Blogger Localization Issues

Some time ago Blogger was localized to Polish. Although English version was fine for me, nice thing to see the Polish market becomes important for Google. Unfortunately two things could be, let’s say, done better.

First, and much more important, is a decision when to switch the language. Actually as far as I can tell it is made basing on the IP address you connecting from. As every IP address (or rather a range of addresses) is geographically ascribed to specific country it (usually) can be resolved which language is spoken in the place you’re in. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean you speak that language.

When Blogger greeted me in Polish one day it was OK. I wasn’t really enthusiastic as Polish messages are longer (in number of letters) than English ones and I end up with content not fitting into the window.


I’m a lazy user so the effort to switch the language is way too much and I guess using the mouse scroll will allow me to burn a calorie or two so I left the Polish interface alone. Unfortunately I was on business trip in Austria and, what a surprise, Blogger greeted me in German. Then, it became an issue as my German is limited to “Bier”, “danke” and “noch einmal” or so. It’s like with the old trick with switching the language in someone’s Nokia to Finnish. Almost no one (except of Finns) could switch it back easily. Yes, I was puzzled. Switching the language just because my laptop has changed the gateway IP isn’t the great idea. I still have Polish locales in web browser and Google still knows I always change the Google search profile into the English one. There are at least a couple of better ways to resolve languages I understand.

Second thing is a small one. Not so long ago I saw a message:


As you can see I’m still too lazy to switch the interface language. Anyway, the message tells, as you can probably expect, “Downtime planned at 4PM PDT.” The message is in Polish but here in Poland we use different time formatting (would be 16:00 or 16) and what the heck is PDT? Yes, I know that’s Pacific Daylight Time and I’m able to check the difference between PDT and CET (Central European Time, which most of Poles actually know what the heck it is) is 8 hours. But when you bother to translate the whole site why not to remember about showing downtime messages using time zone which is familiar to me? Hey, you know which country I’m in, what vastly limits a range of interesting time zones.

Localization is never an easy thing. And it won’t be soon. It’s worth to think about scenarios users will follow first and then plan how the work should be done.