Up to a couple of weeks ago Apple decided to change the languague of the Dutch iTunes store to Dutch. Every interaction with the store changed from English to Dutch.
OK, So I live in the Netherlands (where we speak Dutch) and I use a Dutch based payment system (thus requiring me to use the Dutch store) and I am a native Dutchman. So the language in and of itself if not a problem. Besides of course that the actual translation is ... um ... not of a very high quality, and let's leave it at that for now.
The problem here is that everything else on my computer works in English: The Operating System and all the other applications. When I find Dutch translations somewhere I try to root them out. In Google this is configurable in my user account settings. For Cygwin this is configured by (not) setting the language environment variable.
Why?
Why should I want to eradicate all traces of "Dutch speaking" programs from my computer. That's easy. Two sides of the same coin actually:
- Thing actually do get lost in translation. In my long history in IT - over 30 years now, I started early - I have found that I can understand error messages and descriptions better when they are in their original English than in translation.
- Getting support by using the internet. Because Dutch is a relatively small language (we are apparently ranked 42nd with 21.7 million speakers). There will automatically be way fewer people who have the same problems with the software that I happen to run into. With the effect that the chance of finding a resolution to the problem is much better when I can Google for the original English error message. (Instead of trying to translate back from a translation. See Translation Equilibrium for the results of back and forth translation...
And, additionally, a lot of translations are indeed subpar.
Yes, auto-localisation rubs me the wrong way, in particular when there is no option to switch it off.
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