Wil Tan

Here’s a pic of the information panel on a train a took in Tokyo while heading towards Shinjuku:

Notice how the words “suspension”, “service”, “trouble” (and the partially visible “Shinkansen”) were brutally split at arbitrary boundaries without any use of hyphen. While this is common practice for the Japanese language, it certainly makes it hard for English readers to scan the information being presented.

I can only vaguely remember early computing systems where editors didn’t do word wrapping (anybody care to refresh my memory?)

Related posts:

1. On Mobile OpenID in Japan This presentation by =zigorou (Toru Yamaguchi) titled “Considering OpenID for Mobile” (Thanks =peterd and =nat) is particularly interesting for me...
2. Google Web Toolkit (AJAX library) When I first saw the news about the newly released Google’s Web Toolkit: Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java...
3. Why Internationalize? Seth Godin’s book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us looks like a good read, especially for marketers, crowd-herders,...
4. More Languages in .BIZ We launched another round of 6 languages in .BIZ on January 16th, 2008: Finnish, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Portuguese...
5. What’s in an i-name? The project that I’ve been working for almost a year at NeuStar is very much centered around a marketing term...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 4:31 am and is filed under japan, usualbiz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.