MySpace Latino Has Language Issues

Filed in archive Latin Culture on April 30, 2007

So, MySpace went Spanish. I thought I'll give it a try. I had never used MySpace before, and let me tell you: the user interface is not as intuitive as you would expect - or maybe I'm really dumb, but let's blame it on MySpace, ok? ;)

You can check my profile here. Fell free to leave comments or add me as a friend.

I've spent the entire morning trying to customize the layout. I did everything wrong, until I figured out how it works. It was hard even to find a nice pre-made layout; most of the layouts available on the web are too cluttered and colorful, and not really suited for text reading. After a few hours browsing, I was really tired and fed up. Luckily, I finally found a simple green layout. It's easy in the eyes, and it will do for now.

I've already found a couple of annoying things in "MySpace en Español". First, there are some ridiculous translations. For instance, in the Friend Space, you can read: "Eliane ha 1 amigos", or "Eliane there is 1 friends". The Friend Space is translated as "ElianeEspacio de amigo de" or "ElianeSpace of friends of". There are several language mistakes through the whole site. I've even seen troubles with accentuated characters, which is unacceptable in a Spanish site.

C'amon, people, this is a really, really poor job. How can you say your goal is to "build communities that reflect and respect the lifestyles of our diverse members", and just slap an automatic translation in a website that will be used by millions of people? The Beta status is no excuse for lame errors like those.

As Vivir Latino points out, the entire interface is in Spanish. And you can't see it in English; if you change the language, you're taken to MySpace.com, instead of Latino.MySpace.com. So, if you're an English speaking Latino, you won't get access to MySpace Latino - or MySpace Latinoamérica, for that matter.

As far as I can see, MySpace is providing a poor service to Spanish speaking Latinos, and no service to English speaking Latinos. Anyway, I'll stick around for a while, and see how it goes. I still have to update my profile.

What do you think about MySpace Latino?