Many companies have crappy websites

[mikejmoffitt]

What really bothers me (living in Japan) are shop/company websites (that provide on-line shopping, services, banking...) that, if they have an English page (thanks!) it is always an "investor relations" page begging for foreign investment (thanks for nothing!) Try almost any Japanese company's webpage and see what you get by clicking on "English".

Train pass vending machines and ATMs are similarly infuriating.

The menu choices are reduced (and the button placement for each service doesn't correspond to its Japanese location, so you can't memorize the Japanese menus that way either.)

Oh god, when I was visiting this infuriated me that many UIs like this would be reduced.

[koitsu]

Here are the services offered in Japanese:

What do you get if you choose Hangul or Chinese?

I get the impression that most things which offer half-implemented multi-language support are half-ass because of the differences between the two languages. Depending on what you're trying to say in Japanese, you can often say it with less characters/glyphs, which means when it comes to devices with limited screen real-estate and so on, Japanese works well -- Chinese is the same way. English tends to be lengthy or "chatty", so you end up having to implement things like scrollable window regions, or start adding "More..." buttons. It's all because English consists of 26 letters, while hiragana is 48 + katakana is 48 (and this doesn't include handakuten/dakuten, the small versions of ya/yu/yo, support for kanji, or any of the different marking glyphs used in Japanese (different comma, asterisk, period, etc.)). Hangul is somewhere in between the two.

There are so many embedded/solid-state devices out there with UIs which were engineered solely with the native language (ex. Japanese) in mind. Other languages were added later, and more often than not, the programmers/engineers involved probably sat in a room thinking "how the hell am I going to fit all this English text on here? I can't! And we don't have any more ROM space without forcing hardware upgrades at all the ATM/kiosk vendors!".

Think of it this way: how many kiosk-like devices in North America do you see offering Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese? I can think of only a handful, like the ATMs **at my bank** -- while the ATMs out in the field only offer English and sometimes Spanish. The English+Spanish combo is significantly more common here in California compared to Oregon (where I'm originally from), although that's changing given the large influx of hispanics into Oregon; still to this day I remember being shocked at how much Spanish there was on products/menus/everything here compared to my home state.

[TmEE]

http://everyfuckingwebsite.com/

[Gilbert]

English tends to be lengthy or "chatty", so you end up having to implement things like scrollable window regions, or start adding "More..." buttons.

This. But I also have another theory. It is also possible that the translation was done only with an initial version of the system software. Over all these years the software has been upgraded several times, adding more and more features in the process, but they didn't hire translators to do their jobs every time, so at the end they just removed the buttons whose label texts weren't translated in foreign languages.

I'd also like to see the Chinese interface though. If it's mainly because of text length the Chinese version should still have most of the features.

[Celius]

2) Most of the time, they are just saying "We offer the best solutions." or stuff like that. Okay fine, but solutions to WHAT ? This coupled with somewhat ridiculous pictures of people smiling in a very naive way... Kinda of bade taste if you ask me.

OMG I know. If you want to advertise your business and stand out, do not just say you offer the best solutions and have some generic stock photo of someone smiling on the phone. With some of these places, it's like they just bought a generic business site and slapped their contact info on it.

Can I add to this? There is one thing that royally ticks me off. It can happen to any website but its usually ones run by not small companies. What is it? "Website closed for renovations" and their ilk!

Honestly the number of times I have come across that on a site I visit for the first time... and last time!

You just reminded me that I closed my own website for renovations and never finished! And yeah, that was years ago that I did that. Luckily I don't have anything driving traffic to my site anyways, so it's really not hurting me. But I agree, it's not a good thing to do, especially if your site has built in functionality that the user needs to access that very day (e.g. anything with managing financial accounts).