Having grown up in a country where monolingualism is the norm, and now living in a country where most under the age of 40 can easily communicate in more than one language (I wouldn’t go as far to call it multilingualism), I am intrigued by how Google sets its priorities.
Go to any Google country home page without logging in. Try to find the translation services, without using the Google Translate url. To find the Google translate pages, you generally have to go via its ‘More’ menu, or you have to Google it, or you have to know the Google Translate url. A few years back this wouldn’t have bothered me, since the translations that Google came up with were unreliable and often comical, but now it is a pretty good service, and great for those quick searches. But why is it tucked into a little dark Google corner?
What surprises me (or maybe it’s just disappointment at the reality of the world), is that YouTube and Play sit higher on the menu hierarchy than translation. I use Google Translate daily (and I long for the day they have Google Translate for Swiss German dialects), and I imagine I am not the only one. I rarely go to YouTube (the videos I watch tend to be embedded in blogs, newspaper sites etc), but can it really be true that entertainment and distraction are so much easier to find than a translation tool for the daily reality of most people’s lives? I understand Google was not built for me. I understand that I like dictionaries and that is fairly weird, but I feel the Google menu does not reflect the reality of many people’s lives.
It’s obviously something they’ve thought about, because if you go to http://www.google.com.pg, the home page for Google Papua New Guinea, the country with 841 languages (for a population of around 6 million), there it is!
So maybe we just need to wait a little longer for Google to catch up with the polyglot reality of Switzerland?
Jo Goes 