T-Mobile hot-spots in Austria suffer from poor translation

I posted earlier about my experience of using a localised survey product at Salzburg's airport last week. Whilst I was there I also bought an hour of internet access via a T-Mobile hot spot, and experienced a little glitch in the English translation of the Austrian version of their service.

I was quite happily browsing away, when my copy of Firefox was brought to a halt by an urgent dialogue box.

Your time has run out!

The thing is, when you flipped to the T-Mobile tab, you could clearly see that I did have time remaining on the service - 5 minutes to be exact.

Clicking OK on the dialogue box allowed me to resume my session - albeit with a minute or so wasted whilst I had tried to work out what was going on.

What the dialogue box was meant to be conveying was a warning that my time was running out, not that it had run out.

A simple translation error then, but one that is going to impact on the user experience of anyone using T-Mobile in Austria having switched the service to English language.

Posted by Martin Belam, March 5, 2007
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