For a piece of software to become globally accepted, translated interface, help files and documentation is a must.
Iwasa told me this could happen in Japan in late October/early November when things go well, with international markets following soon after (CerevoLife will get a fully translated interface, while the camera features Japanese and English menus).
Facebook was an early pioneer of online translation, building a crowdsourcing tool to get users around the world to translate its interface's text into their local tongues.
The users themselves translated the interface into French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Polish, with 15 more languages coming soon.
The startup says nearly one third of their users experience the service in their own language, so it makes perfect sense to translate the interface to cater to them, too.
"I have translated this interface language of communication into 3D objects", she says on her website, "which mimic every multi-touch gesture.
Numerical results are presented for a translating-interface test case and a shock/interface collision test case.
Anyway, FriendFeed understands this too, which is why they're opening up to a bunch of new users by translating their lifestreaming interface into German (will that be the end of Freundefeed?), French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese.
When I asked why the English word "advertising" was auto-translated into the word "lying", the explanation was that because Facebook's regionalisation software is driven by users – in other words, users are roped into translating Facebook's interface for each country it operates in – one of the words those cheeky users had suggested had briefly popped into that slot by mistake.
Mediators serve as the interface, translating language and interpreting culture, between the health care provider and the ethnic minority patient.
