Comments on: iPhone features: Lost in translation--Chinese style

Chinese language abilities allows a generation gap to be filled.

[bousozoku]

I really appreciate Apple's attention to languages. For years, I've been able to run my Macs in Japanese, as well as, English and other languages and my 4th generation iPod is much the same.

Since Mac OS X has already been language independent, it's great to see that the iPhone can make great use of that and come to the aid of people who are limited in a certain language. It would seem an appropriate phone for rentals, as it could display and accept text in the visitor's language, depending on the language, of course.

[bousozoku]

I really appreciate Apple's attention to languages. For years, I've been able to run my Macs in Japanese, as well as, English and other languages and my 4th generation iPod is much the same.

Since Mac OS X has already been language independent, it's great to see that the iPhone can make great use of that and come to the aid of people who are limited in a certain language. It would seem an appropriate phone for rentals, as it could display and accept text in the visitor's language, depending on the language, of course.

[saeednas]

Well, you are so lucky, guys ! Unfortunately, lack of support for right to left scripts in iPhone has made us a lot of trouble in middle east, in my case, Iran. Since most of companies and banks inform their clients using Text Messaging in Persian, no iPhone user in Iran can be informed by SMS and we have all ran into trouble. I've been using Macs for almost 15 years (Since Mac OS 6.0.7) and always enjoyed its support for Persian Language (in form of creating and viewing persian text, not Persian Interface).
But iPhone's lack for this has left us unhappy and heart broken :((

[Constable Odo]

I'm sure the iPhone OS needs some fine tuning. Since the iPhone supposedly runs OSX, I thought most of the basic features would already be in place (copy/paste anyone), but apparently the iPhone runs some subset of OSX. I think in time, Apple will get up to speed and implement many of the features of desktop OSX. Maybe they don't have enough programmers to tackle all these features immediately or something. Well, one can only hope.

[spamho]

What are you talking about when you say the iPhone sometimes slips back into Chinese? There are two things that changes the language on the iPhone:
1. keyboard input
2. menu display
Both of these are independent of each other.

I suspect that when you went to change the language display to English, you did not remember to change the keyboard input to English only.

I don't have the iPhone but have the iPod touch. I have the language display in English (UK) and the keyboard inputs as English (UK), traditional Chinese (pinyin and handwriting input), simplified Chinese (pinyin and handwriting input).

[petechen]

I'm pretty sure what Kevin is talking about is that he keeps accidentally hiting that "Globe" icon next to the spacebar on the v_keyboard and thereby switching the language midstream. Sez it happens when texting. That's all it takes to "slip back into Chinese."

[bonesbautista]

It's heartwarming to read of your family's positive experience enhanced by a well thought out device. My mother, in her 70s, wishes for the days of the dial telephone - but she's happy with her RAZR and doesn't want to try anything new...

@saeednas - I'm surprised that Apple hasn't yet implemented support for R to L languages. I wish for you support for a long-time Apple supporter!

[TV James]

So... misleading headline used solely because it was the name of an interesting movie?

Sounds like you might have gotten lost a time or two, but the headline implies negativity/failure on Apple's part where the article is mostly positive about how well Apple handled the issue of translation and implementation.

[petechen]

Love the language support but definitely feel saeednas' pain. Apple has been better about Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew support in the past and hopefully a language kit update won't take too long. I have a habit of sliding between languages and have enjoyed the increased support on both mac and PC in recent years (Thanks unicode!). Both take different approaches.

Spamho made a comment that i agree with - keep in mind that language support and keyboard are two different things. On a PC, you can activate the English-International keyboard and mix in diacriticals specific to Spanish, French, German, and Scandinavian languages without missing a beat. In addition to that, there's also international 'regioning" which is about fomating settings like dates, time, phone numbers, for the locality. (Think AUS English vs. US English)

A few comments about Apple/iPhone's keyboard approach:

1. Asian language support is limited to just Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (Simplified, Traditional)

2. In addition to this, at least for Chinese, you can input either via pinyin or handwriting (actually fingerwriting, but this also reveals a weakness in Apple's touchscreen technology that it will not accep a stylus which would work far faster than a fingertip.) Nonetheless, this flexibility is quite revolutionary.

3. European languages are have predictive support such that if I type "Groß niño façade hôtel über está" it gets it without needing to hit additional "special" keys. (n.b. but I did have to switch between German, Spanish, French, German, and Spanish keyboards to type that.) Basically, just as there is an English spellcheck/dictionary to autocorrect misspellings, the same is used to address foreign language diacriticals. While that's nice to have, there's no way to cheat and make up words like Sp?n?al Tap ( I know, the umlaut is supposed to go over the "N" - that's the best I can do.)

4. For this fact, I was a little disappointed that there was no Vietnamese (or Czech) language support. Granted the Vietnamese diacritical set is far larger and has greater complexity.

5. Similarly, there is Russian, but no Greek. language/keyboard support.

All in all, this makes for a nice "international release" effort on the iP3g. I haven't yet looked to match up what 20 countries outside the US that released the iPhone have their native language supported but no doubt the language support on the iPhone is a HUGE step ahead in internationalization of smartphones. ? props to ??!

[YongStranslation]

Yes, petechen seems very professional, http://www.yongsfy.com is a best choice for us.

[songjiekun]

you know what iphone even not be allow to use in china . no sense!
if you want try translation try this <a href="http://www.verytranslation.com>chinese translation</a>