This made me smile, but it highlights a point. It’s not just about internationalisation and translation. Localisation is important too.
Localisation, or should I say localization
It’s a screen shot from a list of features on the Woo Themes web site. Available in American and UK English.
Those translation articles are on their way …
Sencha is one of my favourite teas and I recently bought this particular variety of tea.
I don’t read Japanese but I’m willing to take a guess that this is a pretty direct translation from Japanese to English. I think this is a smart choice of using very little Latin script on the export version of their tea.
In this instance, for me, the fact that I don’t read Japanese adds something to the product. Not understanding the language actually lends authenticity to the product.
It’s a bit like opera. I don’t want to understand what the cast are singing about, I’m content just to listen to the beautiful sounds they are making. I can make out the story from the context and visual cues.
Had the manufacturer chosen to remove all of the Japanese writing from their products for sale in Europe and only use Latin scripts then I think their tea brand would appear less valuable.
I discovered these pictograms cards on Flickr the other day and their creator Michael Rowley has been kind enough to let me use the images for this post.
When I first saw them, I was struck at how they opened up written Japanese to someone like me who has only dabbled in spoken Japanese in the past and can say a few words. If your mother tongue is written in a latin script you usually have to make a choice about how much of an Asian language you want to learn. Are you happy just to learn speaking and comprehension or do you want to go the whole way and learn to read and write.
Their excellent design unlock some of the building blocks of the Japanese language making it easy to take a first step in learning to read Japanese.
As a European, the further east you travel, the less likely you are to be able to communicate and find your way around. While in Europe you’ll still be able to read most of the languages and figure out place names and read numbers etc.
Once you step into the Middle East that changes and continues to change until you exit Japan heading East for the USA.
What is so great about the cards is the way that Michael has used an image to bridge the gap between the word in both languages.
If you fancy trying your hand at some Japanese you can find out more from Michael’s site at www.vizcabualry.com
I took a picture of this plaque while staying in the Estonian village of Käsmu. It’s in Estonian and English and the circular design lends itself perfectly to this bi-lingual sign. The symbol in the middle feels vaguely Celtic and it screams heritage trail, but in a good way.
I found it on the door of a chapel which was being used to house a photo exhibition of all the people in the village.
Käsmu was originally populated mostly by sea captains and has some wonderful wooden houses, but during the Soviet era the sea was fenced off and the seafaring industry went into decline. It’s now been revitalised as a tourist village and a haven for writers and artists.
I can’t help feeling it would have looked a bit better like this though… oops
Nowadays, it is very common for part of the content of a web site to have been created and published by someone other than the owner web site. For example, the content of many question and answer fora is almost exclusively created by the users themselves.
The volume of comments on the most popular newspapers and blogs will easily outstrip the word count of the original article written by the paid journalist. Any site owner can add continually updating streams of photographs and news to which others freely contribute and which appear on our Web sites automatically.
And then of course, there is online advertising. Placement of advertising used to be a very controlled. But since any web site owner can now publish adverts irrespective of the amount of readers they have, the number of sites carrying adverts has mushroomed. Now that anyone can carry ads, the whole process has been largely automated.
Our first example is not going to win any design awards, but I’ve picked it because it highlights some of the basic interesting points to consider in multi-lingual design.
It’s a small sign on the main door of a major Belgian department store in Brussels which most shoppers probably don’t even register consciously. It uses four languages; French, Dutch, German and English respectively. And here it is.
Using four languages is slightly unusual here as most signs in Brussels are bi-lingual (Dutch / French), but the most interesting feature of this sign is that they have used flags to indicate which section of text relates to which language. This is probably because the text of the sign is translated into four languages and the use of non-text elements helps the reader to quickly identify which section of the sign is “their” bit.
But we often see flags used on bi-lingual and multi-lingual Web sites to help a reader pick the language in which they want to use the Web site so it’s not an unusual design technique.
If you enjoyed the post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed.
© 2008 TypeBased. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Design by 
