by Charles Miller

Last week I wrote that "the internet is forever," because what is ever once put online often endures without end. Another characteristic of the internet is that it is a polyglot network. According to Ethnologue, we live on a planet where there are currently 7,164 languages spoken, and since 63% of the 8.1 billion people on earth have internet access that means a lot of those languages can be used online. All this makes it very likely that a lot of those internet users may have at one time or another ended up landing on a web page written in a language they could not understand.

While the proliferation of web pages in many different languages has made it nearly inevitable you will encounter pages you cannot read, tools to deal with this problem have also become available to all. As of this writing, Google Translate supports a total of 133 different languages and this service makes it simple to translate words, phrases, or even entire web pages.

To better accommodate the needs of an international clientele, online service providers such as Google rely on several different sources of geolocation data in order to determine in what language you are likely to communicate. Sometimes though, Google’s best attempts to be helpful can go wrong. I had this happen to me a few years ago while traveling in the Middle East. While surfing the web seeking some local information my laptop’s web browser managed to pick up some cookies that apparently overrode my Windows language settings and caused the Google search page to switch from English to Arabic. The aesthetic beauty of the Arabic characters was pleasing to my eyes but the right-to-left orientation was disconcerting. When I typed "google.com" then looked at my screen I could see I had typed "moc.elgoog" (read it backwards), but it still worked. I quickly erased all my cookies, and now wish I had played around with that Google search page a little more before doing that.

Another place I have seen Google apparently trying to be helpful is automatically switching to your default language as soon as they know who you are. Many Gmail users here in Mexico have probably had the experience of being confronted with the email login page in Spanish, but as soon as you enter your email address Google recognizes you and your preferred language then changes the page to English. I have also seen this go wrong when someone accidentally types in a wrong email address. If the wrong address is an actual account belonging to someone else, and if that someone else lives in some other country such as Armenia, then Google might change your default language to Armenian and display your Gmail login page in that language. Not everyone knows how to follow the instructions to change that back, especially when the instructions now read: "Ինչպես փոխել լեզուն հայերենից անգլերենի" None of this is indicative of maleficent intent, it is just Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. trying their best to be helpful but not getting it exactly right.

All of this is something I was trying to explain to a client who cut me off and went completely berserk at the sight of Traditional Chinese characters appearing on her iPhone. She was completely convinced she had seen some Chinese hacker’s fingers in the act of typing on her phone. I have no doubt she believes that is what she saw, but Occam’s Razor posits there is most likely a simpler explanation.

Do a Google search for "Why are Chinese characters showing up on my iPhone?" to find dozens of instances of iPhone users seeing Chinese characters on their phones, and explaining why this could be happening. So far, none of the tech newsgroups I follow have mentioned this being the result of hacking… it is but an illustration of how the internet speaks many languages.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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