No hacemos que hables inglés
A couple of months ago, I was chatting to a taxi driver when he told me that some recent ‘fares’—I think that’s what you call a taxi driver’s customers—had told him off for speaking Spanish, and for not knowing their language. (To keep the record straight, I should say that they weren’t English.) I would hate any reader of this blog to suppose that an attitude like this informed my earlier post on Internet Explorer, or Brenda’s comment on PayPal.
I myself think that if you settle in a country, the least you can do is learn the language. It’s just normal good manners. It’s fun. And for a hard-headed bottom line: if I were involved in a road accident, how would I explain to the police what had happened if my Spanish wasn’t up to it?
No, what we were both objecting to was the high-handedness (you could call it “paternalism”) of huge multi-national companies based in an English-speaking country. The attitude seems to be, ‘If you’re stuck in this place, you must want to speak the place’s language. We’re certainly not going to ask you if you’d prefer to speak English, like us.’
At least PayPal offer the option of “US English” on their Spanish site. (Odd that, in itself. I myself know only a couple of Americans who have settled here.) Microsoft just invaded my computer without asking—and I still don’t know how to get the original English version back.