What the Hell, the Japanese Characters Fit the Switch Just Fine!

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

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
Murilee Martin

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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  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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