Lost in localisation

When you buy a book from Amazon.com, or use any online shopping website, you may need to fill in many pieces of information, including, among many things, a ZIP code. For many, this is an obvious thing to do, but for us the Hong Kongers, this is annoying, because Hong Kong has no ZIP codes.

Not every countries have ZIP codes. In fact, about 40% of all members of the Universal Postal Union have not. While the other 60% of countries may account for an overwhelming majority of the world's population, this doesn't change the fact that making ZIP code a requisite input item is in effect creating troubles to 40% of all countries in the world.

In computer science, the issue of making a piece of software to work differently for peoples of different countries or cultures is called localisation. Most uses of localisation are about language. For instance, in some computer games one can choose the language of the dialogues and/or subtitles in the main menus. But localisation may involve other considerations as well. In the above ZIP code example, what is causing problems is not language but the mandatory input of a number that does not exist in some countries.

Designing a properly localised software is hard, because this requires a deep understanding in different peoples, organisations, countries, systems or cultures. Just take the ZIP code as an example. So I tend not to blame the developer when I'm encountering problems in a poorly localised website. But still, these poorly websites can be annoying. Here are a few examples:

1. As mentioned in the above, why is everyone's address expected to have a ZIP code?
2. If your business is international, why do you call it 'ZIP code' (a USA term) instead of the more generic 'postal code'?
3. While web forms seldom force everyone to spell a middle name --- thankfully they don't --- but on some web pages, whenever your first name have more than one string tokens, they presume that one of these tokens is your first name and the others are middle names. For instance, if the evil dictator Mao Tse Tung wants to make a room reservation at Holiday Inn on King, he would have entered his first name as 'Tse Tung'. However, when he arrives at the hotel and looks at the receipt, he will learn that his name has been truncated to 'Tse', because those Western imperialists thought that 'Tung' is a middle name. This hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and their great navigator. So Toronto gets nuked.
4. Any native Hong Konger who looks at the Yahoo's Hong Kong map will probably cry 'WTF?!' See the above image of the map. Hint for foreigners: no sane local people will spell 'Hong Kong Island' as 'Xianggangdao'.
5. Well, this is an example that the act of localisation itself is annoying: a Chinese advertisement on an English webpage. Technically the webpage is very well localised --- it knows that I'm Chinese and so it feeds me a Chinese advertisement. But to be honest, how many people will expect something in their local languages if they want to visit a foreign website? This 'Chinese-advertisement-on-English-webpages' thing is just silly.

Have you experienced any of these or other localisation-related annoyances?

(Edited on Jan 13: for sake of readability, a large part of the original version is trimmed.)