Opinion Multilingualism in mind By Tony Laszlo	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
心の多国籍化 コンピューターのインターフェースで 多言語を使用できるものは少ない。 技術より製作会社の考え方に問題があるのでは…。

I can't count the number of times I have seen an English pop-up menu or error message when using an interface that was supposed to be Japanese. And it is always discouraging to find a "multilingual" tool or resource that offers German and French but makes no mention of Japanese.

Historically, Japanese technicians and designers have taken apart these West-centric systems and converted them for use in their own language, usually cursing under their breath all the way.

While this process - called localization - is important and often inevitable, more often than not the resulting Japanized version is just as rigid as the original. In other words, it works with the Japanese language, but it cannot handle Korean or Portuguese characters, for example. The developer's approach has been to offer separate versions, one per language. This assumes, of course, that human beings do not use more than one language at any one time.

Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Think of the international organization that issues documents in a dozen languages. It would need to make a single digital list of all their titles, perhaps for presentation on the Internet. That list could have Japanese, Russian and perhaps Tamil characters in it. Why would a person need to see all those languages at one time? Because he or she might be in charge of assessing the documents and choosing which language would be required by which board member of the organization.

Or, consider the family situation in which a child whose native tongue is Ethiopian is using the Internet to study the teachings of the Holy Book in Arabic. He or she will likely need to view and perhaps type in characters in both those two languages. Throw into this mix a grandmother who might be using a third language to explain things to the child, and it is easy to see that we live in a world with multilingual needs.

Take that cellphone in your pocket or purse. How easy would it be for you to study Greek, Hungarian or Finnish via that Japanese interface? How hard would it be for someone with a Thai-capable cellphone to study Japanese? This sort of thing is getting easier, but, unfortunately, it is still usually difficult and often impossible, as too few systems have really taken this issue by the horns.

Actually, contrary to what one might think, this monolingualism is rooted not in the limitations of technology, but in a limited mentality and imagination. Present-day hardware and software are, for the most part, quite capable of supporting the development of multilingual systems.

A fundamental and widespread switch to multilingualism can only be expected if the consumers using the systems demand more. Of course, one should make such a demand creatively to get the point across. Everyone who wants to use more than Japanese and English on their cellphones might type in those demands to the companies responsible, taking care to punctuate them with Vietnamese or Sanskrit characters that will be mangled by the system they are complaining about.

Shukan ST: Oct. 4, 2002

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