Wil Tan

(Lack of) English Word Wrapping in Japan

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?)

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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.

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2262 Responses2009-02-04+18%3A31%3A08wil to “(Lack of) English Word Wrapping in Japan”

Markus Says:
February 18th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Submit it to engrish.com
wil Says:
February 18th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
That's hilarious! I can't seem to find any grammatical mistake in the pic though..

(Lack of) English Word Wrapping in Japan

2262 Responseshttp://dready.org/blog/2009/02/05/english-word-wrapping-japan/%28Lack+of%29+English+Word+Wrapping+in+Japan2009-02-04+18%3A31%3A08wil to “(Lack of) English Word Wrapping in Japan”

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2262 Responses2009-02-04+18%3A31%3A08wil to “(Lack of) English Word Wrapping in Japan”