You can now use Tabple in Japanese
People who work in Japanese can now use the Tabple web app in Japanese (日本語). Screen text, emails and push notifications, error messages, public pages and all 44 help guides are translated. The public pages are at tabple.com/ja. If you have an account, choose 日本語 under Language in settings and the app switches too. It doesn’t switch on its own from your browser’s language, and this post covers the web app only.
I assumed translating would be the whole job, but many parts needed more than that. Here is where I got stuck and how I fixed it.
What shows up in Japanese
App screens: more than 9,000 strings
Emails, push notifications and error messages: the messages the app sends out follow the same rules
Public pages and help guides: there are 44 guides
87 routine templates and 164 calendar decorations: including the names of 99 stickers
Dates and repeat rules: dates read like 「8月21日(金)」 (Friday, August 21) and repeats like 「毎週 月・水・金」 (every week on Mon, Wed and Fri), the way Japanese writes them
Subtitles for the intro video: the video itself is the English one, with Japanese subtitles added
Where it took more than translation
Korean fonts redraw Japanese kanji
The fonts on screen were chosen for Korean. When one of them also draws Japanese kanji and kana (the Japanese letters), the same kanji come out in the shapes used in Korea. On Japanese screens, the app now puts the Japanese fonts installed on the device first.
Line breaking differs too. Korean screens use a rule that keeps a word from being split across lines (word-break: keep-all). That fits Korean, which puts spaces between words, but Japanese has almost none, so with the rule on, lines rarely wrap. On Japanese screens I turned it off and switched on the strictest line-breaking rules (line-break: strict), which among other things keep a small kana or the long-vowel mark 「ー」 from starting a line. The preview image that appears when you share a link (OG) handles line breaks for Japanese separately for the same reason.
This work also turned up an old problem. Every web page carries a tag saying which language it is written in (lang), and ours always said Korean no matter what the screen showed. That was true of the login and app screens. The tag helps pick the font, and it also tells screen readers which language’s voice to read with, so a Japanese screen could have been read aloud in a Korean voice. It now follows the language you see.
“and 3 others” read oddly in Japanese
When several similar notifications are grouped, the names are shortened to something like “A, B and 3 others”. I was building that sentence the same way for every language, by joining the pieces with plain spaces. The result looked off in all three. Japanese came out as 「A, B ほか 3 人」 with gaps around the number, Korean as 「외 3 명」 and English as 「and 1 others」.
Now the separator between names and the “and N others” part are built per language. Japanese comes out as 「A、Bほか3人」, Korean as 「외 3명」 and English as 「and 1 other」. Japanese doesn’t put spaces between words, and it uses 「、」 as its comma.
What happens when you carry Korean over word for word
After the translation was done, I read the whole thing again and fixed the stiff, literal phrasing. Some Korean words of Chinese origin changed meaning when carried into Japanese as they were.
「生成」 (Korean: saengseong), used where the text meant “make”, became 「作成」. 「生成」 has a more technical ring than a word for writing a document yourself, so Tabple keeps it for things made by AI, automatically or at random.
「修正」 (Korean: sujeong), used to mean “edit”, became 「編集」. In Tabple, 「修正」 is kept for correcting an error.
「書き込みが復旧」 (“writing is restored”) became 「書き込み権限が戻ります」 (“write permission comes back”). 「復旧」 is what you say when recovering from an outage, so it didn’t fit permissions.
One translation made the error for signing up to receive notifications (a “subscription”) read like a billing subscription problem. I also changed the word for a card PIN to 「暗証番号」, the term used in Japan.
Search doesn’t care about hiragana or katakana
Routine template search looks at Korean, English and Japanese keywords together and treats hiragana and katakana as the same letters. Template names include how they are read in kana. A mood recorded on a Japanese device also reads as the same mood when you open it on a Korean or English one.
So that nothing ships blank
Japanese allows no untranslated strings at all. If even one is missing, the check before release stops it. While translating, I also had a program check that no Korean text was left behind and that the spots where values get inserted into a sentence matched the original. For the guides, the check fails if the structure differs from the Korean version or Korean text remains.
There is also a fallback that fills a blank with English. It is a safety net for accidents, not a rule that lets gaps through.
Good to know
This is about the web app. Everything here applies to tabple.com. The other apps aren’t covered in this post.
You pick the language yourself. It doesn’t switch automatically from your browser’s language setting. The address (/ja) and your account setting decide it.
The intro video is the English video. I have no Japanese recording, so only the subtitles are in Japanese.
Where there is no Japanese version, you get English. This blog can now be read in Japanese, too.
If you use it in Japanese and find an awkward phrase or a missing spot, tell me through the contact form and I’ll fix those sentences first. Start at tabple.com/ja.