Cool Infographics Book in Chinese!

I was finally able to get my own printed copy of the Chinese translated version of the Cool Infographics book! According to my publisher, Wiley, it has been translated into Simplified Chinese, and Orthodox Chinese, Korean and Russian versions are still in the works. The Chinese version is available in the US through Amazon.

Of course, the only way I can tell what the Chinese translation says is to translate it back into English with the Google Translate app. They translated the title "Cool Infographics" into 可视化沟通, which translates back to English as "Visual Communication". I know the app isn't perfect, but you can get the general meaning.

Just under 5% of the Cool Infographics web traffic comes from China, so I know there are a lot of fans there.

I had to work with the Wiley editors to get the chapter colors to show up along the page edges. My thoughts were that it's a visual communication book, and you should be able to find the chapters visually! The translated version got that right too:

 

Market and Competitive Intelligence Trends

Meidata brings us the Market and Competitive Intelligence Trends infographic that covers the sources and uses of competitive intelligence online and related Internet trends that affect the availability of information.

Meidata is a company in Israel, but has clients from around the world.  The infographic is based on their own internal information from global customers and system statistics, so this information is not available anywhere else in the world.

Designed by Robert Ungar at Meidata, the design is colorful and easy to follow.  A great design overall.  One of his best design accomplishments is the language translation.  More than merely pasting the translated text, the design has to account for the change in direction between Hebrew and English, and still tell a smooth story.

You can view the original design in Hebrew, and they just released an English language version (above) on their site, and you can download either the English PDF or the Hebrew PDF.

Thanks to Shaul from Meidata for sending in the link, providing the information and the English translated version.

Rogue Infographics - The Empowered E-Patient Translated into Chinese

I found one of my recent client infographics, The Empowered E-Patient, translated and posted on a Chinese site, www.mazingtech.com (along with many others), but it’s not a version that I designed.  I also had to view the site using this link with Google Translate.  Someone has downloaded the original image file, translated all of the text into Chinese and then reposted the infographic.

Let me start by saying that although I designed the original infographic, I don’t think I have a big problem with someone else translating it and republishing it without my permission (or involvement) in this way.  It was done very well, and the client I designed it for feels the same way.

Here you can see the original and the translated version side-by-side:

You can see that someone spent some time with an image editing program trying to do this right and make it look official.  The Chinese text is the same size and color as the original English, and was very carefully positioned.  The visuals were left intact, as were all of the logos, website addresses and even the copyright information.  

Technically, I think this would be considered a copyright violation, but it’s not like another site is claiming ownership or directing traffic to a new, different destination site.  Because of the care that was taken, if this infographic is reaching more people because of the translation, it would be successfully driving more awareness and traffic to the PathOfTheBlueEye.com site.  That was the whole point of the original infographic in the first place!

One issue is that because I wasn’t part of the translation process, I don’t know that it was translated correctly.  If there actually is some existing demand to view this in Chinese, I could have offered that service to my client to make sure that we were happy with the translation.

It’s worth noting, that there are MANY English infographics that have translated into Chinese on this site, but the navigation to find them is very difficult.  Here are a few more from other designers that I have posted before on Cool Infographics, but have been translated and reposted in Chinese.  (You can click the titles to see the original English version I posted)

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