AGR website comes up in Chinese

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I am using Chrome and it came up in Chinese. I switched to English, signed in, and back to Chinese. After a few minutes, I can see my AGR account in English.
 
I've not had it on Edge or Firefox. I just tried the address with "de" and "ru" substituted for "zh" and received "no such thing" screens.

Recent uses of AI have included false websites with substantial actual pages that have addresses close to the real ones, but unless this is meant to only be read by Chinese customers, that doesn't seem likely in this case.

"zh" is the code for Mandarin. Learn more at:

https://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/
 
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I'm having the same issue all of a sudden. Using Chrome, the main Amtrak site is in English, but when I click the signin link, it takes me to the page in Chinese. This concerns me, especially since the Amtrak site states they are for the United States and Canada only; why would there even be a version in Chinese.
Android phone. Do not use a VPN.
Has anyone figured out what's going on? I'm going to contact Amtrak, too.
 
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tmoore016 said:
I'm having the same issue all of a sudden. Using Chrome, the main Amtrak site is in English, but when I click the signin link, it takes me to the page in Chinese. This concerns me, especially since the Amtrak site started they are for the United States and Canada only; why would there even be a version in Chinese. I do not use a VPN. Has anyone figured out what's going on? I'm going to contact Amtrak, too.
Click to expand...
Same experience I had. Did lots of "cleaning" (history, cookies, etc) to get it to work correctly. Just checked this AM and it seems ok on Chrome.
Off topic: Got an email that AGR has reinstated that multi-factor authentication has been (re-) enabled.
 
tmoore016 said:
I'm having the same issue all of a sudden. Using Chrome, the main Amtrak site is in English, but when I click the signin link, it takes me to the page in Chinese. This concerns me, especially since the Amtrak site stated they are for the United States and Canada only; why would there even be a version in Chinese. I do not use a VPN. Has anyone figured out what's going on? I'm going to contact Amtrak, too.
Click to expand...
I cleared my cookies and cache from chrome, and it's working fine now. Still concerning.... I've never seen that happen before.
(Side note: Before I cleared cookies/cache and got chrome working, I realized that I could get to Guest Rewards from within the Amtrak app & there were no issues. Just a heads up if anyone sees this and is having issues with the website access.)
 
tmoore016 said:
I'm having the same issue all of a sudden. Using Chrome, the main Amtrak site is in English, but when I click the signin link, it takes me to the page in Chinese. This concerns me, especially since the Amtrak site states they are for the United States and Canada only; why would there even be a version in Chinese.
Android phone. Do not use a VPN.
Has anyone figured out what's going on? I'm going to contact Amtrak, too.
Click to expand...
(Boding mine.)
Amtrak's customer base is international. All the trains are in the US (except a handful that cross the Canadian border), but many passengers are foreign tourists.

Perhaps they are playing with some sort of automatic web site translation app and they are using China as a test case and hope Chinese-speaking tourist will become a large market? When they get it working, they may then expand to dozens of other languages (Spanish, French, Japanese, etc.)

Or maybe they off-shored or out-sourced web site development to a Chinese company who are doing most of their work in Mandarin so the English language skills of the programmers don't have to be as high? For example, making sure the web site does the right thing (which is not language dependent), then doing a final pass of QA by someone fluent in English to make sure the grammar and vocabulary are correct. Where ever they are having the web development done, it may be easier to find competent programmers who are not especially fluent in English.

Or perhaps there is just one developer who is fluent in Mandarin and found it much more efficient to develop in their native language and then translate back to English, but accidentally exported the Mandarin version?

BTW, you mention Canada. Most or all Canadian businesses have or are required to have bilingual web sites and documentation (English and French.) Our very small company had to do this when we created an application for a Canadian telephone company. It was not trivial, but wasn't too onerous, just something that had to be done. Two languages down, 3000 more to go!
 
FWIW, my Amtrak.com defaults to English and doesn't switch when I go to AGR.

I really don't think this comes from any malice or political infiltration. Likely just incompetence from the Amtrak tech side of things. Amtrak offers languages in English, Spanish, French, and Chinese, a pretty broad coverage of the world languages (maybe they should cover Hindi and Arabic if we want to go top 6). Notably, Spanish/French domains use espanol.amtrak.com and francais.amtrak.com, not es.amtrak.com and fr.amtrak.com to match the zh.amtrak.com nomenclature. Maybe differences in the way pages were setup has been defaulting to zh?

The pages are definitely written in English and autogenerated to some extent, and sloppy at that. I can see parts of the translated sites where the auto-translate gives up and defaults back to English.
Screenshot 2024-07-25 at 10.42.20 AM.png

There's a million other small complaints I have from the Amtrak.com site; this feels par for the course:
  • After I login I still have the option to fill out an AGR new account application. It's the left-most option to click under Guest Rewards
  • AGR should know I have their Mastercard already, but still promotes it to me like a new customer on every page in the AGR Overview page
  • I have never been able to have Amtrak.com keep me logged in; soon as I close the tab I need to log in again.
 
According to Babel the six most spoken languages in the world in decreasing order are:
  1. Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Arabic
  5. Hindi
  6. Bengali
I suspect the AGR site has a bug that causes it to not reconfigure to the language specified by the user from what I presume may be the default Chinese for it being the most used language in the world. Of course that in itself is a lazy (to put it mildly) way of doing things since Amtrak is not a worldwide anything. Its default should be English as that is the most used language in the US.

Often Hindi and Bengali are punted on in the Anglosphere (though it is changing) because of the relatively widespread English literacy among those that travel to the Anglosphere from the subcontinent.

Oddly enough I am pretty much a native speaker of 3, 5 and 6 since I have spoken all three since early childhood, but depending on who is counting for what purpose I have been counted as exclusive native speaker of any one of the three, So there is that too. My iPhone for example is configured with all three keyboards - English/US, Bengali and Hindi/Devnagari. Hindi in its Urdu form uses the Persian script which I can neither read nor write/type, but I can understand and speak the Urdu form of Hindi, basically more Persian root words rather than Sanskrit root words. Grammar and sentence construct is pretty much the same.
 
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jis said:
According to Babel the six most spoken languages in the world in decreasing order are:
  1. Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Arabic
  5. Hindi
  6. Bengali
I suspect the AGR site has a bug that causes it to not reconfigure to the language specified by the user from what I presume may be the default Chinese for it being the most used language in the world. Of course that in itself is a lazy (to put it mildly) way of doing things since Amtrak is not a worldwide anything. Its default should be English as that is the most used language in the US.

Often Hindi and Bengali are punted on in the Anglosphere (though it is changing) because of the relatively widespread English literacy among those that travel to the Anglosphere from the subcontinent.

Oddly enough I am pretty much a native speaker of 3, 5 and 6 since I have spoken all three since early childhood, but depending on who is counting for what purpose I have been counted as exclusive native speaker of any one of the three, So there is that too. My iPhone for example is configured with all three keyboards - English/US, Bengali and Hindi/Devnagari. Hindi in its Urdu form uses the Persian script which I can neither read nor write/type, but I can understand and speak the Urdu form of Hindi, basically more Persian root words rather than Sanskrit root words. Grammar and sentence construct is pretty much the same.
Click to expand...
But English is by far the most widely-spoken second language in the world, vaulting it into first place if the measure is total speakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers. (By contrast, relatively few people speak or read Mandarin Chinese as a second language, though it seems to be picking up popularity in schools.) Whom do we "thank?" The British Empire? Hollywood? Globalization? Yes.

As JIS demonstrates, there's just no substitute for picking up a language early, when childhood brains are like sponges. Somehow that "wiring" degrades swiftly so that even by U.S. middle school (typically ages 11-13) kids toil to learn basic vocabulary and syntax. And their accents, hopeless.
 
Either way, an App like AGR or Amtrak that is mostly used in the US has no justification to be set up with a default Chinese configuration.

As for mono-lingual vs. multi-lingual experience, there is much to be said, but all of it is out of scope in this thread.
 
jis said:
According to Babel the six most spoken languages in the world in decreasing order are:
  1. Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Arabic
  5. Hindi
  6. Bengali
Click to expand...
Interesting. I would have thought French would have made the list given that it is spoken in several countries in Africa as well as Canada and even places in the northern US, as well as Europe. Of course for Amtrak bring primarily aimed at people in North America it makes sense to have French as an option.
 
BlackDiamond said:
Interesting. I would have thought French would have made the list given that it is spoken in several countries in Africa as well as Canada and even places in the northern US, as well as Europe. Of course for Amtrak bring primarily aimed at people in North America it makes sense to have French as an option.
Click to expand...
French as second language is probably pretty high and definitely within the top 6. And indeed for the USA in particular and North America in general it would be English, Spanish and French if one had to choose three languages.
 
dlagrua said:
AGR still comes up in Chinese no matter what I do. I can choose English and still get Chinese. What the heck in happening? Amtrak is an American service. While people of all ethnicities use it, the main language here is still English.
Click to expand...
I am not having a problem with it myself. It comes up on the English language site, https://www.amtrak.com/guestrewards.html. I mostly use Chrome on a Windows 10 PC and on an Android phone.

Try clearing cache AND cookies.

Try a different browser. MS Edge is automatically installed on Windows computers, so it's there to try.

Try entering the full URL:
https://www.amtrak.com/guestrewards.html instead of just Amtrak.com to try and force it away from the zh version of the website.

This is unlikely, but if you use a VPN, verify you are using a US IP.

I disagree that Amtrak is intentionally defaulting to the zh.amtrak... version of the website or that it is an attack of some sort. All the discussion of how widely different languages are spoken is entirely beside the point. It is a technical glitch and that is all it is. Approach it as such. Amtrak's crack IT department may have zigged where it should have zagged and the detritis of that may be sticking around on your computer even after Amtrak corrected it.
 
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