Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Poor internationalisation

This image is part of a screen shot from a shopping website I visited recently.

This shows the sites attempt at providing the site in different languages.
A few observations:
  • Surely the options should be: Français, Deutsch and Svenska.
  • What about an option for English. - Because this isn't, the only way to get back to English is to delete the cookie created by the site.
  • Because an option is always displayed (French if in 'English mode') and the only way to change the language is by selecting a different language from the list, to get the site to display in 'French' you must first select one of the other options. Yes, to see the site in French you must first display it in Swedish or German
  • There is no way to change the language if the browser you are using does not support Java Script.
Also, only the navigation was translated. All product descriptions were still in English. I don't think that will work out as being particularly helpful for French, German or Swedish visitors.
It's good to see websites adding support for multiple languages, it would just be nice to see them doing a good job of it.

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