Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Spot...ify the mistake!

Last week the famous music streaming service Spotify made its debut in Italy after being around for some years already in other countries. Being a born musicaholic, I downloaded it on my pc and started browsing the official website to know more about the options offered. That’s when I came across the following page:


Ouch! The Italian speakers will immediately notice the glaring mistakes there: from accents that don’t belong to the Italian language (panorámica, piú... Looks like some weird sort of... Itañol?!?) and shouldn’t be there at all (quí), to clearly unnatural phrasings that a native would never use (to mention only a couple of examples from my screenshot, vista panoramica refers to a nice landscape, not an “Overview” of a website, and Impara di più has a flashing red flag on it saying “Literally translated from the English Learn more”).
I did a quick research and found out that the staff has opened a forum thread where users can report typos in their own languages. It turns out there are plenty of them in many languages. Well, not typos actually – utter mistakes.
Now, I don’t know who or what translated it, and I’m aware that the aim here is not to present a product professionally and enhance its sales, but rather to make the menu readable to users worldwide; yet I always cringe when I see language misused that way. I am sure Spotify accurately planned its international releases and checked that all its services were working properly, so why shouldn’t language be worth a little more effort?
Language matters, and any occasion should be a good one to state so!
 

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