As a native English speaker, I tend to accept the Americanisms on the internet and will instinctively ignore anything on a web page offering alternative languages. British English (or ‘English’, as I like to call it) is hardly a localisation priority if your site already has a US English translation that everyone can read, right?
Poking through the Gmail settings today I stumbled across the new language choices. ‘English (United States)’ it reads by default. That text seemed curiously precise so I clicked and to my delight there’s an ‘English (British)’ translation. The difference? That ghastly word ‘Trash’ is replaced by a far more elegant ‘Deleted Items’. It’s a small but glorious enhancement that I’d recommend to English speakers of all flavours.
That said, I’ve had a dislike for the word ‘trash’ since childhood days of Sesame Street, so my passion on the matter is maybe not a surprise.
Update: It appears that if you choose British rather than American, you lose the improved ‘show images’ functionality that Gmail introduced last month.
Rather than the new ‘green’ bar, with the option to always show images from particular senders, the British English setting reverts back to the old ‘grey’ bar without the ability to remember your choice. Stranger still, addresses that I’d authorised to always show images are only remembered when Gmail is in US English, so you can’t even work around the shortcoming by temporarily switching between the languages. Very odd.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.