I think that this is a marketing or engineering decision, anyway -OMO- it SUCK. All well done programs have an option to change the language of the interface.

Google is available in more than 80 languages. Google.ch is available in the 4 Official spoken languages in Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Rumantsch + in English (I use the English version)!

This is a problem affecting a lot of international websites and web services. What I like is the Google approach. At the moment, Gmail is available only in English, but it will be soon available in more than 80 languages, as for the search engine.

Let’s take another example: Yahoo is available in USA, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, India… but it you register to yahoo.com, the interface is available only in English. If you register to Yahoo.it, it’s available only in Italian… this SUCKS!

For ebay it’s the same. As Swiss, I hate to browse ebay.ch in GERMAN (I understand it, i spoke it a bit, but I HATE German!!!). I like English, i have Windows XP in English, even if Italian is my mother tongue and even if in a program I can use Italian, i prefear to use English as language for the interfaces. So, I’d like to browse ebay.ch in English, at least.

[1] I wrote a message in the ebay forums about the translations problem, if you are interested.

Amazon is another example of bad designed platform. Amazon.de is the best choice to buy a book, because shipping from amazon.de to Switzerland is free. It’s not the case if i order from amazon.fr or even worse, from amazon.com. So why should I use it in German? I can buy English books, but the interface is in German, this sucks!

Oh, I almost forgot to say that everything would be easier if everybody would know Enlglish, besides his/her mother tongue. If this could be true, it would be so easy to make all important websites accessible to everybody: one translation in the official language and a second one, in English, for the rest of the world.