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I'm Not Japanese

sachagreif.com

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Re: I'm Not Japanese

#121

Post by xiaoma »

lynnae wrote: post #64
xiaoma wrote: post #47

I hate this trend, too. I've always felt that if I go to the .com, then it should offer English by default. If I go to google.co.jp, then you can show me Japanese. Living in Taiwan, I did slowly get used to the traditional Chinese character web. But there's no way I want to or even can go through that every time I take a week-long trip somewhere. Respect the language settings of my browser, or even my machine as a re…

Why should .com be an automatic english language domain? It defines no single country. co.uk co.us co.au for example, I'd be surprised if they defaulted to anything other than English for a public website. But not .com

While .com doesn't define a single country, there was a huge development of US .com sites (and the internet in general) before there was much of an internet presence outside the English speaking world at all. In fact since most browsers (early and modern both) came out of the US, there wasn't even support for some non-roman character sets until later. That's how history went.

Furthermore, English is the single language widely use by travelers, heard in movies and even in local pop songs all over the world. English is the one language in which nearly anyone on the internet can recognize the name of their own language. Anyone in Russia could recognize that "Russian" refers to their own language, but how many Spaniards would realize that "スペイン語" was what they had to click on a Japanese site to find their own language?

Anything other than English would be a terrible default for a .com

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#122

Post by JohnsonB »

chc wrote: post #113
JohnsonB wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese From the article: >The problem is compounded by the fact that most of the time, you have no way of doing anything about it. And when you can do something, it’s often buried in layers of menus, which –don’t forget–…

This is only a problem for those who: 1. Are in the tiny minority of people in Japan who don't speak Japanese AND 2. Chose to switch to Japanese when Google asked them if they'd prefer Google in Japanese or English Google guessing that she might have been Japanese was not the major problem here. The ultimate problem was her incorrectly stating her language preference. It's hard to see what reasonable measures Google…

Actually, it's a problem for anyone who speaks a language that is different from the official language of the country they are in, and don't have a Google account (a lot of people.) In any case, a persistent language menu on all Google properties that has all languages available would solve either and all other problems associated with language choice.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#123

Post by ktizo »

briandear wrote: post #88
ktizo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It asked her if she wanted Japanese and she clicked yes and it gave her Japanese. What crap do you think anyone is pulling here? Also, if in Japan, I would be surprised to find google.com not to be in Japanese, and I would expect to have to perhaps make some kind of preparations for the fact that the majority of the world does not speak my language and that my electronic devices and services are not universal metatro…

Yes, but google.co.jp does just fine. The automatic country redirects are the main issue. I wouldn't go to Microsoft.com and expect it to be in Chinese any more than if I went to Baidu.cn and expected it to be in English. The country domain is the ideal way to handle regional preference, I don't need the software doing it for me. I'm not an idiot, stop treating me like one.

If I was in China and looked at microsoft.com, I would think they were absolute idiots if it didn't default to Chinese. If you don't localise for all your major territories from your .com domain and force them to use a country domain instead, then you should shoot your marketing director immediately.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#124

Post by jtheory »

ktizo wrote: post #59

I’m not Japanese. No shit. But ever since my wife and I moved to Kyoto, the Internet sure seems to think we are. The internet does not think. Or if it does, it has weird proto-dreams of kittens and porn. But it does not think of you, or your wife. Google is supposedly this big, Skynet-like company that lives to collect data on us. Stop believing the shiny box. It lies. Yet it’s not very smart about language. Pot. Ket…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#125

Post by ktizo »

jtheory wrote: post #124
ktizo wrote: post #59

I’m not Japanese. No shit. But ever since my wife and I moved to Kyoto, the Internet sure seems to think we are. The internet does not think. Or if it does, it has weird proto-dreams of kittens and porn. But it does not think of you, or your wife. Google is supposedly this big, Skynet-like company that lives to collect data on us. Stop believing the shiny box. It lies. Yet it’s not very smart about language. Pot. Ket…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

I was being very snarky, admittedly. The article just really irritated me and I was extremely drunk on rum.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#126

Post by jrockway »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #110

The classical mistake of assuming the language should be the same as the locale.

A mistake in the sense that it ignores a standard that everyone else ignores, but delivers the correct language to 99.999% of the visitors?

(Hint: most people in Japan speak Japanese. There are 126,000,000 Japanese in Japan, compared to 1,000,000 foreigners. Most of the foreigners are Korean and Chinese and probably understand Japanese just fine. Hell, so do most Americans, probably. My point is: if you're in Japan, it's quite reasonable for a website to default to Japanese.)

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#127

Post by draftable »

My girlfriend worked in Spain last year, so I spent about 4 months living in Madrid. I've been back in Australia for 6 months, but the majority of my Facebook ads still show up in Spanish.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#128

Post by blakerson »

jayfuerstenberg wrote: post #4

Yahoo Japan thinks I'm a woman despite my Yahoo profile saying otherwise. All I get is ads for women's undies and makeup. Google's search is pretty bad too, it really pushes me to the Japanese page even though I want English since the results differ. They hide the English page link way at the bottom in small font text and don't make clear that it's the English version.

Yahoo Japan thinks you're a typical Yahoo Japan user.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#129

Post by bolasanibk »

DanBC wrote: post #54
smcl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bugs the hell out of me, what is wrong with little flag + two letter code to indicate the current language, and maybe a little arrow to indicate that it is a menu you can select from.

I agree a drop down list is the nice solution. But it's not as easy as a bunch of flags and ISO 3166 codes. What happens for countries where there is no official language and two languages commonly spoken? (US: English and Spanish; Spain: Spanish and Catalon etc etc.)

India has 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_...
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