Charity Website Needs to Watch Its Language

A charity website’s efforts to support children in need were seriously undermined when its donation pages mysteriously turned into a foreign language.

Goldach, SG (PRWEB) October 20, 2006 -- A charity website’s efforts to support children in need were seriously undermined when its donation pages mysteriously turned into a foreign language.

The website owner, Luzette Villareal operates www.artincolors.com a site on which all proceeds go to help an SOS Children’s Village and to Feed Malnourished Children.

Up until recently the donation pages for the website were in English and had reverted to German.

It was not until someone from Ethiopia wanted to make a donation did the problem come to light. The person wanting to make the donation could not, because they could not understand the German page being presented to them.

According to the charity website owner’s webmaster, the switch to presenting the sites payment pages in German had probably occurred at least 3 weeks before. That was as far as they could tell from another website affected by the same problem.

No changes had been made to the sites payment pages and they were being presented in English when they were first created.

A spokesperson for the website's payment processor, which has over 100 million accounts in 103 countries, said the problem was caused by the sites payment account being registered in Switzerland.

Why the charity website's pages were in German was also something of a mystery because Switzerland has three national languages, German, French and Italian and each is the main language in different parts of Switzerland.

Luzette Villareal of Artincolors said millions of people in Switzerland don’t understand German because their language is either French or Italian.

This raised another question - Why choose German just because the account is in Switzerland?

She went on to say "let’s suppose someone were running a business in China and wanted to accept payments from English speaking countries.

According to the payment processor's logic, because the account is based in China a customer’s initial payment page rather than being presented to them in English, would be presented to them by default, in Chinese."

For those people operating a website taking online payments using this major multinational payment processor, perhaps they need to watch their own language!

You can read the full story at :

http://www.webpageaddons.com/blog/

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