Using Chinese in application user interfaces

Chinese can be a poetic and fantastically expressive language. And it's to my everlasting regret that I didn't take it more seriously when I was a schoolboy. That's because as my proficiency and exposure in my chosen trade increased and I eventually started learning how to make mobile apps, I discovered that UTF-8 was a great boon, because it allowed me to write Chinese characters in HTML.

What, you might ask, is the significance of Chinese characters in a mobile app? The answer, dear readers, is plenty.

You see, the one thing that a developer is always in need of, on a mobile app, is screen space. Due to small screen sizes, I'm always looking for creative ways to fit whatever functionality or information on that tiny screen. And where real estate is concerned, Chinese really saves the day.

Compactness

One Chinese character takes up one character space on screen. In fact, one Chinese character is one Chinese word! Therefore, text justification doesn't really apply to Chinese characters. Neither do word breaks.

Consider the example below from A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Now the Chinese version (just a Google translation). You can probably see how compact the entire paragraph is - no spaces wasted.

那是最美好的时光，那是最糟糕的时光，那是智慧的时代，那是愚昧的时代，那是信仰的时代，那是怀疑的时代，那是光明的时代， 是黑暗的季节，是希望的春天，是绝望的冬天，我们眼前的一切，眼前的一切，我们都直接去天堂，我们都直接去天堂– 简而言之，这一时期与目前的时期如此遥远，以至于它的一些喧闹的当局坚持以最高的比较程度来接受它是好是坏。

Chinese characters
are compact.

The side effect of this is that we can cram a lot more information into one paragraph than we could with English... or any other language that uses the English alphabet. That's no small thing when you consider how much screen space there really is on your typical mobile app.

Conciseness

Remember I said the Chinese language was expressive? In the previous examples, I showed how a lot more words could be crammed into one space. Now, I'm going do the opposite - I will show you how much visual space a piece of information takes in different languages.

Take the word "welcome".

In English, it takes 7 character spaces.

welcome

In Malay, it's worse. It takes 11 character spaces.

akan datang

In Chinese? It takes 2 character spaces. Two!

欢迎

Imagine if so much information could be represented in that little amount of horizontal spacing, how much space a mobile app developer could save by using Chinese, and how much more space there would be to play with.

The Chinese Conclusion

The advantages of using Chinese as a medium for mobile apps, similarly applies to other Asian languages like Japanese, Burmese and Korean. Of course, the fact that English is almost universally known, is a huge point in its favor. But Chinese is catching up. And the China market is nothing to sniff at.

Thanks and goodbye! 谢谢, 拜拜!
T___T