I booked my flight to Australia online via Jetstar. Using amazing high-tech IP-geolocation techniques, Jetstar figured out that I was in Japan and decided to treat me to its Japanese-language site. Fair enough; but if you're going to foist off your localized site, you ought to make sure you get it right.

And Jetstar didn't quite. The most egregious example was their confirmation email, which started like this:

Imagining for a moment that I am Japanese (Jetstar did, so why can't you?), the use of my first name followed by the Hiragana "sama" is really out of place. As a customer, I'd expect my last name (Ginstrom) to be properly written in Japanese characters (ジンストロム), followed by the Kanji character for "sama" (様).

Although the use of the first name is fairly widespread in the English-speaking world, it's a big no-no with customer communication in Japanese.

A word about templates

The problem stems from the use of templates for emails and dynamic Web pages. I imagine that the original email template went something like this:

Where "$name" will be replaced dynamically from the database with the first name.

The site developers must have just passed off this template to be translated. The translator has no control over what gets written for the "$name" value, which the computer is going to fill in with "Ryan," or more normally, "Hanako" or "Taro." The translator, faced with a no-win situation, probably opted for the hiragana "sama" (さま) because it looks less strange with a first name in Roman characters than the Kanji "sama" (様) would.

Localization isn't (just) translation

What they needed to do was modify the template so that the last name of the customer would be entered in Kanji. This would have made it possible to create a proper Japanese-language email template. Whether Jetstar failed to do this out of ignorance or cheapness (not wanting to incur the development costs), it's still a localization fail.