Web Site Language Choices

I've not blogged in quite a while, so I thought I'd dive right in with a short and sweet post just to get started again.

Today I needed to visit the TAM Airlines site, one that's useful for me to use while living and traveling in Brazil. As always, the site first appears in Portuguese and I need to change it to English in order to fully understand everything on the site. The section of the page about changing the language reads:

SITE BRASIL (CHANGE COUNTRY)

That always strikes me as a logical challenge. I don't actually want to change to a site for another country, I want the site for Brazil, but in English. Still, I know that must be the link I should click to change the language, so I click it.



The new page that appears shows a list of countries from which I can choose, including Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, United States, and others. The page also includes a menu that lets me change the language for just this country selection page. That is the menu they should have on their home page.

Faced with the list of countries, I'm still not satisfied with this one to one equation of countries with languages. I could be living in Germany, speaking English, and want to visit this Brazilian airline website. Which country should I choose from the menu? Germany or United States?

The TAM website isn't clear about this, but no matter which country is chosen, the user will stay on the web site for Brazil, but it will be shown in the primary language of the country which they've chosen. So why not just give the users a choice of languages instead of countries?

For that matter, what if the user visiting the website for the first time doesn't know Portuguese or English? Will they understand "SITE BRASIL (CHANGE COUNTRY)" at all?

I believe that websites that offer the users the choice of viewing the site in other languages should do so in a way that all users can understand. Maybe showing a list of country flags is a good idea, but again, that equates countries with languages. Showing a list of languages written in that language itself is the best idea. (E.g. Português, English, Deutsch, etc.)

I don't maintain any multilingual websites (yet), but I think this is an interesting concept. I'll need to do more research, but I believe this puzzle has been discussed by other good web site designers.