty much mirror the footer language chooser?

Basically yes, that is it

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OK, I can make that request.

Added an issue here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2498

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Thank you @tiwane!

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Whoops, forgot to say we implemented this.

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