Google has announced the launch of messages for Japan a site where people around the world could input messages for Japan in their own languages and have them automatically translated into Japanese while raising funds to help Japan. While this is a very noble and noteworthy cause, I couldn’t help but notice in their promotional youtube video for the website that the Arabic text entered was inverted entered from left to right as you can see from the image below:
Now not taking anything away from the actual idea, I think its nice that some people out there are concerned with the situation going on in Japan after the horrible disasters they’ve went through. But I mean doesn’t Google have a single Arab employee that told them “Whoa hold up there!” they don’t even have to be fluent in Arabic to tell them this is wrong, I guess I wouldn’t be annoyed as much if it was some smaller corporation or the fact that they displayed at least a dozen other languages, should I assume that all the other languages are wrong too? Probably not all of them just the ones that read from right to left.
True, that's what we're talking about.
Thanks for this post. As a big fan of anything Japanese, I applaud any action that tries to assist the nation in anyway. However, you are correct in your comment that a company as big as google shouldnt be making such a mistake, it makes Arabs feel neglected. It also gives the impression that the release was rushed and not well planned which is odd considering they already have the technological infrastructure from google translate.