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Comment by metafunctor | Hacker News Reader

My vote goes to the “Org Too Big, Nobody Cares” explanation.

Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world with multiple official languages.

Haven't checked this recently, but a while ago Google Maps was still serving street names in a random language (the first name in alphabetical ordering), for streets which have names in multiple languages.

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> Or, perhaps just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world where there are multiple official languages

As a brit, I am always irked that most of what I browse is locked to US English, as if it's the same thing as British English. At least if your main language is a popular non-English language you get the option to switch to it.

This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United States is always in the special top slot, and below that is everywhere else on the planet, like second rate-citizens. It's especially egregious on global sites, that serve global content.

> This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United States is always in the special top slot

This used to be the case, but it seems to be becoming rare. It’s really annoying actually as alphabetically United States is way down in the list. This is how IP geolocation should be used imho, bubble up the probable location(s) to the top of the list, but DON’T assume the geo is right without asking.

While we are complaining about this, can we all agree that using plain <select> for country is an anti pattern. There should be a fuzzy search.

So many times I have to search for my country under

United Kingdom

Britain

Great Britain

England

Only to find that it was “Great Britain” but collated in the B’s amongst Bhutan and Belgium, etc.

> So many times I have to search for my country under [...]

It's even better when you have to explain this specific oddity in a foreign language.

Try politely explaining to a German consular official that they probably need to look in their system's drop-down box under 'V' for 'Vereinigtes* Königreich' [UK] (instead of 'E' for 'England' or indeed 'G' for 'Großbritannien' [GB]) as they are attempting to enter passport details...

* 'United', in German...

We once added internationalisation to our app. Being British developers, our English was British English so that's what was in the language picker.

We had a very angry American (presumably) who accused us of "cultural imperialism" for having an en-GB option but no en-US option.

Got to say I was laughing about that for quite some time.

Youtube also auto-translates video title for me, based on the language it assumes I can read. It’s so infuriating (there’s settings that alleviate that behavior for declared languages, but it’s buggy as hell, and still grating…)

Monopolists don't care about quality.

It's slightly different from too big an organization. Big organizations do not care about the people they touch (employees, suppliers, etc). Monopolists do not care about their customers.

I listened to a Podcast and one of the hosts was a British guy living in America. He had to speak in an American accent to his Xbox One in order for it to understand him. It seemed the voice recognition was based on your location setting and not independently configurable.

>Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance

Ignorance, or arrogance?

American who has been in that meeting a few times. It is mostly arrogant innocence... A kind of Dunning-Krueger like effect.

This triggers some PTSD with Google Maps navigation in Finland

We have two official languages - Finnish and Swedish, neither of them big enough to warrant any Google effort for proper text-to-speech. Hence, the voice navigation first pronounces street names in Finnish, then again in Swedish, both butchered by applying English spelling rules, all voiced by an extremely robotic voice

I doubt it. I bet this actually works better for most people. It really sucks because you can't fix it if your computer is actually configured correct, but they probably ran some simple tests and determined that IP location is better than HTTP header language.

I'm sure it is easy to construct an argument that this isn't actually better overall. That case probably does then fall into "Org Too Big, Nobody Cares".

USA-centrism per se would still seem to recognise second languages, several state legislatures use Spanish, I think at least one publishes laws in Spanish & English.

Part of USA even has Spanish as an official and principal language - Puerto Rico.

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