iPhone features: Lost in translation--Chinese style
Ni hao? The iPhone's Chinese language support screen.
(Credit: Kevin Ho)One solution to the what-to-do-with-the-iPhone-1.0 dilemma that occurred to me over lunch with my grandpa on Tuesday (in San Francisco's Chinatown no less) was to give him my old iPhone 1.0.
My grandfather is an immigrant and a jolly, happy type who stays vibrant by talking with his friends from church or with family members. But because English is not his first language and because he's not as tech-savvy as his grandchildren, he has often found dealing with a typical cell phone difficult. The technology gap, generation gap, and language gap all posed by a typical cell phone's user interface (Nokia in this case) were oftentimes frustrating. After all, who can remember to press UP and * to unlock a phone?
With the iPhone's 2.0 firmware, with international language support (including simplified and traditional Chinese) and with the easy interface, however, the path was clear. After showing him and asking him if he understood what the menus meant on my iPhone 3G (as a test run), we were convinced that it was time for him to upgrade to an iPhone--and that a 1.0 iPhone would be more than fine.
Pleased with ourselves, our next problem was that it took us awhile to navigate and convert my iPhone 3G back into English. Even after that switch back every now then (especially with texting), I notice the iPhone slipping back into Chinese mode. It too seems to be stuck in a foreign tongue. But the fact that my grandfather can understand and use an iPhone well enough to help me guess my way back into the English mode is great example of what a universal user interface should be like.
Kevin Ho is a San Francisco attorney and the owner of a brand new iPhone. He'll be writing about the experience for the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Since Mac OS X has already been language independent, it's great to see that the iPhone can make great use of that and come to the aid of people who are limited in a certain language. It would seem an appropriate phone for rentals, as it could display and accept text in the visitor's language, depending on the language, of course.
Since Mac OS X has already been language independent, it's great to see that the iPhone can make great use of that and come to the aid of people who are limited in a certain language. It would seem an appropriate phone for rentals, as it could display and accept text in the visitor's language, depending on the language, of course.
But iPhone's lack for this has left us unhappy and heart broken :((
1. keyboard input
2. menu display
Both of these are independent of each other.
I suspect that when you went to change the language display to English, you did not remember to change the keyboard input to English only.
I don't have the iPhone but have the iPod touch. I have the language display in English (UK) and the keyboard inputs as English (UK), traditional Chinese (pinyin and handwriting input), simplified Chinese (pinyin and handwriting input).
@saeednas - I'm surprised that Apple hasn't yet implemented support for R to L languages. I wish for you support for a long-time Apple supporter!
Sounds like you might have gotten lost a time or two, but the headline implies negativity/failure on Apple's part where the article is mostly positive about how well Apple handled the issue of translation and implementation.
Spamho made a comment that i agree with - keep in mind that language support and keyboard are two different things. On a PC, you can activate the English-International keyboard and mix in diacriticals specific to Spanish, French, German, and Scandinavian languages without missing a beat. In addition to that, there's also international 'regioning" which is about fomating settings like dates, time, phone numbers, for the locality. (Think AUS English vs. US English)
A few comments about Apple/iPhone's keyboard approach:
1. Asian language support is limited to just Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (Simplified, Traditional)
2. In addition to this, at least for Chinese, you can input either via pinyin or handwriting (actually fingerwriting, but this also reveals a weakness in Apple's touchscreen technology that it will not accep a stylus which would work far faster than a fingertip.) Nonetheless, this flexibility is quite revolutionary.
3. European languages are have predictive support such that if I type "Groß niño façade hôtel über está" it gets it without needing to hit additional "special" keys. (n.b. but I did have to switch between German, Spanish, French, German, and Spanish keyboards to type that.) Basically, just as there is an English spellcheck/dictionary to autocorrect misspellings, the same is used to address foreign language diacriticals. While that's nice to have, there's no way to cheat and make up words like Sp?n?al Tap ( I know, the umlaut is supposed to go over the "N" - that's the best I can do.)
4. For this fact, I was a little disappointed that there was no Vietnamese (or Czech) language support. Granted the Vietnamese diacritical set is far larger and has greater complexity.
5. Similarly, there is Russian, but no Greek. language/keyboard support.
All in all, this makes for a nice "international release" effort on the iP3g. I haven't yet looked to match up what 20 countries outside the US that released the iPhone have their native language supported but no doubt the language support on the iPhone is a HUGE step ahead in internationalization of smartphones. ? props to ??!