What the Hell, the Japanese Characters Fit the Switch Just Fine!
When the Mitsubishi Pajero was brought to these shores, as the Mitsubishi Montero and the Dodge Raider, the bosses at Mitsubishi figured they’d just move the steering wheel to the other side and translate the text on all the controls from Japanese to English, end of story. As I learned while working for a localization company a few years back, this job is not always as simple as it looks.
These days, there’s no way focus groups and multiple layers of PowerPoint-enhanced bureaucracy would ever let hyphenated text get by on a vehicle’s instrument panel, but back in 1980s Japan— for example, on the “SECU-RITY” indicator light on a 1987 Nissan Maxima— engineers were in charge. The message gets across? Fine, we’re done!
As a technical writer, which was my trade for more than a decade prior to getting into this here automotive-journalism racket, I had some of my stuff translated into other languages every once in a while. Going from English into, say, German or French, your text bloats like crazy and you have a hell of a time shrinking your diagrams to make everything fit on your pages. Going from English into a language that uses ideographic characters (e.g., Chinese or Japanese), you find that your stuff now takes up half the space. My guess is that the original tailgate-lock switch on JDM Pajeros had a pair of kanji characters, Mitsubishi paid a few yen to Hideki’s Cut-Rate Localization Service and Drain Opening Company to provide English versions, and it was all good. Seeing this sort of thing is refreshing these days, because focus groups lead to fun-expunged Corollas.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Found a JDM-only car where all controls are in kanji including window switches - the Toyota Crown. Check out its wikipedia page and image at the link below. Murilee, if I can figure out a way to get one of these onto the track for the 24 hours of Lemons (preferably the V12 model), will you waive BS laps? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/1997_Toyota_Century_03.jpg
Lemmy - love the IL-62 avatar. It's "Classic".