Or “how can localization fuck it up”.
Try to accessing the Blogger’s Help site. Everything looks normal, right? Specially if you use a computer whose default language is set to English.
Now, try to set that default language to Spanish. If you don’t know Spanish, don’t worry if it doesn’t make much sense. Now, if you arrive to the site using a computer that has Spanish set as defult, then everything will be written in that language since Blogger actually detects that and then some.
That is pretty cool. Not.
See, localization is actually not just translating text and changing some images and such. Localization means adapting a product to another culture. Some people actually use the term culturization to refer to this process. It can be a pretty BIG thing.
And what does this rant have to do with Blogger’s Help site?
There is a helpful article that talks about “Hacking the Blogger Matrix“. A tongue-in-cheek title in English, but that in Spanish reads as “Piratear la Matriz de Blogger”[1]. If that title is reverse translated then it would read “Pirating the Blogger Matrix”.
Hacking becomes Pirating.
Which is a pretty harmless example: now, if you took a site written in Spain to Argentina, be sure that it will raise some chuckles, since “to take” in the first country means “to fuck” in the former. And this is between two countries that speak the same language, apparently.
More horror localization stories some other day.
P.S.: Now try to contact Blogger Support. We couldn’t.
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