I ordered something from overseas and checked the tracking number to see when I might receive the shipment. The results looked like this:
Since the page wasn’t in English, and Google knew I was an English speaker, Google offered to translate it for me:
So I did. Then it looked like this:
The special part… Check out the time column. They “translated” 24-hour time into 12-hour time. They knew I was in the US and that’s our preference for displaying time. So they didn’t only translate the words into English, they went the extra step and translated the time format to match expectations. They certainly didn’t have to do that, but I definitely noticed that they did.
Delightful attention to detail, and thorough definition of translation. Well done.
Jack M
on 07 Jan 15Nice catch. Interesting that they didn’t also switch the DD.MM.YYYY date format to the standard American MM.DD.YYYY. I wonder if that was on purpose.
Denis
on 07 Jan 15But they left the dates in the european dd.mm.yyyy format, which is probably harder for us ‘mericans to grok than 24-hour time. And I don’t know what’s going on with the weekday. So I think I’ll hold my applause.
Denis
on 07 Jan 15Actually, I see what happened with the day names: they translated “mer” (abbreviation for mercredi, Wednesday) to “sea”. As in “ocean”. So +1 point for the 24/12-hour time but I’d say -1 point (at least) each for the date format and the weekday, final score -1.
Rebecca
on 07 Jan 15Also came in to say good on them for the time formatting, but they busted with the date formatting.
Xavier
on 07 Jan 15The fun part is that the Swiss Post already have an english localization (Eg: https://www.post.ch/EasyTrack/submitParcelData.do?p_language=en&VTI-GROUP=1&directSearch=false&formattedParcelCodes=RX352337180CH). I’m wondering if Google is using those multilingual sites to feed its translation algorithm.
Ordering goods from Switzerland? I’d be curious to know what kind of interesting products that might be (We’re always trying to source interesting products for attendees or speakers for the conference we organize)
Mrk
on 07 Jan 15It’s a watch…
Joe Mako
on 07 Jan 15But they did not add the a.m. after converting 03:16 to 3:16, combined with 5:11pm in the first row, it would be easy to mistake 3:16 as 3:16 p.m.
Jason Fried
on 07 Jan 15Yup Joe and everyone else… It’s not perfect. Look at anything and a “but… but… but…” will pop up. I was only pointing out how I thought the time conversion was a nice touch. And regardless of the date format, and missing the a.m. on the morning times, I still think it’s a great effort and overall a thoughtful piece of work. Over time I bet they get around to fixing up those other bits too.
alexey
on 08 Jan 15Semantic layout?
This discussion is closed.