Interesting: in Japan, half of the top sellers in books are written for mobile phones. The writer goes on to say: “I can’t see anyone in Western nations waking up tomorrow and seeing mobile phone composed novels on the top seller lists, but usually Japan is years ahead on many tech fronts”.
That right there is […]

A good overview of what’s happening on the internet in Estonia (ie. lots).

Via zephoria: a paper (download PDF) on “Language Networks on LiveJournal”. Livejournal has a huge Russian community, apparently disconnected from the English (and Japanese) communities. Fascinating stuff.

Chinese Youths Crazy for English Alphabet Tattoos. Funny: “The guy at the tattoo shop told me this means brave and proud warrior in English.”

How do you count words automatically (so you can charge by the word) as a translator for languages like Japanese, Thai, Khmer, Cambodian or Chinese, that don’t separate words with spaces or any other delimiter?

The penchant for cuteness, especially in Japan, is well known. So I wasn’t surprised to see these emoticons on dongA.com. Much better than the western popular varieties, that tend to be quite boring.

I love checking out Japanese websites, even though I still don’t speak Japanese.

I went to check: it turns out Yahoo’s country list doesn’t have Iran in it anymore. Here’s a screenshot:

And the Iranians are understandably not happy: Letter to Yahoo: "Yahoo mail has recently removed "Iran" from the list of world countries in its signup page! We, the nation of Iran, assume it contrary to professional ethics […]

I was playing around with the excellent Google translate tool, and I noticed something cool:

They let users suggest better translations. Nice example of crowdsourcing translation!
(I’m not the first one to notice and be fascinated, either.)

(via Silver Oliver who works at the BBC): Do tag clouds work in Chinese? (Chinese translation of this article). Rex Wong talks about the alphabetical ordering problems of non-alphabetical languages, problems sizing up Chinese fonts, and the mixing of Chinese characters and English words.
At the end of the day, though, tag clouds do seem to […]

I am not sure of all the implications of this story (these types of stories are too often abused by consultants and such who make them fit whatever message they want to get across), but the Ilkone i800 mobile phone is definitely an example of culturally appropriate experience design. It’s not a new story, but […]