For whatever reasons (mostly intertia, I would imagine), the languages which are most associated with vertical text, Chinese and Japanese, are written horizontally on the web.
But vertical text may be becoming a reality down the road.
At Unicode.org, there is an interesting illustrated pdf UTN #22: Robust Vertical Text Layout. It goes into gruesome detail about how vertical text can be arranged, how scripts are combined, and so on.
The consequences for CSS and the web are pretty broad. For one thing, it will allow content in the Yi and Mongolian scripts to make their way onto the web for the first time.
Another possibility is that we will see a resurgence in vertical text in the well-known languages Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
(Thanks to Brion VIBBER for pointing this out to me.)
An interesting post on the perils of translating company names into Chinese by John Biesnecker:
Intimate geeks
After we chose the computer we wanted at Best Buy, we were directed to the “Geek Squad” service center where they tested our machine and made sure that everything was to our liking. “Geek Squad” was translated as 贴心电脑服务, or “intimate computer service,” a difference that I believe shows how much Best Buy invested in market research before opening their first store in Shanghai. …
[via Google…fails me? - the school of hard VOX]
Update:
Chris Waigl clears it up
in a comment: the tool seems to have a limit on how long the input can be. Interesting. By the way, this post was meant in good fun; I have great respect for Google’s MT, and MT in general… it’s no simple task.
Here’s a challenge:
Someone at a blog called WRITE-UP OF THE DAY is translating… something. Chinese, apparently, to judge by a couple posts with glossaries.
But there are no links to originals.
Here’s the challenge: can you figure out if the original is online somewhere?
(Incidentally, I haven’t, yet…)
I just discovered that WordPress.com , a blogging host, has feeds for tag searches.
The tag Translation turns up some interesting results… like this one:
Picasa’s bad translation « Thailicious
I wonder who Google hires for Thai language extension/ interface translation. Is he/she/it a human at all? Could it be the computer that does all this work for Google all along?
Personally I’m inclined to give Google a little leeway on localization problems — they’ve done a lot more than most companies in the way of making their content available in many languages.
But it’s a good thing that Thailicious is pointing out the problem — the most important question is how responsive a process they have in place for getting problems fixed. I hope somebody at the Googleplex who works on Picassa takes note of that blog post.
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