Free Wisdom Online: Google's Internationalization Blunders

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There is a common UI guideline that seems to be routinely ignored when
it comes to multilingual interfaces.  Last week I noticed that Google
breaks it in a particular impressive way.  Go to google.com, click on
"Preferences" and then select a new language under "Interface
Language."  Let's pick Georgian - I know you were always curious about
how Google looked in Georgian.

You don't get to see the colorful Georgian letters spelling "Google"
but at least you get to see this cool script in other parts of the
page.  Now, let's change it back.  Click on "Preferences" again. 
(Actually, on "პარამეტრები", but you hopefully remember where to find
this link).  Now stare at the preferences page in Georgian and try to
figure out which of the following options means "English": "ნეპალური"?
"ტაგალოგური"? or maybe "ტაილანდური"?  (Google offers you many more options, of
course.)

Let's pick one randomly.  How about "ტაილანდური"?  Let's see what we
got.  (I am skipping the google.com page and going straight to the
preferences.)

This looks a bit like the script on the menus in Thai restaurants, but
it's actually Laotian.  This bit of trivia of course doesn't help us
find English, so we'll have to pick something randomly again.

Ok, at least we've got a Roman script.  I am not sure what language
this is, so let's call it "Kesukaan" for now.  It appears that some
languages have easy names in Kesukaan - I see "Bahasa Uighur," "Bahasa
Ukraina," and "Bahasa Portugis."  No "Bahasa Englis" or "Bahasa
Inglis" unfortunately.  I could cheat at this point and go for "Bahasa
Portugis".  However, I can see only one bahasa that isn't obviously
not-English: "apaan sih?"  I am feeling lucky, so I take my chance.

Kazakh.  Since this is cyrillic script, I can actually find English in
the list: "ағылшын".  But since most of you probably can't, let's
pretend that I can't either.  In this case, it seems that my best bet
is to pick from among the few languages shown with their English
names.  From among those, "Corsican" looks like the best bet.

Ok, we finally have a list of languages in which we can identify
English quite trivially ("Inglese").  So, we are finally back to
English:

What's the moral of the story?

>   Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a
>   clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state
>   without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo
>   and redo. (Nielsen's Usability Heuristic #3)

In this case, all that is needed is a list of languages where each
language is listed with its own name: English, ქართულად, Kiswahili,
etc.  Come on, even Nokia has figured it out.

If you've read this far, stick with me for a few more brief rants.

* Why does "google.us" redirect to "google.com.br" when I am in
    Brazil, but "google.com.br" does not redirect to "google.us" or
    "google.com" in US?  And why can't "google.com" be in English by
    default?  Has it ever dawned on people at google that English
    speakers travel to countries where the native language is
    Kasukaan?

* Why does google assume that my choice of language for the interface
    implies a preference for seeing web-pages in that language.  Why
    do I have to set my interface language to English to avoid seeing
    results mostly in Portugues when I do a query like "linux"?  Does
    the simple fact that I haven't bothered to change my interface
    language to English mean that I need to know about Connectiva
    instead of Gentoo and Suse?

* Why does a search for "python" in the Georgian interface bring
    results in Japanese?  Is there a relationship between those two
    languages that I wasn't aware of?

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