Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

I ran across the website of Lãngüagê Liñè (do they read Sam Ruby?), a telephone-based interpretation site in the UK, and poked around in their translations.

And I found a new low: Somali text turned into an image.

Now it is true that taking an image of text in an unfamiliar script and transcribing it is a pretty hard thing to do if you don’t know the language.

But.

Why would you turn text into images in a language whose alphabet only contains 20-odd roman letters with nary a solitary accent? Here’s a screenshot of the… er.. image:

Here’s the entire Somali alphabet:

The Somali latin alphabet is:
’, B, T, J, X, KH, D, R, S, SH, DH, C, G, F, Q, K, L, M, N, W, H, Y, A, E, I, O, U.

Yep, that’s it.

Were they worried that users’ fonts wouldn’t have apostrophes?

Now if you’re going to talk about a task like translating The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights into as many languages as possible, then you’re guaranteed to be dealing with some rather hard-to-input languages: Persian, or Dari, or Uighur or Urdu etc etc. And in fact as those links show, the text is only available (at the moment) as images.

Fortunately it seems that the UN site has has seen the error of its ways and is now actively soliciting the help of transcribers to get those images transcribed.

But good grief. It makes no sense whatsoever to use images for a language like Somali… this isn’t even localization… it’s just common sense.

(I don’t know why the Somali language is following me around the internet, but I’ve blogged about it before.)

HIGHLY SURREAL UPDATED EXAMPLE: Another example of images of text, ever so ironically found on Microsoft’s introduction to their input methods. (Insert cross-eyed smiley here.)

ANOTHER OFFENDER (thanks Chris): It seems this entire site about Chinese, interesting though it may be, is images. So much for blogging that.