Although often treated as a homogeneous block, East Asia has about one quarter of the world’s population and is actually a very diverse region with many languages and cultures. This article focuses on the countries of China/Taiwan, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Mongolia, and does not include the Russian Far East or South East Asia.

Languages and writing systems

There are many languages spoken in East Asia. Although the term Asian languages is often used as a synonym for CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean), not all people in East Asia speak Chinese, Japanese or Korean. In addition, many see China as a single homogeneous market, but spanning from the Pacific Coast to Central Asia, China includes many ethnic groups that use different languages and writing systems. Nevertheless, the most economically important languages in East Asia are Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean share certain common features, including characters derived from older Chinese characters; the actual form, meaning and pronunciation of historically related characters in each language differ considerably. Of the three languages, Korean uses the fewest Chinese characters, while Japanese uses multiple variations of some characters that reflect different periods of contact with Chinese culture. The CJK languages were traditionally considered among the most difficult to work with in computing environments, but in fact are considerably easier to work with than many other languages such as Arabic or Hindi. Special versions of some software, however, are needed to work properly with CJK languages. (Quark XPress, for instance, has separate versions for working with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and files created in CJK versions cannot be opened in non-CJK versions of Quark XPress. Adobe InDesign also has special CJK versions, but files created in these versions can be opened seamlessly on non-CJK versions.)

Mongolian is unrelated to the CJK languages and is currently written in two forms: traditional and Cyrillic. Traditional Mongolian is written in vertical columns, set left to right across the page. This left-to-right orientation makes Mongolian different from other vertical scripts in Asia, which are set right-to-left. Computer systems that can deal with traditional Mongolian are uncommon, but fortunately computer resources for working with Cyrillic Mongolian are widely available. Be aware that not all Cyrillic fonts, however, will contain a few characters needed for Mongolian, so special care must be taken in font selection. Aside from this issue, Cyrillic Mongolian presents no major computing difficulties.

Chinese presents its own special set of challenges. There is an ongoing debate as to whether it is proper to speak of the Chinese language, since the Chinese spoken in Beijing (Mandarin) and the Chinese spoken in the south (Cantonese) are not intelligible with each other. They do, however, share a common writing system, which means that, with some minor exceptions, written Chinese is intelligible regardless of which dialect is spoken.

This situation is also complicated by political matters: the Communist Chinese government instituted a reform of Chinese writing that resulted in a writing system known as Simplified Chinese. This version of Chinese is used throughout most of Mainland China and other areas where Chinese is widely spoken, such as Singapore. The Nationalist government in Taiwan, however, refused to adopt Simplified Chinese, meaning that Taiwan continues to use Traditional Chinese. Despite the transfer of Hong Kong from British rule to China, Hong Kong also continues to use traditional Chinese, with the addition of a small number of Cantonese characters not recognized elsewhere.

In addition, a number of minority languages in China, particularly those in the Western Provinces, use other scripts for their own languages. Uygur, for instance, uses Arabic script, and Tibetan is written in Tibetan script, Yi is written using the Yi writing system, and Mongolian spoken in Chinese Inner Mongolia is written with traditional Mongolian. Software products intended for sale in mainland China are required to support these languages using the GB18030 encoding (at least to the point of showing proper characters). For companies localizing non-software products, the minority languages of China are not typically localization targets, as they do not have the economic importance of Chinese.

The Japanese writing system is probably the most complex writing system in the region, as it actually consists of four writing systems that must be seamlessly blended: kanji (Chinese characters used to write the roots of words), hiragana (characters representing syllables used to write grammatical endings), katakana (character representing syllables used to write foreign and loan words), and romaji (Latin characters).

Korean is written primarily in the Korean writing system known as hangul. In North Korea only hangul is used, but in South Korea, significant numbers of Chinese characters (known as hanja) are used, with the number and frequency of use varying considerably between writers. Most localization work uses relatively few hanja characters, but for texts that are more academic in nature, extensive use of hanja may be appropriate.

Localization and internationalization issues

Localization for East Asia has a reputation of being very tricky. When compared to European languages, East Asian languages are complex, but operating system support on all major operating systems is very good, so there is little reason to fear Asian language localization as long as products are properly internationalized.

CJK languages are primarily encoded using two bytes per character (up to four bytes in the case of GB18030 encoding) and are often referred to as double byte languages, as opposed to "single-byte" languages like English. Unicode encoding has made this distinction increasingly less important, but in some cases programmers will still assume that characters are represented as single bytes, or will use sort routines that assume single-byte characters. Thus, it is vital that proper system calls to text-handling routines be used wherever possible, and that Unicode be used whenever appropriate.

Another common problem in internationalization and localization is that insufficient room may be left for character display. A small character size that will be sufficient to display English text may result in illegible CJK text. In the example below a 12-pixel high black and white display shows both English and Japanese text:

In the next sample, the same text appears on a 20-pixel high black and white display:

Note the dramatic impact of increasing the display size on the Japanese text.

In general, CJK text needs to be set larger than English text, with 10 point a minimum size. Japanese and Korean localizations, while having fewer characters than their English translations, generally take up more room because their characters need to be larger and take up more space than do Roman characters. Chinese texts, on the other hand, generally take up substantially less space than do their English translations because most Chinese words consist of one or two characters and do not have the complex grammatical endings that characterize both Japanese and Korean.

One final well-known internationalization issue has to do with names: family names appear before given names in most East Asian languages, and forms and other interface elements may need to be adjusted to reflect this fact. In addition, the terms first name and last name should be replaced with terms such as family name and given name that are unambiguous as to meaning.

Cultural issues

Much has been written about the cultural differences between Asia and the United States and Europe. Fortunately, there are many individuals from East Asia living in the United States and Europe who are well-versed in the cultural norms of each region. When entering into business relationships in any of the countries discussed in this article, it is best to have staff who understand the intricacies of cross-cultural business and negotiation.

While it is impossible to fully address cultural issues that affect localization, be aware that in some cases it may make more sense to separately author some materials for East Asian countries than to localize materials created for a non-Asian audience. Marketing materials in particular are not readily translatable, and separate authoring may make more sense. In instances where global branding is an issue, allow more time for adaptation of the global brand for Asian countries than you would for European countries since the cultural differences will be much greater.

Legal issues

Two legal issues need to be addressed by companies looking at localization for China in particular. The first issue is the status of Taiwan. According to the mainland Chinese government, Taiwan is part of China, even though it has a separate government from mainland China. Inadvertently referring to Taiwan as a separate country can lead to legal problems in China, and products have been barred from mainland China on account of this issue. The second issue is that mainland China has very strict laws regarding political and religious content. Content that deals with these issues should be thoroughly reviewed by Chinese legal specialists prior to release in China to prevent any problems.

Conclusion

The recent dramatic growth and liberalization of China's economy has again focused attention on East Asia as an attractive region for international business. Effective localization for East Asia requires careful planning and knowledge, but given careful planning, the region can present an opportunity for tremendous localization return on investment.

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Question:

When editing or reviewing a file in Fortis, I don't want to review the whole file, only the segments that were manually translated and edited. Is there a quick way that I can differentiate between which segments have been manually translated and which segments were pretranslated by Fortis?

Answer:

Often, it takes significant time to examine Fortis files to find only the segments that need to be edited or reviewed. A key factor to remember is that any manually translated segments should carry an asterisk (*) in the segment number tag. Try the following process to reduce the edit and review time:

1. Open the file(s) that needs to be edited or reviewed.

2. Choose the "Fold Segments..." option from the "View" menu. From the "Fold" window, enter an asterisk (*) in the "First Expression" box. Check to make sure that under "Folding Criteria", the "Display Segments with Expr." box is checked.

3. Now click the "OK" button. Fortis will now hide all of the segments except the segments that were manually translated and marked with an asterisk. This makes the review process very simple, as only segments that need review will now be displayed. The missing segments have not been deleted, only hidden. To redisplay all file segments, simply choose "Remove Folding" under the "View" menu. If your documentation contains asterisks in the actual document text, the method above may not produce the correct results. If this is the case, choose the "Fold Segments" option, and instead of entering an asterisk in the "First Expression" box, type in the following expression: \o[0-9]+[\!\?|#~]*\*\c Before clicking the "OK" button, under the "Options" box, check the option of "Regular Expressions". This method will produce the same results as the option above, filtering out only the pretranslated segments

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Note: in this article "Asian" is used to refer to Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) text.

Adobe Illustrator has had excellent Asian text features for years, but the most recent version, called CS (for "Creative Suite", appears to abandon these Asian features when first installed. The features are not gone, however, but rather are turned off by default. To turn them on, open the Type & Auto Tracing pane of Illustrator CS’s preferences. In this pane is a check box for "Show Asian Options". Checking this will turn on the Asian options. Even with Asian options turned on, however, not all the Asian-specific features will be visible in the default palettes the Illustrator uses. In both the Character and Paragraph palettes, fly out menus on the sides of the palettes contain an item "Show Options". Selecting this makes the palettes bigger and shows additional Roman and Asian typography features. The fly out menus also contain other features not accessible through the buttons on the palettes.

When the Asian typography features are turned on and visible, it is apparent that Adobe Illustrator CS’s support for Asian fonts actually goes far beyond that of any previous versions. One of the most useful features is the ability to generate "composite fonts" (accessed through Type: Composite Fonts..., a feature available in Quark XPress for many years. Composite fonts allow different fonts to be assigned to different kinds of Asian characters (such as Japanese kanji, hiragana, katakana, etc.), and then treated as through they were one font. The individual ranges can have characteristics such as scaling, adjustment of baseline, and adjustment of font size relative to the main font that allow them to be combined in a harmonious and pleasing arrangement. Without this capability, individual character ranges would have to be styled manually to create the same effect. Setting proper composite fonts up in advance for a project can save considerable time and effort.

To take full advantage of the Asian text features, you also need to know three seldom-used tools available in the main Tools palette of Illustrator. Clicking and holding on the text tool opens up a sub palette with six different options, as shown below:

The first three (text, text area, and text on path) will be familiar to most designers. The remaining three (vertical text, vertical text area, and vertical text on path), however, are seldom used in Roman design, where vertical text is seldom used. These tools are used primarily in setting Asian text, and include such useful features as right-to-left flow (essential for proper vertical Asian text), and the ability to rotate Roman text with respect to Asian text (accessed from the fly-out menu of the Character palette) by turning "Standard Vertical Roman Alignment" on and off.

Illustrator CS has many other Asian-specific features for text setting, and represents a major step forward in proper support for Asian typographic requirements within a Roman-text environment. If you are involved in Asian-language DTP, design or illustration, it is worth taking the time to try out the different Asian options and become familiar with them.

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