This has got to be one of the most irritating things. Japanese text is already alien enough to many people, but when it turns into real incomprehensible gibberish, things get worse. That’s what Mojibake (文字化け) is.
Recently, I’ve been sending emails and MMSes to a couple of my Japanese friends’ keitai email. Wanting to make it easier for them to read, I decided to type fully in Japanese. I was rather confident that they could read it, especially for the MMSes, since my phone was running on a Japanese firmware. It turned out that I was wrong about it.
Be it from hotmail or my phone, all the Japanese text turned out to be mojibake. All that could be read was the english text and the kaomoji (顔文字). Due to the character encoding problems, this occurs.
I have already sent quite a number of mails out to people such as a Japanese homestay student who is coming over in a couple of weeks, and a friend whom i met during my part time job as a guide. With all mails being in full Japanese, it would mean that all the mails were total alien signs. You know, like those kind you see in the movies before aliens start invading Earth. Now, they would probably think I’m some spammer who has nothing better to do, or that my mails are typed in a really foreign language like Tamil.
When I realised that I had been sending Mojibake all this while, I immediately started sending my mails in English. Fortunately, everyone whom I have sent the english mails to have replied, except for the one I met during my part-time. I’m guessing that she isn’t going to reply. Sheez.
Sigh. Sending mails to keitai mail is such a complicated thing. You have to look out for mail addresses that have over excessive dots, then worry about the character encoding. The Japanese should really use their computers on a more frequent basis ^^
Mojibake is classic problem in Japanese text.
Japanese k-tai/mobile has sometimes decoding problem for non de-facto standard coding format. I frequently has expecience of UTF-8 decode problem.
That’s why I sometimes send ro-maji Japanese text to a Japanese mobile from a mobile.
(ex. Konbannha, ashita no yoru Akiba ni ikimasenka?)
I see, so the decoding problem happens on all Japanese phones. But I wonder why I couldn’t send an MMS with a Japanese phone in Singapore to a Japanese phone in Japan, without the Japanese characters all turning into mojibake.