Ericsson Breaks Chinese Language Barrier At A Stroke
By Jeremy Scott-Joynt
27-FEB-98
Ericsson plans to extend its lead in China's telecoms market by introducing mobile phones and devices which can understand written Chinese, in the hope of pushing the take-up of mobile technology.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ The Swedish vendor will license technology from a Canadian company, Zi Corp, which specializes in Chinese language processing.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ The system Ericsson is particularly interested in, Zi-8, allows Chinese speakers to use just ten keys to input text in the complex characters that make up the language and with the minimum of relearning.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ In the future, according to a Zi Corp spokesman, Zi-8 will also allow stylus input, opening the door to, for instance, the PDA handsets and mobile data devices under development by all the major manufacturers. Voice activated input is also a possibility.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ An Ericsson spokesman explained that the key to driving take-up in China's massive market was making it as intuitive to use phones and devices as it was for people in the West. "Users have to understand the Roman alphabet to use the phones at the moment," he said. "The idea with this is to provide them with an interface that works for them."
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Ericsson would not say when phones incorporating Zi-8 would become available.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Versions of the system for Japanese and Korean written languages, which are derived from Chinese, should follow later this year, Zi's spokesman added.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Mobile handsets available in China today are largely ports of existing Western terminals. Although menus may have been translated into Chinese characters, the phones cannot accept entry in Chinese. This makes phone books and SMS messaging difficult for Chinese-language users to use intuitively.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Chinese is written in ideograms, representing units of meaning rather than individual sounds. And pronunciation is rarely the key to comprehension: the tone used, and the context within the sentence, are far more important than the phonetic spelling.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Although written Chinese is almost uniform, barring some variations between the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the spoken language exists in dozens of dialects. The only way a Mandarin speaker from Beijing can communicate with a Cantonese speaker from Guangdong is through the common writing system.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Zi's system uses the fact that the pen strokes that make up every Chinese character are written in a rigid order. By simplifying the 36 different strokes into eight basic categories - the other two buttons are for wildcards - users who can write Chinese can relatively easily use Zi-8 by simply spelling out which strokes, in which order, make up each character. |
