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Not true. Nearly all text in Japanese print media, ads, brochures, websites, video games, etc. is left-to-right horizontal. Only books and some magazines are wr
by dudeinjapan 4y ago
Not true. Nearly all text in Japanese print media, ads, brochures, websites, video games, etc. is left-to-right horizontal. Only books and some magazines are written in vertical columns. Anyway, this again is not an insurmountable technical hurdle that held back Japan's otherwise burgeoning software industry.
- Retric 4y agoYou misunderstood, the fact that the language does both means the design space is different. Stuff that would seem natural in Japanese would seem very odd in English. Similarly there are far more people fluent in English so small dev teams can reach a much larger audience without considering translation issues.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoWell, yes, to some degree this does affect localization in the US for software that was originally built in Japan. However, given that the Japanese character sets are more demanding than US character sets, it would usually mean that software made in JP is easier to port to US, and not the other way around. Emoji for example came from Japanese mobile phones ("e" pronounced "ay" means picture, and "moji" means letter)