Localising ASP.NET application into Mandarin

Question

We have developed a medium-sized ASP.NET / SQL Server application that uses resource files to provide English and Spanish user interface variants. Unicode data types are used throughout the databases. Now we are being asked to add Mandarin to the mix. I have no experience with localising into Asian languages, so I really cannot imagine what kind of job this would be.

My questions are:

1. How complex would this job be, as compared to localising into another Western language such as French or German?
2. What additional issues, other than (obviously) translating strings in resource files, should I deal with for Mandarin localisation? Anything related to the different alphabet, perhaps?

Reports of previous experiences or pointers to best practices are most welcome. Thanks.

Answer 1

As far as translating text in the user interface goes, the localization effort for Chinese is probably comparable to that of Western languages. Like English and Spanish, Chinese is read left to right, so you won't need to mirror the page layout as you would if you had to support Arabic or Hebrew. Here are a couple more points to consider:

• Font size: Chinese characters are more intricate than Latin characters, so you may need to use a larger font size. English and Spanish are readable at 8pt; for Chinese, you'll want a minimum of 10pt.

• Font style: In English, bold and italics are often used for emphasis. In Chinese, emphasis is usually achieved with a different typeface, font size, or color. Use bold with caution, and avoid italics.

However, if you're targeting an Asian market, more significant changes may be required. Here are a few examples:

• Personal names: A typical Chinese name is 孫中山: the first character (孫) is the family name, and the second and third characters (中山) constitute the given name. This of course is the opposite of the common Western convention of "given name" + space + "family name". If you're storing and displaying names, you may want to use a single "Name" field instead of separate "First Name" and "Last Name" fields.

• Colors: In the U.S., it's common to use green for "good" and red for "bad". However, in China and Taiwan, red is "good". For instance, compare the stock prices on Yahoo! versus Yahoo! Taiwan.

• Lack of an alphabet: Chinese characters are not based on an alphabet. Thus, for example, it wouldn't make sense to offer the ability to filter a list by the first letter of each entry, as in a directory of names.

Answer 2

Regarding sort order, different methods are used in Chinese: binary (i.e. Unicode), radical+stroke, Pinyin (=romanization), and Bopomofo (=syllabary).

On SQL Server, you can define the sort order using the COLLATE clause in the column definition, or on statement level. It's also possible to have a default collation on database level.

Run this statement to see all supported Chinese collations:

select * from fn_helpcollations()
where name like 'chinese%'

In .Net, there's also a list of Chinese cultures to be used for sorting, see MSDN.

Answer 3

1. On the technical side of things, I don't believe it's significantly more difficult. Adding support for non-Western languages will expose encoding issues if you are not using Unicode throughout, but it's pretty much the norm to use UTF-8 encoding and Unicode SQL types (nvarchar instead of varchar) anyway.

   I would say that the added complexity and uncertainty is more about the non-technical aspects. Most of us English speakers are able to make some sense of European languages when we see 1:1 translations and can notice a lot of problems. But Mandarin is utterly meaningless to most of us, so it's more important to get a native speaker to review or at least spot-check the app prior to release.

2. One thing to be mindful of is the issue of input methods: Chinese speakers use IMEs (input method editors) to input text, so avoid writing custom client-side input code such as capturing and processing keystrokes.

   Another issue is the actual culture identifier to choose. There are several variants for Chinese (zh-Hans which replaces zh-CHS and is used in China, and zh-Hant which replaces zh-CHT used in Taiwan). See the note on this MSDN page for more info on this. But these are neutral culture identifiers (they are not country-specific) and can be used for localization but not for things such as number and date formatting, therefore ideally you should use a specific culture identifier such as zh-CN for China and zh-TW for Taiwan. Choosing a specific culture for a Web application can be tricky, therefore this choice is usually based on your market expectations. More info on the different .NET culture identifiers is at this other post.

Hope this helps!