11 Sep
2007
11 Sep
'07
6:33 a.m.
On 11/09/2007, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Most cases - even modern PCs - seem to have at least something stuck to the
front which isn't part of the basic underlying moulding. It hardly seems like
rocket science to regoinalise what amounts to a printed label knocked up in a
design package.
Well...
(1) It's more labour.
(2) Labels could be misapplied.
(3) Labels will possibly wear off or fall off in time
but mostly
(4) all the problems I enumerated of localising the kit and making
sure the right things are shipped to the right places, and the
problems of moving kit from one country to another, still apply.
Why do you think they bother with those multi-language instruction
pamphlets? Because it means they can ship the same sealed box in any
market.
OK; I wouldn't travel to France without knowing some French.
D'accord, absolutement.
Liam Proven wrote:
Education /in Britain/. It was the *BBC* Micro.
I think you missed my point. It wasn't a typical general-purpose 'home'
machine of the time, it was a machine designed primarily for a specific market
- namely one where the majority of the users would be children who were
actively encouraged to be plugging things into the machine.
(unfortunately the only technical spec I have is 09/1981 and just states
"colour scheme and markings to be agreed by BBC" - it doesn't detail the
thinking about the labeling)
Er, yes, I follow that, but I confess I do fail to see the relevance?
> BBC micro, got this right! Proper words on the
ports..
The BBC Micro, a machine designed in England for Brits.
I suspect it was more that
the primary market was education, so it made sense
to be as user-friendly as possible by stating exactly what each port was. Given that manuals and software have to be
regionalised for the intended
market, it hardly seems much effort on the part of the manufacturer to issue
case decals that are also regionalised. There seems little excuse for a
pictogram that might be ambiguous in *all* languages just because the
manufacturer was lazy or was trying to save a few pennies.
I think that is absolute reverse of the case, actually. Printing a new
manual is cheap; redesigning case mouldings or even just what's
printed onto the case means retooling production lines, producing
different models for different markets, tracking which country each
machine is destined for... Vast amounts of complexity. I suspect the number of times that a person is plonked
in front of an alien
machine with absolutely no knowledge of the written language of the country
from which the machine is from is pretty small. In most cases it would only
happen when the person is visiting a foreign country, and in that case you'd
expect them to be making an effort to understand the language anyway.
I think you believe that because you speak the world's most widespread
international language. I wouldn't go to
Japan without learning Japanese.
Hai, so desu ne.
To not do so would just be an insult to the
people of the country that I'm visiting, not to mention downright rude.
I agree. It's the main reason I have a smattering of German, Spanish,
Swedish and so on.
Now, if I were in a situation where I was going abroad
and going to be
plugging bits of hardware together (rather than merely anticipating being a
user of an assembled machine - in an office or Internet cafe, say) then it
hardly seems difficult to extend my education to the few necessary words
needed to figure out ports on a computer.
It's not about occasional visitors; it's about natives.
In fact that's probably even easier for me than
being in a foreign country
where I'm not fluent in the language and am faced with a bunch of mysterious
pictograms - not having the port functions spelled out actually makes it
worse, because I not only have to ask what the ports are in the native tongue,
but also interpret the response (so I still need to know what 'printer',
'serial' etc. is anyway)
That's not the manufacturer's problem. They probably supplied a little
leaflet in 20 languages explaining what does what. If you're a Kazakh,
tough, but then, you probably couldn't afford it anyway. Read the
Russian.
(sorry, pet peeve, but people who bumble into foreign
countries and expect to
communicate solely in their own tongue rather annoy me!)
Entirely agree.
--
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