Just for fun: Retail demo user names in Windows 10
Some time ago, I went to all the locales I could find and extracted the sample names that are used to help you set up an account.
Just for fun, I’ll do the same for the name used by the fictitious account used by the retail demo experience. This special mode is used when a computer is set up on a sales floor and runs an attract loop.
Locale | English name | Name |
---|---|---|
ar-sa | Arabic | فؤاد حلبي |
bg-bg | Bulgarian | Owen May |
ca-es | Catalan | Darrin DeYoung |
cs-cz | Czech | Zdeněk Benda |
da-dk | Danish | Mathias Kjeldsen |
de-de | German | Detlef Wagner |
el-gr | Greek | Γιάννης Λάμπρος |
en-gb | English (UK) | Owen May |
en-us | English (US) | Darrin DeYoung |
es-es | Spanish (Spain) | Luis Serna |
es-mx | Spanish (Mexico) | Darío Díaz |
et-ee | Estonian | Owen May |
fi-fi | Finnish | Pentti Hietalahti |
fr-ca | French (Canada) | Fabrice Lacroix |
fr-fr | French (France) | Gilbert Beaulieu |
he-il | Hebrew | Owen May |
hr-hr | Croatian | Owen May |
hu-hu | Hungarian | Lovas Mihály |
id-id | Indonesian | William Sutaji |
it-it | Italian | Enrico Pisani |
ja-jp | Japanese | 古林翔 |
ko-kr | Korean | 임대종 |
lt-lt | Lithuanian | Owen May |
lv-lv | Latvian | Owen May |
nb-no | Norwegian (Bokmål) | Magnus Ekeli |
nl-nl | Dutch | Frank Reuser |
pl-pl | Polish | Roman Górski |
pt-br | Portuguese (Brazil) | Guilherme Rodrigues |
pt-pt | Portuguese (Portugal) | Gabriel Cunha |
ro-ro | Romanian | Ștefan Șaguna |
ru-ru | Russian | Никита Смирнов |
sk-sk | Slovak | Owen May |
sl-si | Slovene | Owen May |
sr-latn-rs | Serbian | Owen May |
sv-se | Swedish | Viktor Larsson |
th-th | Thai | ชยนต์ คงไพศาล |
tr-tr | Turkish | Cem Kaya |
uk-ua | Ukrainian | Owen May |
vi-vn | Vietnamese | Trần Đức |
zh-cn | Chinese (PRC) | 宋冬 |
zh-tw | Chinese (Taiwan) | 劉冠宇 |
I don’t know why Owen May is used for so many locales.
11 comments
Is the “English name” column supposed to be “Language name”?
It’s the English name of the locale. For instance, the English name of “de-de” is “German” (while the Swedish name would be “Tyska” and the German name “Deutsch”).
If I were to give a Chinese name to someone, I wouldn’t call them 宋冬. It sounds too much like 送终.
All of the names seem to be male, although I couldn’t be sure about the Japanese. I mean Sho Kobayashi? I got nothin’.
Who is Owen May? 🙂
I mean, it seems some languages have no “localized” names and I’m curious why…
Maybe he’s related to James May, but enjoys computers instead of cars.
> I mean, it seems some languages have no “localized” names and I’m curious why
It’s because you only have that much languages available for RetailDemo language packs.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/customize/desktop/retail-demo-experience#add-retail-demo-mode-including-language-packs-to-your-images
I wonder if there is any correlation with how complete the localization is and if there is a custom demo user name. Some are full localizations, while others have a base language they fall back to.
That may explain the prevalence of “Owen May”, although I’d expect fallback to en-us, not en-gb. It’s certainly not a typical Hebrew name.
For most of the world, falling back to en-US is inconventient. Americans use the Imperial system, write their dates in the month-first style, use the U.S. Letter paper, don’t use the negative sign in currency. Most of the world would rather use metric, day-first dates, A4 papers, and the negative sign for currency. Besides, most of the world teaches en-GB in school as “International English”.
Also, what I said is one of the reasons for the unpopularity of Microsoft Store apps here. They don’t stick to the locale. (While we’re at it, they don’t stick to any principle.) At least, the Weather app is nice enough to ask whether I prefer Celcius over Farenheit.
At one software company I worked, there was a release form where you could grant the company the right to use your name fictitiously in documentation and marketing stuff. Lots of people signed the releases because, back then, it was still fun to see your name in print. Sometimes your name would be turned into a business name, like R. Chen Translation Services.
I have a couple friends who write scripts for television, including sitcoms. Whether they were naming an actual on-screen character or just a passing reference to somebody’s cousin, the name was run by the studio legal department for “clearance.” They used several criteria, including how common the name is.
(Back in the 90s was still largely determined by looking in several metropolitan phone books.) If only a few people have that name, then there’s increased risk somebody with that name might try to sue for defamation (despite all the disclaimers about the work being fiction). If lots of people shared the name, then it would probably clear. The writers would often tease each other by planting their colleagues’ names in jokes. Lucky for my friends, their names didn’t clear.