Android phones & East Asian language support

Until a few years ago, mobile phones were a strictly national business. If you frequently travelled to Asia or simply wanted to send a message in an Asian language, you had no choice but to buy an Asian mobile phone. Except for a limited number of devices, only high-end phones were capable of handling Unicode text and far-eastern character sets. Thankfully, with the advent of smart phones, and especially Google's open source Android operating system, all this has changed, and mobile phones have become much more international. Today it is possible to have one mobile phone and install support for a whole set of different languages. This tutorial will show you how to do exactly that on your Android phone.

Installing input methods for Chinese,Japanese or Korean

First, we will tell you how to input Chinese and Japanese text on your Android device by way of an "Input Method", or "IME", a programme that converts what you type into Chinese or Japanese characters. This works exactly the same way as on your computer, so there is not a lot to learn here if you're already writing in Chinese on your computer. We'll also briefly cover Korean language input for the sake of completeness, but haven't tested the necessary programmes ourselves.

A limited number of Android phones come with input methods for Asian languages preinstalled. But if that's not the case, head over to the Android Market and install the input methods from there.

• For Simplified Chinese: Google Pinyin IME (com.google.android.inputmethod.pinyin)
• For Traditional Chinese (Zhuyin/Bopomofo and Cangjie input): android-tc-ime (com.googlecode.tcime)
• For Japanese: OpenWnn (com.pm9.flickwnn)
• For Korean: Google Korean IME (com.google.android.inputmethod.korean)

Sogou and Baidu also offer input methods for Chinese, but Google's is the best and doesn't phone home as much ;) I can't give you an advice for Cantonese, unfortunately, since I'm not familiar with the language, but there are a number of apps available on the Android market. Make sure you read the reviews before you install anything, though.

Talking about phoning home, though: This method has one downside. The Japanese OpenWnn input method from the Android market lists full internet access as a requirement. I am not exactly sure why an input method would need this privilege. The only logical reason I can think of is that the developer is trying to compile a database of phrases people type, in order to make the input method more precise. Google Pinyin IME for Windows used to take data from Google's massive search engine business to increase prediction precision. And since its Android counterpart also requires internet access, it might just do the same. But the difference with OpenWnn is that the default OpenWnn version that comes preinstalled with uncustomized Android (i.e. an original Android version not modified by your phone's vendor), and which is also preinstalled on the Android SDK & Emulator, doesn't require internet access. If you're a little into command line hacking, we will show you in an upcoming tutorial how to install the Android SDK and pull this "clean" version of OpenWnn from a virtual Android device.

Activating and using the Input Method

After installing your Input Method, go to Home -> Settings -> Language & Keyboard and activate it (i.e. touch the input method until the little check mark lights up green). After that, open any application or window where you want to enter Chinese, Japanese or Korean text. Press and hold the input box where you want to type until a small dialogue box comes up that gives you an option to change the input method. Select your desired input method and type away!

You can find more information on the details of installing and setting up Chinese input methods on Pinyin Joe's homepage, here and here. Joe's page is, by the way, an excellent resource for all things related to Chinese language input on computers in general, and has helped me countless times.

Changing your system language to Chinese, Japanese or Korean

If you want to take it one step further, you can convert your whole phone to another language. Again, this may not be possible on all phones, as most vendors remove this option or only allow you to choose from a very limited number of languages. Your first stop is Menu -> Settings -> Language & Keyboard -> Select Locale. If you're lucky, you can select your desired language right there. If not, you'll have to take a detour.

Besides the language option in your Android settings, there should be an app called "Custom Locale" in your home menu. Open the app via Menu -> Custom Locale, scroll down until you find the desired locale (zh_CN for simplified Chinese, ja_JP for Japanese, ko_KR for Korean), press and hold the entry until a dialogue box comes up. Click "Apply" and enjoy your brand new Chinese or Korean Android. Note that on some phones you have to reboot the system to get rid of the last artifacts of the old language.

If you don't have any app by the name of "Custom Locale" on your phone then it was removed by your phone's vendor. Again, a virtual Android device would come in handy here, as you could simply pull the .apk package to install Custom Locale from the virtual machine. However, there is a 3rd party app available on the Android market called "LocaleSwitch" (com.aokabi.android.localeswitch) which does the job as well.

This is basically everything you need to know to fully convert your phone to Chinese, Japanese, Korean or any other language. Android is the ideal system for people who travel between different countries and frequently need to switch between system languages and locales. Enjoy!