Music Titles Lost In Translation In New Hong Kong iTunes Store
by Brent Dirks
July 5, 2012
Along with the increasing number of countries with an App Store, Apple has also recently expanded the iTunes Store into 12 new Asian territories. But in one country, Hong Kong, there have been some translation issues, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In the song and album titles of the music section, some residents were less than pleased:
On accessing the iTunes store for the first time, some Hong Kong users were irritated to find that the store was listing a number of song titles by the city’s popstars in Mandarin pinyin, a system that transcribes Chinese characters into phonetic Latin script, instead of displaying titles transliterated for the Cantonese language, which is spoken by the majority of the population.While that may not seem like a huge deal, there is a bit of historical perspective:
A former British colony, Hong Kong returned to mainland Chinese rule in 1997, but has stayed proudly loyal to its own native dialect and customs. Many locals resent the intrusion of Mandarin—which China’s government has promoted for decades as the official language across the border—and fear that Cantonese, spoken by 96% of the population, is gradually being shunted aside.You would think that Apple, wanting to increase its presence in Asia, wouldn’t have made that mistake. But I suspect the translation staff in Cupertino is as badly understaffed as the App Review team is. For our international readers, what do you think of the translations in the App Store? Have you ever run into problems like the Hong Kong residents? Source: The Wall Street Journal Via: iDownloadBlog
