We Say It Your Way

Customers today expect to use their phones in their own languages. That expectation is uncommon in most other forms of information technology, and it may well derive from the fact that some major players in the mobile phone business emerged from small-language countries. It also stems from the design decision to make mobile phones easy-to-access consumer products rather than specialized pieces of high technology. Today, it’s no longer possible to conquer the world without localization.

Good localization takes many issues into account, some of which are contradictory—everything displayed must fit on screen, terms should be familiar to users, terms should be used consistently across the software and software manuals, abbreviations should be avoided, and the grammatical rules of each language should be scrupulously obeyed.

English is one of the shortest languages, and accordingly most software design is done in English—the corporate language. Translating texts into languages like German or Finnish, though, may result in significantly longer words. Sometimes a language also requires a different construct using more words than the comparable English expression. Squeezing all essential information into a translation can be quite a battle, complicated by the fact that layout style will be a function of text length. (See Figure 2.9 for a comparison of menu items in nine different languages.)

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Figure 2.9: There can be radical differences in the appearance and length of texts that are translated into many languages.

The driving principle in localization is respect for the language of the users. Expression is permitted to take the space it needs (within limits), and the UI structure has to be flexible enough to tolerate this. One-line menu items may be preferred in general, but if one line does not provide enough space for full expression of content, even if that’s true only in some of the languages supported, designers will accede multiple lines. Acronyms are not accepted, and technical terms are used only if there are no corresponding expressions in common parlance.

The software platform for any mobile phone must support the characters and diacritical marks used in all target languages. Some writing systems have character sets completely different from the Latin character set, and a few languages require the ability to draw text from right to left. An internationalized software environment is needed, an environment that allows applications to be translated into all intended languages. Creating one can be a challenging task, though. Many existing platforms have only limited support for languages with requirements very different from those in English.

That said, software support may not be enough. Languages such as Chinese have input requirements so specific that they can significantly influence product concepts. This sort of disparity may help explain why, for example, some parts of the world like pen-based UIs while keypad-based interactions are solidly preferred elsewhere.

Localization was a nonissue in Apollo’s case. Everybody involved spoke English, anyway. Well, actually, human language had no relevance to the design of diskey as it defined a language of its own, a completely artificial language optimized for its own comprehension. Today localization is a major part of the work of developing consumer products. In the Nokia classic category phones, for example, the number of different display texts approaches 2000 for each language. To translate them all into tens of languages, following localization guidelines and ensuring that all translations are ready when the product ships, is the larger part of UI implementation work in product programs. (For a case study of localization during UI style creation, turn to Chapter 8.) Figure 2.10 shows the countries with currently localized languages.

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Figure 2.10: World map illustrating all areas with currently localized languages.



Mobile Usability(c) How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
ISBN: 0071385142
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 142

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