infundibulum

I’m subscribed to some news feeds that send me updates with articles about translation, and here’s the latest one I came across:

Speaking the same language

Police are reaching out to migrant communities, with information in seven languages now available on the force’s national website.

Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Somali and Vietnamese speakers can now access police information online.

The site which was translated by NZ Translation Centre explains how to contact local police and liaison officers as well as giving tips on crime prevention and safety tips.

So I took a look at the site itself:

New Zealand Police Official Website

All said, it’s a pretty nice site — they’ve done a good job localizing it. One interesting bit, however: the character encodings aren’t consistent.

I suppose there are compelling reasons to use those legacy encodings for Korean and Japanese — but it really doesn’t make sense to encode English as Latin-1, when the same site is using UTF-8 for a language like Somali, whose alphabet is strictly “roman” characters.

It seems to me that they’ll be looking at more headaches down the road as a result of not just going ahead and serving the whole site in a single encoding.