You can measure the size of a bank based on how many different languages it offers for ATM transactions.
Bank of the West, which has branches only in California, offers three languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese.
This screen seems to suggest that idioma is the Spanish word for "language". However a dictionary search says that that word is Spanish for "list of languages". But that doesn't quite make sense here since the customer isn't being asked to choose a list. What is Spanish for "idiom"? That would be idiotismo, which looks to me like it should mean "small idiot".
Bank of America, which is one of the largest banks in the US, offers ATM services in 7 languages (I am assuming Cancel is not a language):
And Wells Fargo, one of the other largest banks in the US, offers its ATM services in 8 languages:
Look at the last row: what is the language Hmoob? I never heard of that before. I found out later that it is the name of the language of the Hmong people from southeast Asia. More precisely, Hmoob is how the Hmong write "Hmong" in Hmong, in the same way that "Deutsch" is how Germans write "German" in German. There is a large Hmong community in California.
OK, let's see what Wells Fargo makes their screen look like in Russian:
Here I'm entering my PIN-code (PIN-код). In the bottom box, what is the purpose of saying in English that the ATMs speak Russian? It seems superfluous at this point.
Next comes the option for choosing your account (счет):
Well that's silly: while the Russians keep "PIN" in "PIN-код", they don't write Checking as "Checking".
At the end of the transaction, the screen essentially gives up any pretense of primarily using non-English.
Bank of the West, which has branches only in California, offers three languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese.
This screen seems to suggest that idioma is the Spanish word for "language". However a dictionary search says that that word is Spanish for "list of languages". But that doesn't quite make sense here since the customer isn't being asked to choose a list. What is Spanish for "idiom"? That would be idiotismo, which looks to me like it should mean "small idiot".
Bank of America, which is one of the largest banks in the US, offers ATM services in 7 languages (I am assuming Cancel is not a language):
And Wells Fargo, one of the other largest banks in the US, offers its ATM services in 8 languages:
Look at the last row: what is the language Hmoob? I never heard of that before. I found out later that it is the name of the language of the Hmong people from southeast Asia. More precisely, Hmoob is how the Hmong write "Hmong" in Hmong, in the same way that "Deutsch" is how Germans write "German" in German. There is a large Hmong community in California.
OK, let's see what Wells Fargo makes their screen look like in Russian:
Here I'm entering my PIN-code (PIN-код). In the bottom box, what is the purpose of saying in English that the ATMs speak Russian? It seems superfluous at this point.
Next comes the option for choosing your account (счет):
Well that's silly: while the Russians keep "PIN" in "PIN-код", they don't write Checking as "Checking".
At the end of the transaction, the screen essentially gives up any pretense of primarily using non-English.
