Google Maps

Tokyo is back. A couple of weeks ago I was looking at Japan with Google Maps and all the English place names had been replaced with Japanese. That made it useless to me. I just went and checked to see if anything had changed, and now they have both English and Japanese names, at least for the bigger cities. It is very cluttered looking now with all the Japanese names appearing. Perhaps if I was able to read Japanese I would not mind so much, but I don't.


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What would be really nice is if they would allow you to select your preferred language, or maybe for our linguists out there, a list of languages that you can deal with. I know a few words of Spanish and French, but I am not really fluent in either one. I would just as soon restrict my viewing to the one language I can understand: English.

On a related note, I noticed that the largest percentage of users of Orkut, Google's personal link-up system, are from Brazil, something over 50%. Great for Brazil. Not exacting encouraging for English speakers.