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    
Read the latest posts about: Austria, Localisation, Web
The views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former clients or employers. Read my blogging principles
 Get free updates via RSS       Get free updates by email       Follow Martin Belam on Twitter