It's been a whirlwind month. I left Okinawa on March 10, just one day before the Tohoku earthquake. By the time I had recovered from my jetlag, I saw on the news that the earthquake had hit, but I was unable to get through and check on my family for a nerve-wracking day. (My family is staying in Okinawa for a few months so that my son can finish the school year, and my wife can work on the move from that side.)

When I first got back to the US, I experienced a bit of reverse culture shock, which is to be expected after living in Japan for nearly 12 years. Over that time, you forget some things, and other things change, so returning to my home country was like entering a slightly different dimension resembling home but not quite it. Having to find a house, buy a car, get a driver license (my US one having expired), etc. in the space of a month made it even more of a challenge.

But I'm pretty much used to being an American again, and although Seattle locals like to complain about the rain here, this really is a beautiful place. Mountains, rivers, lakes, forest, ocean — it's a nature-lover's paradise. Combine that with great coffee and beer, good music and art scenes, and friendly, cosmopolitan people, and I probably could have chosen a worse place to repatriate.

It sucks being away for my family for this long, but with modern wonders like skype and email, it's a little more bearable. The last time my wife and I were apart this long, it was before we were married, and we had to make do with letters and the occasional phone call (remember how expensive international calls were way back when?).

I definitely plan to keep on blogging, so now that this status report is out of the way, please stay tuned for more of my inane blather about programming, translation, and Japan.

But they really dropped the ball localizing their purchase page:

Prefectures drop-down list

The first thing to notice is that the entire page is English, except the drop-down list of prefecture names, which is inexplicably in Japanese. But that's not the problem I want to point out here: the localization problem is that they translated the prefecture names, but failed to put them in the proper order.

The prefecture names appear to be in haphazard order, but it turns out that they're in numerical order, which means that they're ordered by the Unicode values of the Japanese characters. For example, the character 三 in 三重県 has the Unicode value of 0x4E09. Since this is the lowest value in the list, it comes first, and so on.

Of course, this is totally unexpected, because it's nowhere near the dictionary order (the order that it would appear in the dictionary). Numerical sorting works in English, because the ASCII letters are conveniently in alphabetical order, but doesn't work for Japanese, because the same character can have many pronunciations.

But in this case, sorting in dictionary order wouldn't have worked either. Japan has an idiosyncratic but very logical custom of sorting the prefecture names geographically, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south. If you have a rough understanding of Japanese geography, this makes finding the desired prefecture easy.

I imagine that an actual Japanese person would find a list of prefectures in this order bewildering, and it would create a great deal of frustration hunting for the proper one.

I think this failure is due to a lack of appreciation of the need for localization. The developers sent off the list of prefectures to be translated, and shoved it into the existing form without due care.

The kicker here, however, is that the list was actually sorted in the proper order, and then "un-sorted" by the developers. Looking at the code for the drop-down, you see that the codes associated with each choice are out of order:

If you sort the list by the "value" attribute, it's actually in the proper order, with 北海道 (Hokkaido) first at 928, followed by Aomori at 929, down to Okinawa at 974. So the developers got the list in sorted order, thought, "That can't be right," and proceeded to un-sort it into numerical order…

I'm not really interested in becoming an interpreter, simultaneous or otherwise, but the profession has always fascinated me — simultaneous interpreters are kind of like the thoroughbreds to the slow-but-steady translator plow-horses.

My main goal for the course is to stretch myself in new ways. In particular, I'm hoping to train myself in interpreters' ability to think on their feet. I also am looking forward to going both from and into Japanese. I've lately been trying to write more Japanese, and study more translations from English into Japanese, and I think that this has increased my toolset for translating into English.

The course also promises to teach some people skills: everything from eye contact to correct posture (urp). I'm looking forward to an exhausting but valuable eight days.

A couple of weeks ago, someone close to me died after a long fight with cancer. When we both lived in mainland Japan, we'd talk about moving to Okinawa, and living a more relaxed life.

One day, I packed up my family and moved here. Since he'd have a lot of trouble finding a job with equivalent pay in Okinawa, his plan was to wait until retirement, sell his house, and use that and his retirement to supplement his income. He died 3 years before reaching retirement.

I learned from him that life doesn't always go as planned, and we've got to do things when we can. I feel fortunate that my job allows me to live where I want, and have a lot more control over how much I work, when I work, and what kinds of work I do.

I've always been a kind of impulsive person. I think that mulling over big decisions too much makes us unhappy about the outcomes. But I've made a renewed commitment to get out and try new things; to stop waiting until the time is right, because it never will be just right. And we don't have all the time in the world.

Behold my cuteness!

My wife and son were walking the dogs when this little critter came running out of the sugar cane fields. Which is pretty unusual, since cats usually don't go running after strangers, especially when they're walking two dogs.

Assuming it was a stray (a depressingly large number of people come to the cane fields to abandon unwanted pets), they took her home, cleaned her up, and fed her while we tried to find out if she was lost or abandoned. After a bit of searching we concluded it was the second, and we decided to keep her. We named her Shadow, because it looks like she's wearing eye shadow.

Here's a picture of her with my son's shoe (size 25) for size comparison:

I'm smaller than a shoe!

After a short feeling out process, she's getting along well with the other cats:

It even gets cold in Okinawa sometimes

And one more of Shadow on her favorite perch:

Chilling on a Sunday

So here is the current makeup of the Ginstrom household:

1 mom
1 dad
1 grandma
1 son
2 dogs
3 cats

The author (Wil Shipley) recommends that you only send string files to your translators to localize:

To make our localizers’ jobs easier, what we’d like to do is give them ONLY .strings files, so all localization takes is any text editor – localizers don’t have to know how to use Interface Builder or any developer tools.

This is better than sending proprietary files that require special software to edit, but isolated strings tend to be cryptic. What's worse, the context could affect how the string needs to be translated. To give an example, I can think of at least three translations for the string "Files" into Japanese, depending on the context: "ファイル", "ファイル一覧", and "ファイル数" (lit. "files", "list of files", and "number of files").

You can get around this somewhat by avoiding ambiguous language in your strings. But although clear text is a good goal for software, it's also well known that every extra word you add to your on-screen text decreases the chance that your users will actually read it.

There's thus a tension between providing clear, unambiguous text and making your text as short as possible (and thus introducing ambiguities). The problem is exacerbated when you localize into multiple languages, because each one is going to find different ambiguities in your (to you quite straightforward) text.

Give your translators screen shots

One good compromise is to provide screen shots with your string list, so the translators can see the context of the strings they're translating. It'll also given them an idea of how much space they have to work with. (By the way: always lay out your text with plenty of space if you're going to be localized!)

When you get your strings back, you'll have to collate them back into your string resource. If you find the same string translated two different ways, first confirm with the translator that this difference is necessary, and if so, branch your string resource into two strings, corresponding to the same original string but different translations. This takes some extra work, but you can automate it so that it's done with every build.

One more piece of advice: don't split up your strings. For example, if you have range of dates with variables interposed ("From {1} to {2}"), don't send your translator the strings "From" and "to" to translate! Give the translator the entire string, or if it's a form with input widgets, give that context.

Download the latest version here.

This version adds support for Open Office files (Writer, Calc, and Impress), and features a newly designed front page.

Support for Open Office

Count Anything now supports Open Office document formats. You don't need to have Open Office installed to get word counts of OO documents.

New front page design

Using Count Anything, I found that I always did the same thing: launch the program, and then call up the "pick files" dialog. This seemed like a waste of effort, so I replaced the front page with an add-files form. This saves a step and I think it makes getting a word count faster.

About Count Anything

Count Anything is a free program for Windows that counts words, characters, and Asian characters in a large variety of file formats.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
   – Mark Twain

Often you'll hear relatively inexperienced translators complaining about the poor quality of the documents they translate. Amazingly, the more experienced the translator, the less they seem to complain about the poor quality of the source material.

To be sure, a lot of the stuff that I translate isn't written very well. Sometimes it's because it was written in a rush by an engineer, who'd rather be making stuff than writing documentation. Sometimes it's because an internal document, like an email or PowerPoint presentation, is being translated for another purpose.

But in general, clients are paying the big bucks to have a document translated because that document has value. They usually don't just churn out dreck and then pay thousands of dollars to have it translated. For you, it might be just another job, but for the client this document is a really big deal. So translators actually tend to see documents that are better than average.

I think that at least some of the complaints about poor-quality documents stem from a lack of proficiency in understanding the source language. I know it was true in my case.

When I first started translating, I used to see a lot of really bad writing, but fortunately I mostly kept my mouth shut about it. Then over the years, like Mark Twain with his father, I found that my authors' Japanese-writing ability was getting better. Or maybe it was just my ability to understand it…

I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the
leisure to make it shorter.

—Blaise Pascal

As with all writing, conciseness takes extra effort in translation. Although what you write is pretty much decided in translation, how you convey that information isn't, and interference from the source language tends to result in lots of roundabout phrasings.

Ironically, if you charge by target output, then the more work you put into trimming the excess verbiage from your translation, the less you get paid. That's why I very much prefer to charge by source volume (if I do charge by target volume, I try to focus on quality and not worry about the final invoice).

Some translations that I do have strict length limitations. This happens when the translation needs to go into a brochure, or someplace else where space is limited. The restrictions are extreme for the occasional video subtitling job that I do.

Usually, the length restrictions are given in terms of the number of words, but today I did a job where the restriction was given in characters. There were several blurbs for an exhibition, and each blurb — title and body — needed to be no more than 800 characters long.

I found that having the limitation in characters rather than words made me focus on using shorter words and less wordy descriptions. I replaced ten-dollar words with their nickel equivalents in order to get the character-count down. This had the effect of making the language a lot simpler, and I think easier to understand.

Of course, this can be taken too far — like using lots of acronyms and jargon instead of proper writing — but I found today's job to be a useful exercise in tightening up my translations. I'm going to try to keep this frame of mind in my future translation work as well.

Incidentally, I was able to charge extra for the work of keeping the translations short, but the extra time it took probably made it less profitable than ordinary translation.

June marked the 10th anniversary of my latest move to Japan. During that time, a lot of things have happened in the US that I haven't been around to experience: the dot-com crash, 9/11, the erosion of civil liberties, the disaster of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the housing crash and banking crisis.

Los Angeles was as crazy as ever, and my native San Francisco seemed even more crowded, expensive, and frenetic than the last time I visited. One relative, who has never been outside the US, asked how I liked living in Japan, following up with, "but of course you agree that America is the greatest country in the world."

Maybe it's a sign of being the best country on Earth that you've got to pass through a metal detector to get into an amusement park, and the guards there pass metal-detector wands over baby carriages, while armed police patrol the park. It felt more like going into lockdown than a pleasant outing. But what would I know — after all, I don't live there.

I'll risk being thought unpatriotic, however, to admit that it was a relief to get back to dear, sleepy Okinawa, where strangers greet you on the street, cars slow down to let you over instead of speeding up to cut you off, and nobody talks politics — not because it's taboo, but simply because they're not interested.