rtotheich
New member
TellMe already recognizes German, French and Italian. That is by far the most challenging engineering task, but it is already completed, at least as far as Switzerland is concerned.
In regard to Local Scout, well, the button to launch Local Scout simply doesn't exist in WP. You can't even start it. You are likely correct that this is due to a lack of data (although Microsoft does have more than nothing). Interestingly, Nokia has more than enough data for all of Europe, but they apparently haven't merged their POI databases. I was under the impression that Microsoft and Nokia were going to merge ALL their mapping data, but as of yet it hasn't happened. Anyway, none of this requires bilingual engineers. Most junior developers could get this job done.
This is a fair point. However, what I meant to say is that some location data doesn't exist at the present moment for other reasons:
Go to an old restaurant located in a historic location in a small town or a souvenir shop located inside a Swiss Chateau. These people have no desire to BE on local scout and probably don't want to be included in yellowpages or wherever Siri pulls from. It's this kind of thing that prevents restaurants from showing up, not just the fact that nobody has implemented them. Many other places in the world don't have or have any interest in Foursquare, Yelp, or similar services for a variety of reasons. Parisian Bars on the Champs-Elys?e are already flooded with tourists and featured in every guidebook and maybe they don't want a bunch of random reviewers changing that. Much of the time, it just doesn't match the culture. I studied in Morocco last semester and there literally isn't support for Foursquare there. The restaurant owners who have places located in the center of the medina where cars can't go certainly have no interest in photos of their restaurant appearing on some website whose main audience isn't people who speak their language.
When searching for something will definitely yield no results or inaccurate results, you have two options: One is to slap the BETA or Unfinished product label in the header and the other is to completely disable the feature until it is good enough so that it won't cause problems or crash the device, which could happen when reviews are being written in two langauges and appear next to each other.
The idea behind 'localization' is that it requires much more than programming and simple execution. It requries accurate display of the right information when you want it without hassle and the explicit permission of the owner of the establishment as well as several country-specific bureaucraties. This isn't something that amateur devs can complete on their own.
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