🚀 go-pugleaf

Here are more consolidated answers to the original questions from
Rene J. Valdes (Rene.J.Valdes@cdc.com):

     The obvious assumption appears to be that all software is created in
     English (hopefully in an internationalized reference version) and then
     localized into other languages.  Isn't really anybody localizing into
     English?  Isn't anybody developing software where the original
     (reference) version is in German, French, Japanese, etc. and the
     product is then localized for English?

Jeff
INSOFT-L List Manager

*========================================================================*
 Jeff Bowyer                         EMail:
 Computing Center		     jbowyer@cis.vutbr.cz
 Technical University of Brno
 Udolni 19, 602 00 BRNO
 Czech Republic
*========================================================================*


Sender: Richard E. Birch (richard_birch.wgc1@rx.xerox.com)
        Senior Translation Systems Specialist
        Customer Business Services, Rank Xerox Technical Centre

At Xerox we have to put into our markets products created by Fuji Xerox in
Japan.  Localisation of these products has some interestingly unique features.
These come off the top of my head:

1.	Sometimes problems can be encountered with expansion space for the
*ENGLISH* version if the product was not originally designed for the
multinational market (Kanji can be even more compact than English!).  Of
course, this leads to much greater problems for other languages.
2.	The Japanese UIs sometimes contain cute, automated graphic images such
as flowers, little men performing tasks, faces, etc.  which are often removed
for Western markets.
3.	Japanese instructional text can sometimes appear very wordy to the
western mind.   There is less use made of icons and graphics than in English.
4.	Japanese menus can sometimes be very long, narrow lists of Kanji
characters.  I presume that this is because it is easier to scan Kanji than
long lists of words in western languages, since it is very much more
graphic-like than non-ideographic script.
5.	Japanese screens can sometimes appear quite busy to the western eye.
Quite a lot of information gets packed in to them.
6.	Dictionary lookup in Japanese does not lend itself to simple one-word
lookup systems, since there are no spaces in Japanese.
7.	Because there are no spaces in Japanese, word wrapping tends to be
achieved by the insertion of hard carriage returns.  This can be problematic
for the segmentation of text which is to be handled by source matching
(repetitions), update change analysis or machine translation software.

One more, less serious point.  (This is NOT a problem we have with Fuji Xerox!)
Often the Japanese prefer to keep translation 'in-house'.  I have even heard
that native English translators have had their translations corrected by
Japanese, because it "didn't sound right".  So, in Japan, you can often see
English like this choice passage someone just now pointed out on the cover of
my wedding photos:
"Kitamura!  We are thinking that 'How to management' is more important than
'What for sell'.  we want to realize that is 'It's well that!' that is our
opinion."


Sender: David Gee <DAVID13@bkmain.east-london.ac.uk>

With some software it would be useful to localise from US English to
UK English. !!! There are many manuals with US specific metaphors.
The best example is Microsoft Words macro's which have not been