I can’t believe nobody has done this list yet. I mean, there is one about names, one about time and many others on other topics, but not one about languages yet (except one honorable mention that comes close). So, here’s my attempt to list all the misconceptions and prejudices I’ve come across in the course of my long and illustrious career in software localisation and language technology. Enjoy – and send me your own ones!
Now that’s a pet peeve of mine, a bizarre belief surprisingly often held by people, who must be oblivious to the existence of tourism.
It would be a useful way to predict it possibly, but presumably the author meant if you have support for localization, you also provide an obvious and easy means of changing the language.
More importantly, you should be using the language an existing user has already used in the past.
It’s infuriating when an app or a site throws a shitty translation of itself in my native language at me. Most of the time they must not even check it’s quality, it’s notorious. Just let me use English by default.
Now there you have one more pet peeve of mine, language preference settings that pretend that all language versions are equal, that shitty translations aren’t abundant. If the original text is in a language that I can read then I want the original, not some shitty translation. It shouldn’t be that hard!
This. When I was in Mexico on my honeymoon, Google kept redirecting me to their .mx version of Google; despite my inability to read Spanish.
And I always want the english version instead of the german version, despite me being german. Literally only google fucks that up. Every other site, even the small local german Uni website or the canteens meal site, respects my browsers setting. Google does not, and serves me german.
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