CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Just wanted to give the community a sneak peak at CiviCRM in Japanese. There is a very large project going on in Japan by edTrends to fully localize CiviCRM in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai. Unfortunately the word play on Civi+CRM is completely lost on our audience.

There are a number of differences in the Japanese version primarily factoring a great deal of things that are unique to Japan that goes well beyond language. For example, in the west your date of birth would be expressed using the Gregorian calendar 1975/01/15 in Japan all official documents and dates must use a Japanese calendar which is based off of era or the reign of power of each Japanese Emperors time on the thrown. So instead of year you would use the emperors era name plus the year of the emperors time on the thrown. Showa (Emperor Hirohito) 1=1926, Heisei (Emperor Akahito) 1=1989, and so on. Iit resets back to year 1 when a new emperor comes to power.

Thats just a small illustration of the differences in how Japanese data is managed. I assure you it gets stranger than that.

The beautiful difference in culture, with respect, impressive... yes!