A rant about how devices handle users with language backgrounds other than English

evercarrot
2026-02-24T15:10:47Z

How is it possible that in the year of our Lord 2026 my devices STILL use my physical location to determine everything?

As I'm writing this, I'm still reeling from the emotional rage I experienced during the past days. A little context: I got a fitness band (smart band? health watch? smart watch?) as a Christmas gift from a family member. It's a Huawei fitness band that was quite cheap, and I was going to connect it to my (Samsung) android phone. It's the end of February now, and what put me off from configuring it for this long was the fact that I was quite concerned with the privacy side of things; How can I know that my health data isn't indexed by some foreign corporation, sold, and subsequently used against me by my insurance company in 20 years? (further context: I live in Finland)

After doing some research I decided to at least try it out to see how the band works, and only then decide whether I want to keep using it or not. I connect it to my phone, begrudgingly set up yet another account for a service I will use only for a single purpose, sign over my soul and am finally able to establish a connection between the phone and the band. The band asks me to choose the language, and I choose English. I have all of my devices in English even though it's not my native language, mainly for two reasons:

1. the translations I've found to be quite clumsy/unintelligible at times, even (read: especially) on Windows

2. 99.9% of all tutorials, guides and manuals exist in English, therefore it's easier to troubleshoot/fix problems if I don't have to translate stuff all of the time

After choosing the language and finally getting the damn vampire to work, I notice it's displaying the weather in Fahrenheit. This is odd, because my phone as well as the health app on it are both configured to display units in Celsius, and no matter what I do, I can't get it to change. This shouldn't be a big problem because I don't care what weather/temperature it displays; I already get that information elsewhere.

Now, I'm definitely not an expert on electronic devices or computers in any capacity, but I do dual-boot Linux and Windows on my PC with my main usage being on Linux Mint, and I've also tinkered with some Raspberry Pi and for example Lua coding during the past years, just because learning is fun. Really, the only reason I use Windows at all anymore is because I never got my favorite game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, to work on my Linux distro. I've chosen English (and only English; there is no secondary language) both as the Windows language as well as for Steam, Firefox etc.

Nevertheless, every time I start up Windows, approximately a third of all notifications, error messages and buttons are in my country's most spoken language. Why? Because I'm located in my country. The same is true for my browser, about half of all software and so on. The system detects that I'm located in Finland (or perhaps that the OS was obtained here), and therefore it desperately tries to adjust to that fact, among other things by assuming what language I really speak. Some things in Windows just seem to adjust automatically depending on where it detects I am, and for many problems the only solution seems to be to change my time zone, the unacceptability of which should go without saying.

I understand Windows has been going downhill for quite a while, pushing content and services that the end user didn't ask for and doesn't want/need while removing functionality to bar the user from tinkering with their product too much. That being said, I can't for the life of me understand in what world this particular decision benefits anybody. Why not make separate settings for the time zone, the display language and the displayed units and then respect those settings? It's annoying for the user and it doesn't make anything on my device easier to do, and every time I want to configure Windows, my Android phone or for example my smart band, I feel like a child that gets babied by all the adults and never taken seriously. The child's name? Not Albert Einstein, at least as far as Microsoft is concerned, because of course I am a stupid and lazy average person who speaks the majority language in my country, who wants to do the same things everyone else does, and who understands the error message in English perfectly until the word "OK", which needs to be translated to my country's majority language for some reason.

Back to the smart band problem: After scrounging the internet for a while, I noticed quite a few Europeans have had the same issue with not being able to change the displayed units on their smart band. The solution?

Change the language to UK English.

Now, I understand that this problem had a relatively easy "solution", and in any other scenario I would have jumped to solve the problem and get on with using the device, but this was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. When configuring a device, the user cannot be required to play 5D-chess against the manufacturer's cultural ignorance in order to get basic things to work. In trying to make their product as foolproof as possible, they've made all the end users fools in the process. And this goes for computers, phones, smart bands, smart TVs, gaming consoles and even toasters that nowadays all require AI+remote control completely set up in order to function. Why not let the user first decide what they want, let the user ignore the settings they don't know about, and then have this state-of-the-art technology adjust to that?

I have no interest in wearing this kind of "smart" device on me because it makes me feel stupid.

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