Itunes store language

Interesting that the post from Rob on Jul 15, 2009 5:31 AM has been edited by the host, so someone at least must have looked at it from Apple!

iTunes 9 - just took a look at it to see if there had been any changes to the language - no (from what I can tell). I also have just looked at the apple help for changing your language setting (its easy to change you language settings in iTunes.....). They have taken on board the feed back that the help site is wrong and now the languages available in each country have been changed to what is not just available, ie, in the Netherlands, it just shows Dutch rather than Dutch and English. In fact, the only place you can get more than one is in Switzerland and also Canada.

The ironic thing is that this would be so simple for Apple to fix. As I have noted, all of the menu items are teh same across countries and must therefore be table driven. It should be relatively simple to just have a preference to the table that is used to drive the menu structure.

A simple fix - pity Apple broke it in the first place 😉

at least when it was in English the text was correct.

Now its horrible, not even correct Dutch - Babelfish would make a better job.

20% (3.3 million) of the population of the Netherlands are not native Dutch so why has apple stopped supporting them in its store?

Message was edited by: WizGnomeX

Just to add my two cents worth - I'm a Brit living in France and Itunes store is in French. I would far prefer English too!
Linda

I have the same issue, dunno what the **** are you guys thinking...
Is very frustrating to see Apple turning into Microsoft.
Useless support, no more listening to their customers, ages before an issue is fixed..

BTW: ...to make the matter worse the Dutch translation is wrong. I want the English back. aaaaargh!!

So I filled in the support form on the Dutch store (which is in English) asking why they had replaced English with Dutch. I got this reply:

"Hello Mike,

I understand that you are wondering why the Netherland Store does not have an english language option. I can appreciate how eager you must be to get this issue resolved. My name is Jennifer and I am happy to assist you today.

Thank you for taking the time to contact Apple about improving iTunes. Apple recognizes that no one is better qualified to provide feedback about iTunes than the people who use it."

So are the going to do anything about it???

The reply that you received is very much scripted. I have also received responses from Apple with the same sort of content (in fact with the exact same last paragraph).

I think a first point would be, "are they going to answer your question". I would be nice even to know what the decision was and even that they are not going to do something about it. Then at least we would know what the policy was going forward.

Maarten van der Smagt wrote:
Just my 2 cents worth: I'm Dutch, live in NL but would prefer the store to adjust itself to OS/application language. I do no believe this should be too hard, since it seems the language change is based upon automatic translation anyway...

Remember the symphonic rock-band "Yes"? Do a search in the store for this band, then click on Yes under "Artiesten en meer" (artists and more?), and now you're in Muziek>Rock>Yes. Then you can click on "Bekijk Alles" next to Albums and here's what you get: "Albums van Ja" (ja being the Dutch translation of of the word yes). I would be LOL if it weren't so sad.

PS same story in French and Spanish stores 😉. Might even be better without a choice of language. Just keep it in plain English, since the translations are bad and often inappropriate.

Something else ironic: I am in fact trying to learn Dutch. A recommendation to me is to read children's books and I thought it would be useful to get a audio book from the iTunes library. Clicking on Kinderen en jongvolwassenen, I see 5 pages of audio books. Most of them are in English, the odd one or two are in German and even French - but none (that I can see) are in Dutch! In fact I have now been through most of the categories (in quick order) and cannot find a single Dutch audio book.

Now if Apple thought it so important to have their menus etc in Dutch, you would have thought that they would have provided some Dutch content.

Yep, I'm also frustrated by Apple in this case.
I'm Russian, work now in the Netherlands for some time and have account in the Dutch iTunes Store. But I don't know Dutch!
Give me chance to use the iTunes Store in English!!
I can understand that implementing all possible languages for store in particular country can be too much, because stores somehow country-specific. But give, at least, an option for English as widely accepted international language!

You may change he language of your OS but the iTunes Store itself will always use the native language of a certain country - no way o change that behaviour. Only if choosing a store in a bi-/tri-langual country (like Belgium) there will be a choice of languages that you may select.

No, this is crazy.
Before last iTunes store update (less than a month ago) it was possible to choose the language you want...
This is simply bad thinking from Apple, the result is that I'm not using the store anymore (as many other people) because I can't understand it.
It is very simple programming, it was possible before I don't see why not anymore...

Indeed. Before July or so, the Dutch store was in English (at least for my account). Then it suddenly changed without warning, and without the possibility of reverting back to English. From a colleague I heard that at first the Dutch store support team were not even aware of the change, but that it turned out to be a management decision. A, as we apparently all agree here in this forum, very bad one... 😉

Indeed this is ridiculus. I am a new user, I just got my MacBook and I wanted to setup Itunes account and I can't even do that - cause everything is in Dutch. Please, set up an English as universally allowed language in the countries. I don't understand why Japan has the option of using English AND Japanese and other countries don't?

Denica wrote:
Indeed this is ridiculus. I am a new user, I just got my MacBook and I wanted to setup Itunes account and I can't even do that - cause everything is in Dutch. Please, set up an English as universally allowed language in the countries. I don't understand why _Japan has the option of using English AND Japanese_ and other countries don't?

Which is a very good point... if they can have it then it should be available to all in whatever language they choose according to how their computer system is set up. It's bad enough that some websites automatically revert to the language of the country you are in using ones ip address instead of how ones computer system is set up.
I don't bother much with iTunes anymore and am looking at other places to buy.

I find it amazingly irritating and irresponsible of Apple that I can't change my iTunes language store.

I live in The Netherlands, but I don't want my store in Dutch. How is it possible that there's no way to change it to English? I finally decided to buy an iPod and start using all these features, but I'm already regretting my decision.

Does anyone know how I can change this?