September SLIG Meeting hosted by ITP

The 6th SLIG meeting took place on 24th September at the University Industry
Centre, UCD. The topic under discussion was Japanese Localisation and the
speaker was Hideyuki Namiki, Technical Director of International Translation
and Publishing Japan. The speaker was introduced by Helen J. Wybrants of ISC
Europe and Raymond Buchan, Marketing Manager of ITP.

Namiki-san divided his presentation into the following topics: Translation,
Desktop Publishing and Engineering.

On translation, Namiki-san mentioned that the use of different fonts for
emphasis varies from that in the European languages (e.g. italics can not be
used). This can affect the way in which text is translated. He also alluded to
translation difficulties arising from the use of strings which are concatenated
at run time to generate a variety of different messages. In addition he noted
that translation memory systems such as Trados will work for Japanese.

Regarding Desktop Publishing, we learned that fonts for Japanese need to be
purchased individually for each software licence. This can make it desirable
for fewer fonts to be used in the Japanese version than for other language
versions. In addition, compatibility problems can exist between Japanese and
European language versions of DTP software packages.

In discussing Engineering, Namiki-san referred briefly to the character
encodings used for Japanese and their technical characteristics. He also
described the cultural differences relating to certain kinds of standard data
such as people's names, dates and addresses. These can have engineering
ramifications relating to such actions as sorting and display on the screen.

Following the presentation there was a question and answer session. Overall
this was a most interesting talk.

Richard F. E. Sutcliffe
University of Limerick