I am actually writing this post in Scotland and I don't sprechen Sie Deutsch. So why are the Blogger menu items in German? The answer is a bug in Google's slightly too clever system for presenting users with geo-appropriate versions of itself and its applications. I first noticed this when visiting England earlier this year. One of my browsers has google.com set as the home page but clicking the Home button in that browser took me to google.co.uk. You might not think that is a problem, but when you search for something like a Sony Viao via google.co.uk you get offered the best deals on Vaios in the UK, which is not what you want if you live in the US and plan to buy your Vaio there (for one thing laptops generally more expensive in the UK, and for another, their keyboards are significantly different from US models).However, getting the UK version of Google is a relatively minor inconvenience compared to getting the German version, which is what has been happening on my trip to Scotland. And it is not just Google search that is in German. All the Google apps, including Blogger, are in German and so far I have not found a way to 'make' Google sprechen Sie Englisch. What I have found is one explanation for this problem: Google uses the location of the ISP by which you are connecting to the Internet to determine what country you are in. Google then uses the language of that country in its menus. (What Google does in multi-lingual countries like Belgium and Canada I don't know.)
But how does this ISP-language link explain German Google appearing in Scotland? A quick traceroute showed that the ISP used by the hotel at which I am staying is based in Germany. They have a UK company but apparently the main servers are registered in Germany. Apparently the coders at Google had not considered that possibility.
The whole thing is a great example of the huge difference between physical categories and digital categories. Categorizing physical things is challenging. Read David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and you realize how tough (for example, I had no idea there were two kinds of indexing specialists known as lumpers and splitters).Weinberger ably demonstrates that one of the wonders of the web is the way it can break down categories. Search for a book at Amazon or anything on Google and the results will display its many facets. Search for "cycle" and you will see what I mean. Cycles of all kinds pop up: life, the sea, pedal bicycles, motorcycles, and so on. And your media choices include data, images, news, blog posts, etc. However, when you connect to the web you do so from a physical location. Google determines and categorizes that location for you, but not always accurately.
This whole Scottish-German experience has been quite educational. I think I might have found a new way to teach foreign languages. When you use a foreign version of a program that you know well, like Blogger in this case, you quickly recognize and translate foreign words, such as bearbeiten, which means edit. Actually, I'm rather partial to bearbeiten. Sounds much more exciting. Honey, I'll be there in a minute, I just have to do some quick bear biting.
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