

Gif showing the Facebook homepage in different languages.

Today there is a lot of talk about machine translation, by “translation” here I mean: to make content and platforms available in languages in which they were not originally produced.

I myself have written a lot about textual translation here on the blog, and is an issue that is properly debated among academics and in the media in general. Precisely because of the immense technical challenges of translating words and linguistic concepts from one language to another some other aspects of translation ended up being overshadowed.

I mean, when talking about this subject people usually only take into account a textual translation, not taking into consideration a “translation”, an adaptation, of the layout, design and aesthetic standards of a particular site or platform to another culture. A visual translation, per se.

Engines such as Google Translator and others restrict themselves to just pick up a webpage and replace the HTML pieces containing the words from language X with the ones from language Y.

But of course, this ignores profound differences regarding design conceptions of different cultures. For example, something very simple: in languages like Arabic and Hebrew is read from right to left, so the whole positioning of the page should be changed. If you really expect a translation from a media to other language, these differences in design must be taken into account.



Unfortunately, today not even this more rough and simple adaptation of, for example, readjusting or reorganizing the page, is performed in a proper manner. As we can see in the translation above of the Chinese site 163 that presents serious problems in the organization of the page layout and regarding the typeface in which the page is displayed in the Latin alphabet after the transliteration.



There is still the buttons problem, as we can notice at the top of the right corner of the page, in which the button text is not translated because it was an image. Solving problems like this would require the use of computer vision, similar to what we use on our smartphones to translate sign and signboards in the real world when viewed through its screens.



Differences in the layout of an article in the English Wikipedia and the Arabic Wikipedia.



This example above is still relatively simple, even a current algorithm could, for example, to adapt a Wikipedia article so that when it was translated from Arabic to English, or vice versa, the positioning of menus, toolbars, and other elements were inverted. That would be simple to do because it is a page with billions of visitors and has well-established guidelines and layout patterns (which in turn makes it easy to create an algorithm to adapt visual elements from one culture to the other). The same can be said in relation to platforms like Facebook, that, by the way, does a very good job of adapting the layout and user experience of its platform to different languages and cultures.



Differences between the Brazilian news website UOL and the Chinese portal QQ.

It’s not exactly the aim of this text, but I believe it would be worthwhile to briefly discuss the reasons why such huge distinction occurs. And this obviously includes many factors, such as the own innate grammatical differences between the two languages, for example, there are no capital letters nor spaces in Chinese. There are also no italic texts in such language.

You also have to take into account other aesthetic and design tastes. In the same way that, if you go to a typical Japanese or Saudi house, you will realize that they have differences in decoration and architecture, as you can notice in this publication illustrating the varied houses architectural styles around the world. These differences in virtual layouts are just a reflection of the real world ones.



Famous Japanese street, “Dōtonbori” , surrounded by billboards.

For example, some argue that Chinese and Japanese sites have such a large information density, in part due to the fact that many Asian cities are like the photo above.

Also, of course, it has to be taken into account cultural influences of the West. I mean, Japanese and Chinese have grammatical and alphabetical similarities, however, Japanese sites have a much greater resemblance to the West ones. Which I believe occurred due to the fact that Japan was much more influenced by Western concepts, and that therefore including design notions, than China. What certainly has to do with the issue regarding the country’s isolationist policy, that existed up to the 60s and 70s.

Finally, there must be also taken into consideration, particularly in the China situation, which is the most populated country in the world and it’s a country where an absolute majority of people access the Internet through mobile phones and through a slow connection, so, therefore, the matter of limitation in bandwidth, as well as screens sizes and other more technical aspects might also be one of the factors.

I believe we can draw a parallel between the situation presented here and the dilemmas regarding adaptations in translations of movies and series.

I mean, it’s not “wrong” if you, for example, decide to keep the original layout, with the bars and other visual elements of a platform inverted. In the same way that it is not “wrong” if you keep the original references when dubbing a movie.

But often it sounds weird at a first side and you have difficulties understanding the references if you’re not immersed in that culture. And I think that’s the point in question. It reminds me of one time when I was watching the movie “Lost in Translation” dubbed in Portuguese, and the character, who would be interviewed by a famous Japanese talk show host, says:

“He’s the Jô Soares of Japan.” (Jô Soares is a famous Brazilian talk show host)

In the original quote he was referring to the American talk show host Johnny Carson that, obviously, most Brazilians wouldn’t know and therefore wouldn’t understand the reference. I know that it may look like a “silly” problem, even an unimportant one compared to, perhaps, more relevant issues, as the difficulty to improve textual translations performed by machines. But it is something that, nevertheless, I believe, deserves a deep consideration.

I believe that a visual and aesthetic adaptation is necessary for most applications and platforms. Although, of course, depending on the situation, in some more specific projects, we should stick more to the author’s original concept. Forgive me if these two things might sound somewhat contradictory, but I believe you guys got my point. This, by the way, goes into that question regarding the philosophy of changing a particular work of art (and I believe that a web page, that the layout of an application or platform is an artistic expression of their creator).

If you are interested in this subject, about how we could use algorithms and artificial intelligence to facilitate these automatic design adjustments, I deeply discuss this in my text “The Automation of The “Technical Part” of Art: The Use of Artificial Intelligence in The Artistic Creation”.

But, in a nutshell, many of these problems wouldn’t need a complex tool of “automatic design adaptation” to be solved, sites such as Wikipedia and certain blogs and pages with fewer options within them would be relatively easier to adjust it, I believe. On the other hand, news portals with many sessions, links, and tools, such as the two Chinese sites mentioned above, certainly would need a higher level of AI to adapt them.

To conclude, I leave the image below, which I believe illustrates in a very good way the symbol of an internationalized visual identity, which is so much necessary in this globalized world.



Sources:

• Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese Layouts in User Interface and User Experience Design (Interesting article talking about how to adapt the layout of a platform or application to another language)

• Global by Design – Creating a world-ready web design – UX Magazine (Article giving advice on how to create a global design for your platform)

• Why does Chinese web design look so ‘busy’?, Why does Chinese web design look so ‘busy’ – Part two – Econsultancy e “Why Is Chinese Web Design So Bad?” (Articles talking about the differences of Chinese websites and why they are the way they are)

• Can You Name The Brands Behind These 20 Translated Logos (Interesting article showing different multinational corporations logos adapted to different countries and cultures)

• Visual Translation: A New Way to Design a Chinese Typeface Based on an Existing Latin Typeface (Article about the internationalization of corporate logos and the transliteration of Latin typefaces to Chinese typefaces)