Mobile phone menu

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