Living in Denial A personal blog of a girl named Survon.


Monday, April 10, 2006

Hunt your language

Since Internet has become more and more popular nowadays, it has been one of the most important tool as an international knowledge sharing platform that connects each and every corners of the world into one relatively tiny cubicle which we call, computers connected to internet.

When we talk about globalisation, it MUST have to be related to the Internet.

When you put something on the web, no matter it's a normal advertisement, company's website, forum, blog, or even x-rated sites, you will expect billions, or trillions of visitors across different nations which might chance upon your page. Let's not mention sites which are locked by access control system.

In Malaysia, most websites are written in English, because, first, that's the most common written language despite Malay being the main medium of Education, second, that's the international language where everyone in the world should or suppose to understand. If the company has more extra money to invest, they might come out with dual- or tri-lingual site with Chinese and Malay. Erm..probably Tamil too, I'm not sure as I don't read Tamil. After all, it depends on the target visitors.

Have you ever chance upon a foreign language website and you have difficulty finding the button to convert the page to your understandable language?

If you are lucky enough, you could easily spot the language conversions buttons and make the selection to your preference like below.

If ALL the above words look alien to you, no worry, that signifies the site does not have any language you could comprehend. Thanks for the visit, you can leave now.

Your life will be even much easier if they could add the flag, so that you could spot the series of choices available.

Some sites, especially Hungarian sites, love to use ONLY flags as the language conversion buttons.

Now don't you regret for not studying hard during your previous Geography lessons? Even if you don't know your own flag, make sure you know the flag of the language origin you know.

This looks pointless. How many people will know Angol means English?

Some websites like to play hide and seek. Try to spot the English button...

It is always easier to spot the button if it's written in Roman characters, as long as you could find the list of selection. What if you can't even understand a single words from some other non-Roman characters language like Chinese?

I bet you can't even recognize this is the place where you could convert the display language.

posted by Survon @ 5:03 PM,