Drapetomaniac

I’ve learned Spanish for heritage reasons, Portuguese for recreational reasons and have recently started learning Arabic to learn a non-western language with a lot of ties to the languages I’ve already started to learn.

In early interface testing, I would always type in my name with the accented -xC3xA1- in order to see if whatever field I was typing in had a weak interface. Often times the program would GPF and would break and other times the letter would get mangled.

Luckily, over the years as the market depended more on non-English speakers, these interface problems started to disappear. I always watch for services that deliver multiple language interfaces and how they perform in that field.

Google has had a decent run at language accomodation although I thought for their capital and reach was still slow.

While following recent language news I found Google encouraging people to explore their growing language features, including changing the entire interface to another language.

I actually do this every once in a while to force myself to language practice a language.

However, google doesn’t warn you to be proficient in a language. They say in their entry, “Hyperpolyglotic Gmail“, “If you’re multilingual, feeling adventurous, or if you just want to test how well you know the Gmail user interface, try changing your account language settings.”

My favorite part is the warnign, “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy.” Remember that the next time you’re doing something dangerous. “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy.” Walking on the outer edge of a bridge? “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy.” It’s as comical as it is bizarre.

Seeing if they had a safeguard in place, I changed my interface to Arabic. Something I really not proficient in. There was no warning, or timed function to revert it back, or any other function to make it “easy” to undo your risk. Luckily, I familiar enough with the interface to change the language back, but it wasn’t immediately at my disposal. There wasn’t a link on the page back to the language settings after I changed the language. I had to follow the links deep back into account settings.

If anyone ever offers the advice, “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy – think twice. Google offers advice that probably provided a usability denial of service to at least a handful of their blog readers.

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