"Irish" localised version of YouTube is actually in "English"

international | sci-tech | opinion/analysis

Wednesday June 20, 2007 12:45

by R. Isible

Youtube Ireland

YouTube (now owned by Google) have launched what they say are "localized" versions for 9 countries: Brazil, Japan and seven EU countries including Ireland. The Irish version appears bizarrely to be localised in English.

Localisation[1] (known by the shorthand "L10n") is the process of providing interfaces to computer programs entirely in the language, character set and time/date formats of a particular country and culture. The Irish site[2] is localised in English.

The press release states that the purpose of this is to allows users in each country to share and create videos in their local language. If the recognition is that Ireland is a predominantly English-speaking country, then it seems pointless to create a redundant version separate from the www.youtube.co.uk site. Probably it's all just a gloss on the fact that Google have servers geographically distributed around the world to speed local access times, consuming huge amounts of power usually in relatively impoverished backwaters[3] that are glad of the jobs at any price.

Click the flag on the top-right to change to e.g. French or Japanese.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localization

2. http://www.youtube.ie

3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/23/google_penguins/

In a stunning display of hypocrisy all information for this article was gathered with the aid of Google, who own all of our souls and despite their bullshit corporate propaganda about "do no evil" probably turn over our search results to the torturers in the CIA when asked. Hopefully it won't escape your notice that this article is also fully localised.