ITunes Ping in English in Netherlands

Question

I am a foreigner living in Netherlands, connected to the iTunes store through a Netherlands credit card and an iPhone contract. I do not know Dutch quite well, and up to now, I could not find a decent way to show the iTunes store inside the application in English, but I was able to find my way somehow.
As Apple introduced iTunes Ping yesterday, I decided to give this new technology a try. The same problem with my iTunes store view persists in Ping: everything is in Dutch. For me, seeing Ping screens in Dutch is both inconsistent with the rest of the GUI and way harder to use. Is there any way out of this? Can I use the Dutch iTunes store, Ping and other services in English?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm a Dutch guy living in Germany, a country full of non German speaking migrants and expats. Same problem here. I actually speak some German but I prefer English and I most definitely am not even remotely interested in buying German dubbed content that used to be in English via fully Germanized UI. Hence I'm not a paying customer on iTunes even though the US version of store has plenty of stuff I could be spending money on.
Apple, and many other companies, plain don't understand localization issues. I've seen web sites assume wrongly that I speak Finnish or German and ignoring all indications I can possibly give that I want to be addressed in English. Earlier today I saw Google make this assumption: in a fully US-en localized gmail it managed to play the promo movie for priority inbox in German.
Allow me to spell out the business case for Apple and others:
1) Automatic localization based purely on location (IP address based or otherwise) is likely to get it wrong quite often (think double digit percentages in some country). If you don't offer alternative localizations or make switching localization very hard, you are pretty much slamming the door shut in the face of a potentially paying customer.
2) The world is full of native and non native English speakers living in pretty much any country on the globe. For a US based company, that is a large group of potential customers that can be reached that are now forced to deal with your service in a language they may not even speak.
3) Apple has loads of English content, which barring licensing issues could be sold/served to people outside the US as well.
4) Many English speaking expats are in the "wealthy, willing to spend loads of whatever the local currency is" category. These people are extremely likely to be over represented in your sales stats. If only you could reach them.
5) Many non native English speaking expats (like me) actually do speak English pretty well. I actually prefer English localized over the usually quite awkward Dutch/German/whatever translations used in many web sites.
6) Many countries have large communities where English and secondary official languages are widely spoken. For example 5% of the Finnish population is Swedish speaking and Finland has a quite sizable expat community where English is widely used. In Germany, there are quite a few migrant minorities from e.g. Turkey or Russia (100K+ here in Berlin) in addition to the many expats from US, UK, etc.
7) Failing to address people in the correct language alienates them. They might never come back even when you finally do figure out how to do things properly.