Welcome to Nowhere
And now, a wee rant.
Check out this page:
Now, tell me where exactly in the world this carsharing business exists. This is the front page of the company!
I was linked to this site by a friend in Helsinki (in the context of another conversation, about carsharing, as it happens). But the only place Helsinki is mentioned on this company’s website is in a caption to a photo. We are also met with this quote:
City Car Club offers a cost effective and easy to use way of driving. We have different types of cars and vans available at over 70 locations in the capital area.
The capital area?
So this is a Finnish carsharing company, based in Helsinki (I think), with a website in English, and nary a mention of Helsinki.
Or Finland.
Heck, or even Finnish… in order to get to the Finnish version, I just randomly guessed and went to CityCarClub.fi.
And guess what? No mention of Helsinki there either! (Or Helsingissä or any of the other 148614601 forms a Finnish noun can take…)
I have noticed that the same thing is often true of local newspapers’ websites. They’ll be called “The Gazette” or “The Tribune” or “The Local Paper.”
But they don’t tell you where they are!
Does this strike anyone else around here as weird?
Sheesh, talk about localization issues…
1 comment.
Technorati tags: Fun, l18n, Language and the Web, localization
Oops, didn’t look at the contacts page, Thomas. But even there, there’s only a postal address. Is there an office somewhere?
It strikes me as strange that a company like this, which is tied to a physical location, wouldn’t clearly say where they are up front.
Maybe it just doesn’t matter, and the only people who end up at a site like this are people who know they’re going to use the service anyway.