Viewing Japanese Characters on U.S. Windows XP/Vista

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on June 16, 2008 at 8:51am

On Windows XP (U.S. version), do you need to install "East Asian languages" [1] in order to view Japanese text within web pages?

Yes.

The character encoding is UTF-8, but I'm wondering if a default vanilla XP or Vista can display the text properly.

It cannot. You need to install east Asian languages. The US version of OS X has Japanese pre-installed, even on iPhone.

Trying to imagine what a U.S. based IE6 user would experience when viewing a UTF-8 web page with both English and Japanese text.

I don't remember for IE6, but on Windows you get boxes, question marks or mojibake depending on the browser.

I think the browser/OS will start a process to try and install the language.

It does.

In our experience, if a user doesn't have Japanese language support installed they probably can't read Japanese anyway so it does not matter :-)

Permalink Reply by Christopher Kobayashi on June 16, 2008 at 3:08pm

Aloha Mika
Thank you very much!!!

So it might not be a good idea to add both English and Japanese text to a web page. For the Japanese user, they wouldn't notice. But for a person using the U.S. version of Windows, the installation process might be confusing and possibly a bad user experience.

Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on June 16, 2008 at 3:30pm

Exactly. For Japanese users its OK to mix, but for pages with a little Japanese that might be viewed by people without Japanese installed we usually embed the Japanese string in a GIF. We do this with the language switcher on Ikayzo.com and the Japanese blurb on the Ainaweb homepage.

For this group's (Business in Japan) landing page we took a different approach. We assume most visitors will have Japanese installed but for those that don't, we simply provide an explanation:

"If some of the text on this page looks garbled it means you don't have Japanese language support installed on your computer. Thats OK. You don't have to speak Japanese to participate. English posts are welcome."

Permalink Reply by Christopher Kobayashi on June 16, 2008 at 5:44pm

we usually embed the Japanese string in a GIF

That makes a lot of sense. Good UX.

So perhaps for the locale switcher on GE's website, they should have used images instead of text.

Going off topic now, too much coffee this morning :-)
They might be using some type of server-side script to do language detection using IP geolocation information or user-agent sniffing, etc. These wouldn't be perfect, but probably accommodate most common scenarios. Found an interesting discussion regarding detecting what font's are installed. Just more food for thought.

Thanks again Mika for the insights!

[1] http://www.ge.com/worldwide/index.html
[2] http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum83/3860.htm

Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on June 16, 2008 at 6:38pm

So perhaps for the locale switcher on GE's website, they should have used images instead of text.

I think so.

They might be using some type of server-side script to do language detection using IP geolocation information or user-agent sniffing, etc. These wouldn't be perfect, but probably accommodate most common scenarios.

You can do this to guess the country. I think IP geocoding is 95% or more accurate for countries. Another approach is using javascript to detect the browser's language preferences. Its important to also allow users to change the locale with the UI in case they are:
1. Traveling in another country. At internet cafes they don't control the browsers language preferences.
2. In a country where more than one language is spoken.
3. Geocoding is wrong.

Permalink Reply by Christopher Kobayashi on June 16, 2008 at 11:00pm

Its important to also allow users to change the locale with the UI in case they are ...

Good points and I agree.

Google seems to handle switching languages nicely.

[1] http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/var_1c.html