Sitting at work in over-cast Sydney with my morning coffee in hand, I went to gmail.google.com to be told I was in fact in Germany and that Gmail doesn’t exist there but Google Mail does.

Silly google.. I’m in Australia.

I like the fun wording of the message however seeing as it’s targeted at travellers I would expect it to be translated and displayed in a few other languages.

I hoped the page was intelligent and was picking up my computer’s language setting but I switched my Mac to Italian and then German but in both instances the web site still spoke English.

I then set the language preference in Firefox to German and while www.google.com displayed itself in German, gmail.google.com continued to show the message in English. Poor confused non-english speaking gmail-using travellers to Germany will be email-less.

Tags: australia, firefox, germany, gmail, google, languages, translation

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 11:28 am and is filed under applications, user experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.