Dislocalizations – Lessons from the virtual hotel lobby

 

Even the biggest companies sometimes don’t get it right. I rediscovered this when I filled in an online “quick check-in” form for a hotel in Europe. The hotel is part of an international chain and has localized the form to match the language of the guest but, in practice, the task took far longer than it would have taken if I had checked in with the clerk. The delay was due to false assumptions, programming bugs and automatic localization. Sadly, having a real customer go through the process most probably would have identified the errors before I had to suffer through them.

The first challenge was the assumption that I wanted the form in Hebrew, the language of the country I live in, not English, my mother tongue. I have no problem working in Hebrew as I am a professional translator from Hebrew to English. Yet, filling in forms in English still demands significantly less effort as compared to Hebrew. I searched but found no apparent way to switch the form into English although I admit I may have missed it. In today’s world of globetrotters, automatically linking a language and country is not a reasonable assumption.

To add to the fun, there were two programming issues, one minor and one major. Hebrew is a right-to-left language  while English is left-to-right. Accordingly, the Hebrew text in the form was aligned to the right as is correct. Curiously, the follow-up screen in English stating that the form had been received was also aligned to the right, which is wrong and looks rather strange. On a more serious note, for two guests, there are four fields in which it is necessary to enter a date (birth and passport issuance) in the European format, i.e., dd/mm/yyyy. For some reason, despite my best efforts, including using the calendar tool in the form, I could not continue as there was a red notice that the date was in the wrong format although it was correct. Ultimately, I simply opened up a new form and refilled all the fields. That apparently solved the problem. However, I wasted some 15 minutes and precious energy trying to overcome this barrier to filling the form. To tell the truth, I considered the option of not filling in this “quick” check-in.

The most annoying error in the form was the negligent automatic translation of the country list. There are four fields where it is necessary to open a dropdown list and select a country. The hotel chain decided to localize the names of the countries, translating them into Hebrew. However, it forgot to re-alphabetize the list. As a result, the order of countries in Hebrew only makes sense if you know how to spell in English. For example, Cuba and Canada begin with the letter c, which is the third letter of the Englis halphabet. However, in Hebrew, they begin with the letter kof ק, which is the 19^th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Yet, they were still towards the beginning of the list in Hebrew.  It was a logical and visual challenge finding Israel, one that I would have been happy skipping.

In my opinion, having foreign locals attempt to fill out the form would have identified the issues before it ended up on my desk and desktop. These issues have nothing to do with the hotels but impact the customer activity. Localizer, be aware.