By looking at the error message that was generated by Amazon when I was updating my contact info, I had the feeling that the website did not like the name of my country.
In fact, this is an example of the details you need to pay attention to when you are managing a multilingual website, especially at the level of interaction design.
Languages are always full of surprises …
Remember my last post about me dreaming about the new MacBook Pro? It contained a word (in fact 2) that may seem a bit strange to some readers. I thought it could be a good idea to describe it in more details, specially since Wikipedia has a quite complete entry for this concept:
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Computational linguists were formerly usually computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that language is much more complex than previously thought, so computational linguistics work teams are now sometimes interdisciplinary, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics). Computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists and logicians, amongst others.
This week’s word I have selected is mnemonic or mnemonic techniques. Read my related post or what Wikipedia says about it:
Mnemonics are often verbal, something such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something. They are often used to remember lists. Mnemonics rely not only on repetition to remember facts, but also on associations between easy-to-remember constructs and lists of data, based on the principle that the human mind much more easily remembers data attached to spatial, personal or otherwise meaningful information than that occurring in meaningless sequences. The sequences must make sense though. If a random mnemonic is made up, it is not necessarily a memory aid.
How many times are you asked for a login name and password in a day? How many Personal Identification Numbers (PIN), door codes, digicodes, IDs do you have? How many of these do you remember each and every time?As far as I’m concerned, I havePersonal Identification Number (PIN) for:
Logins and passwords for:
Not to mention all these Medical insurance numbers, private and professional telephone numbers, addresses, names, and so on.Luckily enough, most of the applications (Mozilla, IExplorer, E-mail clients, FTP clients, etc.) have a “save password” functionality, which helps a lot to remember the login information. But what about the others? Can you imagine writing down all your passwords on a sheet of paper and check it every time you have to enter a PIN code on your cell phone or retrieving cash at an ATM? Not a good idea.The only option left is to learn these random sets of numbers by heart, either by developing your artificial memory through the use of mnemonic our memory aids or by visualizing them on a keypad, keyboard or any other support.Read more about the word of the week: mnemonic techniques.
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