Language Localization = I Hate You 2.0

Does everyone in Japan speak Japanese? Do all people in France speak French? Can every single person in China speak or read in Chinese? A general assumption .. YES .. but there are students, expatriates and guests / tourists in each country that we live or are in that DO NOT speak nor read the mother tongue.

Say you're on a trip to Shanghai or Paris or Kuala Lumpur for that matter. You get online using your notebook or stop by the nearest local cybercafe, you key in a website address that you occasionally browse back home daily, then suddenly the entire user experience gets you worked up because every text or content that you would normally see in English is now in the local country's native language in Hindi or Farsi or Latin. To make matters worse, say your browser or operating system does not support foreign language encodings, what you will see right now would be no less than jibberish ASCII codes. The sensible thing to do at this moment would be to look for a link to switch to a language that you wish to see. Then again how on earth will you be able to navigate to select a particular language when what you see on the screen is either foreign to you or is web jibberish?

No one bothers to let you know what language they wish or wish not see at their login page only because they're NOT bothered with your website anymore or they cannot find a 'live chat' module with technical support or they cannot find the feedback or contact me hyperlink. Well, listen up, you really don't want to put off the user browsing experience therefore get rid of automatic language selection based on IP Addresses. Secondly, code your global file to support UTF-8 encoding. Thirdly, language selection links should be changed to images instead of foreign language text. Lastly and the most important thing to remember... paste 1st Paragraph shown above on your toilet door.

Aesthetics not only applies to themes, images and placements on a particular site or page anymore. Today, where customers, clients or end users are getting fussier, harder to satisfy and have a long list of endless choices, the ability for an application or a company that runs the application to remain sharp, possess people smarts characteristics and aesthetically and psychologically competitive is highly crucial and mandatory in every new web business. Lose five to ten end users because of this, hey that's fine.. lose an evangelist, we'll see who has the last laugh... your competitor!