Cheap Web Thrills: Foreign Languages and Mac OSX

© 2003 Lawrence I. Charters

Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 25, no. 3, May-June 2003, pp. 67-68.

Apple’s Advertising talks about all the wonderful things you can do with Mac OS X, from making movies to chatting with friends using instant messaging to surfing the net to — well, almost anything. And while they have mentioned that Mac OS X comes “with full Unicode support and thousands of dollars worth of high-quality fonts” for reading non-Roman languages, this isn’t all that obvious in daily use. Chinese and Japanese are built-in? Where?

The easy answer is: launch a Web browser. To be specific, a Mac OS X-native Web browser. Apple’s Safari Web browser does a particularly good job of displaying non-Roman fonts, but you can get comparable quality from Mozilla 1.3, Netscape 7.02, Camino 0.7, OmniWeb 4.1.1, and even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.2.2. (There are other Mac OS X Web browsers out there, and they’re probably just as capable, but how many browsers does the average person need, anyway?) About the only browser that can’t do this trick is Lynx, the Terminal-based, text-only Unix browser. Lynx is much like a Model T: it will show you any language you want, as long as it is written in Roman characters, only.

One of the easiest ways to show the multi-language capability is to visit that pillar of British culture and civilization, the British Broadcasting Corporation Web site. Almost from its inception, the BBC has been a powerful tool for bringing the British point of view to the globe-spanning British Empire. And while the Empire may be a shadow of its former glory, the BBC continues to be a world-class news source, and it displays that news on its Web site in native Albanian, Arabic, Azeri, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, French … If you aren’t running Mac OS X, go out and get a copy. If your Mac isn’t capable of running Mac OS X, go out and get a new machine. Then fire up your favorite browser and visit:

http:/ /www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

where you can pick from 43 different languages. Even if you don’t understand a word of Urdu or Hindi or Arabic or Chinese, you can’t help but be impressed.

This composite of six screens shows the opening page of the BBC's Worldwide Service Web site in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi and Urdu, plus a sixth screen showing all the available languages on the right. Switching from one language to another is as simple, in Mac OS X, as picking them off the list.
This composite of six screens shows the opening page of the BBC’s Worldwide Service Web site in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi and Urdu, plus a sixth screen showing all the available languages on the right. Switching from one language to another is as simple, in Mac OS X, as picking them off the list.

The criterion for BBC’s selection of languages is worthy of comment, but repeated queries to them failed to elicit a response. The inhabitants of former colonies use many of the languages listed, which is probably why the BBC offers them. Some of the languages were probably offered in response to Cold War politics. But you won’t find, for example, Japanese.

So fire up your trusty browser and go to the Web site for the Nihon Sumo Kyokai, the Japan Sumo Association. Sumo is the world’s oldest professional sport, dating back roughly two thousand years, and the Nihon Sumo Kyokai thoughtfully provides much of the site in English, too:

http:/ / www.sumo.or.jp/

While the BBC doesn't offer pages in Japanese, Nihon Sumo Kyokai (the Japan Sumo Association) does. Modern Japanese is a difficult language to support on a Web site since a single page might use two different Japanese character sets, plus a Chinese character set, plus a Roman character set. Then add in different styles of characters and — things can get complicated.
While the BBC doesn’t offer pages in Japanese, Nihon Sumo Kyokai (the Japan Sumo Association) does. Modern Japanese is a difficult language to support on a Web site since a single page might use two different Japanese character sets, plus a Chinese character set, plus a Roman character set. Then add in different styles of characters and — things can get complicated.

Look around; they frequently post QuickTime clips of interviews, interesting matches, and bits of history.

Mac OS X: good in any language.