I’m a regular user of imdb, when I notice an interesting actor or when I ponder if I should watch some film or not, I usually dig it up from IMDB. Now this actual incident is not very recent, but it has bugged me more than anything in a little while. Now in my opinion movies should, by default, be listed in their original title – and it has been like this for ages. During this autumn someone has had a brilliant idea to bring up the translated titles by default from imdb.
Let’s give an example, I was looking for some actor and his particular listing of movies looks like this:

This poses many problems. The biggest problem is that someone assumes all connections from Finland should want titles in Finnish! Next thing is, that if you buy a film ”Paavo Pesusieni” (or whatever translated animation / cartoon), there’s most likely a Finnish voice in place of this (even though, dvd’s propably always have the original soundtrack) and therefore this is error in listing. And it looks ugly too! Nevertheless, I found this very annoying, so annoying that I’ll write about it. What makes it worse, is that this usually brings up translations I’ve never heard of before! I mean, they could’ve put the site to listen for user-agents preference on language instead of some geo-ip policy, it’s not so hard?
Then again, I clearly wasn’t only one loosing hair over this and there is a solution to this problem, you can use http://akas.imdb.com/ and get the titles as they used to be. Which is my primary movie-source now 🙂