Poor Internationalization

Before this turns into a rant, I should say that I applaud the efforts to make the web more language friendly. However my experiences with an increasing number of websites is that they are assuming that just because you're connected from somewhere in the middle of Germany, you speak German. Now I'm not talking about www.einigewo.de, I'm talking about sites that are truly international. This all came to a head last week when I tried to respond to a blog in order to correct some mis-leading information. The owner of the blog doesn't accept anonymous posts. So be it. Since it is owned by an extremely well known, large and wealthy internet company, I just happened to have a userid and password so I could log in. The blog also had a captcha that I needed to deal with. Normally not a big deal but this time something didn't quite go so right and (if you've not guessed it by now) the error message came up in German. Actually the entire site appeared to be very well internationalized but I'll leave that final judgment to my German friends. I stared at the message for a bit and read in a Germlish sort of way and well... I tried to type in user id, password and caption again.... same result.. search about for switch to English button... nothing. Strange because the main page of this companies site *does* allow you to set this preference. Long story short, I finally did manage to get the site to accept my message and to this day I still don't know why my first attempts failed. What I do know is that although they have made a great start, they need a jUnit test to make sure that an English speaking person in the middle of Germany can still navigate their site.

tags: junit  internationalization