Numbers the way your language writes them, and local overtime rules

A reader in Germany typed 1,234 into the percentage calculator, asked for 50% of it, and got 617. In German, 1,234 is one point two three four, so the answer should have been 0,617. The same thing happened on the Portuguese horsepower converter: 1,234 hp came out as 920 kW instead of about 0,92. The pages spoke the reader’s language and wrote their results with a decimal comma, but they read what was typed with English rules.

That is fixed today, across every calculator. Here is what changed, and two other things we found while looking.

What you type is read the way the page writes

On a page in a language that writes a decimal comma (German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Indonesian), the rules are now the page’s own:

• 1,234 is one point two three four, and 1,5 is one and a half.
• 1.234 is one thousand two hundred and thirty-four, exactly as the page itself would print it. To enter one point two three four, type 1,234.
• 1.234,56 is 1234.56.
• A value pasted from an English source, 1,234.56, still reads as 1234.56, because its last separator is a dot, and 1,234,567 can only be grouping.

English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Thai pages keep the rules they always had. Values the site fills in itself, such as the number in a page address like /hp-to-kw/1.5/, a preset or a saved calculation, are stored as plain numbers and are never re-read as text, so nothing you saved last week changes meaning. If you switch languages, your saved inputs are carried over with the language they were typed in and converted, not misread.

Overtime, by the law where you live

The Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese overtime calculators used to be the American tool in translation: time and a half by default, dollar examples, and an explanation of the US Fair Labor Standards Act. Each now starts from its own statutory premiums, with examples in its own currency and a plain statement of which law the numbers come from.

• Japan: the legal minimum of 25% for overtime, 35% for work on a statutory rest day, 50% beyond 60 hours a month, and the night-work additions, from the Labour Standards Act article 37. The hint on the hourly rate explains how to turn a monthly salary into an hourly one.
• Mainland China: 150% on a working day, 200% on a rest day without compensatory leave, 300% on a statutory holiday, from the Labour Law article 44, with the 21.75-day month used to convert a salary.
• Taiwan: the 1.34 and 1.67 multipliers for the first two and the next two hours of weekday overtime, double pay on national holidays, the 46-hour monthly cap, and the tax exemption for overtime within legal hours, from the Labor Standards Act article 24.

The calculator still applies one multiplier at a time, and the pages say so: a four-hour Taiwanese weekday overtime is two hours at 1.34 and two at 1.67, or a custom 1.505.

Trip time in kilometres, with a trip you know

The trip time calculator used to greet every reader with 300 miles at 60 mph and the American interstate as its example. In all 15 languages other than English it now starts in kilometres and km/h, the speed hint is in km/h, and the first preset is a drive from that country: Rome to Naples, Tokyo to Nagoya, Taipei to Kaohsiung, Berlin to Hamburg, Paris to Lyon, São Paulo to Rio, Seoul to Busan, and so on. The explanations use that country’s motorway limit to suggest a realistic average, and the worked examples are metric, checked by the test suite like every other example on the site.

A smaller one: which grade scale is this?

The Thai test score calculator turns “68 out of 75” into a percentage and a letter grade. The letters follow the common American scale (A from 90%, B from 80%, and so on), not Thailand’s 4.0 system, and the page now says so next to the setting, so a student can read the percentage and apply their own school’s table.

If a page in your language still reads or writes a number in a way that is not how your country does it, the feedback link in the footer reaches us directly.