> I wrote to the person from Google suggesting (amongst other things) that
> as part of their i-mode gateway they provide machine translation for
> Japanese sites (as Excite does for normal web sites). The brief nature of
> the text on i-mode sites would be more suitable for machine translation.
> The main market for such services would I guess be foreigners in Japan at
> the moment as they are the only non-Japanese with i-mode capable phones,
> although they also have a WAP gateway which would perhaps also convert
> i-mode sites. She wondered how many of the Japanese sites are only
> relevant to people in Japan.
I think that translation of japanese I-mode sites are
not the best idea, because you have to be much more carefully
with the layout. For example...almost all english speaking sites
have a menu structure like this:
[1] Menu1
[2] Menu2
[3] Menu3
[4] Menu4
But japanese sites very often have a structure like this:
[1] XX [2] XX
[3] XX [4] XX
If you translate it, you detroy totally the layout, since
the japanese chars (here the XX) are much shorter.
The other thing is...how do you want to translate the official
japanese I-mode sites?
Last but not least...there is no really english speaking market
for I-mode sites in Japan, don't get tricked since this list
is in english :)
Juergen
--
Juergen Specht - <js@nooper.com> - Nooper.com - Mobile Services
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Tue Jan 16 08:59:16 2001