Ordinary Gweilo

Phil is complaining that eBay’s new Hong Kong site is all in Chinese, following the example set by Yahoo Hong Kong, which dropped its English version a couple of years ago.

It is a significant overhead to maintain systems in multiple languages, and one major difference between Hong Kong and Singapore is that here there is a much greater determination to use Chinese wherever possible. Two Chinese Singaporeans talking to each other in the workplace will very likely use English, whereas Hong Kong Chinese would almost certainly use Cantonese. Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong is more Chinese than Singapore.

If I am looking for some information on the Internet, I have got used to a Hong Kong site of a multinational company either having no English at all or only a subset of what is in Chinese. Multi-language sites are sometimes very frustrating to use – for example, after I sign on to Netvigator it displays information in Chinese and I have to re-select English (it doesn’t remember either that I selected English on the first page or that this user prefers English).

Many standard letters and bills from the government, utilities, banks, credit card companies and similar are bi-lingual, which works well in my household (although my wife is fluent in English she still prefers to use Chinese). Now the Inland Revenue have changed their approach, and send you correspondence in one language. My wife was complaining that they had chosen English for her, which is fine for me because I can understand the letters, but not ideal for her. One subtle variation on this is if we are planning to go to the cinema we display the English and Chinese websites alongside each other and discuss which films to go and see.

Most phone response systems work fairly well, and there is even a standard that you press ‘1’ for Cantonese, ‘2’ for English, and ‘3’ for Putonghua, though in my experience if you eventually get through to a real person they greet you in Cantonese regardless of the language you selected! However, that is only a very minor complaint, because the conversation then switches to English without any problem. One minor frustration I have experienced a few times is with trying to set up my mobile phone for voicemail etc. Each time I switched to a new provider, I found myself trying to navigate through the system in Cantonese in order to find the option to change the language to English. The catch being that if you can’t understand Cantonese (or find someone who does) you can’t change the language to English!