Rex Wong, a Hong Kong UI guy, points out the problems of setting up a tag cloud in Chinese:
Sorting: Do they sort by pinyin (preferred by Mainland Chinese) or by strokes (preferred by Hong Kong Chinese even though it’s hard to gauge how many strokes goes into a character)?
Font sizing: Some Chinese fonts do not scale up well (see below).
Mixed language: Where would English tags go in a pre-dominantly Chinese cloud?
"uiGarden is a bilingual on-line magazine that provides an opportunity
for researchers and practitioners who work in the user interface design
(including user experience, information architecture, GUI,
and usability) field in the Chinese and the English speaking worlds to
publish their thinking and exchange views with each other. The goal of uiGarden is to facilitate information exchange and communication
between the Chinese and western user experience design communities."
Right now, there’s more generic UI articles than there are Chinese-specific ones; however, many of them come in English and Chinese.
The desire to communicate across linguistic barriers is driving a lot of experimentation in the online world. While we wait for translation software to improve, people around the world are studying Chinese in order to get closer to the Chinese people, and Chinese are studying English. Virtual environments are starting to provide platforms for Chinese and others to learn from one another. Here are a few projects that point the way forward:
IBM’s John Tolva alerted me to the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University, which has two efforts I’m particularly interested in. The first is an MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called Chengo Chinese. From the game’s design framework, available at the Confucius Institute MSU website: The new Chengo Chinese [will consist] of four virtual worlds: “villages”, “towns”, “cities” and “cosmopolitans”. The four virtual worlds will progress with increasing complexity, advancing from ancient times to modern times and from countryside to cities. Those different virtual worlds represent a variety of cultures and living styles, and teach different cultural contents and language in correspondence with learners’ language proficiency and cultural knowledge. Learners will start with “villages” and advance into “towns” after they grasp a certain level of Chinese language and cultural knowledge and reach a certain point. [In addition,] the players can choose five career paths in this game, which include: scholar, businessman, kongfu master, officer and historian or archeologist. Players encounter different experiences based on their individual career choice. Furthermore, players with different career goals co-exist in the virtual worlds and interact with each other. In addition, the game also contains many artificial intelligence ‘robots” (i-bots) that can interact with the players.
The Confucius Institute is also in the process of purchasing an island on the online world Second Life, which they plan to equip as a kind of virtual language learning and cultural experience. (Rebecca MacKinnon notes here that Second Life doesn’t support Chinese characters as of yet).
ChinesePod, as most readers of this blog will already know, continues to be one of the earliest and most innovative Chinese language programs using podcasting. They offer free, daily podcasts with humor and intelligence, backed by careful linguistic expertise and years of experience of living in China as a speaker of Chinese as a second language. They also offer business vocabulary and a blog to discuss learning issues.
Seeing Youtube from Chinese eyes, this video about Xu Jinglei and her blog traffic is being hailed as an example of "China’s first company to use Youtube for advertising." Donews has an article which discusses Youtube as a platform for promoting Chinese businesses to overseas audiences. The video was posted on Feb. 7 by a Chinese fan and has been viewed almost 4,000 times since then–not a lot by Youtube standards, but decent, I guess, for only 2 days. The clip calls Xu Jinglei the "queen of blog" and asks, "Whose blog will win the first 100 million views in the world?" A bit of competitive spirit there? Then the viewer, rather imaginatively, introduces us to Xu Jinglei via her performance in a TV ad for umbrellas made by Zhejiang HongAi.
Any company anywhere in the world can upload ads onto Youtube for free, but HongAi Umbrella was the first Chinese company to do so…The HongAi Umbrella example might start up a wave of Chinese companies storming Youtube.
Baidu’s ads have been famous on Youtube for awhile now, so it’s not really the first Chinese company to get on Youtube, but yes, perhaps one of the first regular consumer products companies. We can only hope that other Chinese companies indeed start to deliberately produce user-made videos as ads for Youtube.
Now a treat for the Mandarin speakers who may be wondering what "mei" has to do with a job. From their website:
"“Mei” is a phonological sound indicating different words and
meanings in Chinese. As for “Meijob”, “Mei” could mean “Beautiful”,
“Charming”, “every (job)”, “Media”, “Matchmaker/Intermediary” and
simply “No” - each signifies an important aspect of our activity in
“Meijob”:
Whether you have or you do not have a job right
now (“Mei you”), www.Meijob.com is a great media to find your next
beautiful or charming job. We do so by aggregating each and every job
from each and every source available. We will be the “Matchmaker”
between you and your next job.
You are welcome to share with us
your thoughts and ideas about the meaning of the name “Meijob” for you,
and some Meijob T-shirts are waiting for you as a humble reward for
your attention."
Having lived many years in Beijing, I’m partial to northern China in the winter (I realize it may be an acquired taste!). Two photoblogs, one from Dalian and one from Xi’an, start to convey the flavor of the bare branches, straight avenues, steam rising from roadside food vendors, bundled up pedestrians, smell of coal, and blue skies of a northern Chinese winter in the city. Ziboy is usually good for a slice of Beijing hutong winters (see his 2006.1 archive, for instance), but he’s busy doing his magic in NYC at present. Something from Harbin or Yinchuan would also be wonderful, but have looked and can’t find one.
Photo Xi’an is presented in English and is done by Wang Zhifang, who describes himself as "a Xi’an citizen and also an undergraduate studying
Geographic Information System (GIS) in Chang’an University, Xi’an."
Longtanwan is a Dalian photoblog with especially nice apartment and building photos.
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