Mobile phone menu

I have been involved in a localization project of a mobile phone company for quite a while. Localization means that all the display menus and users' guides of a product, in my case, a mobile phone, should be translated into Bahasa Indonesia without disregarding local standards and cultural norms.

Recently my manager in Singapore sent me a series of questions for the purpose of collecting Indonesian language specific conventions, one of which deals with date format as follows: What order is used in Bahasa Indonesia's date format? Is it date- month-year, or month-date-year?

What are the separators used, periods or dashes? What is common usage of the long version of dates? Is it "4 Maret 2001" or "Maret 4 2001"?

Does it need a leading zero (4-3-2001 or 04-03-2001)?

The same questions arise with the use of time format, whether leading zeros are needed in writing, for example, five minutes past nine. Is it 9.5 or 09.05 of 9.05? Are periods or colons used as separators?

To find out the answers I referred to the general guidelines for Bahasa Indonesia released by the Language Center (Pusat Bahasa) and the guidelines published by several publishers including Gramedia but only some questions were answered. The guidelines are therefore far from complete.

As an official institution in the development and standardization of Indonesian, the Center should provide guidelines which are as complete as possible.

It should even provide the English version so that foreign localization engineers involved in similar projects would have a reference besides, of course, a good bilingual Indonesian dictionary.

Recently the leadership of the Language Center was handed over from Mr. Hasan Alwi to Mr. Dendy Sugono. It is hoped that as the new head of the Center, Mr. Sugono will speed up the development of Bahasa Indonesia. As a first step, he may want to make amendments to the general guidelines, making them more complete and also providing an English version.

ADRIANUS HIYUNG TJUNG

Jakarta