为何日本网页设计如此与众不同？ Why Japanese Web Design Is So… Different
In the mind’s eye of many people Japan is a land of tranquil Zen gardens, serene temples, and exquisite tea ceremonies. Both traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, books and magazines are the envy of designers worldwide. Yet for some reason practically none of this mastery has been translated into digital products, in particular websites, most of which look like they hail from around 1998.
日本乃孕育禅宗花园的静谧之地，神龛耸立，茶道妙韵留香。日本是一个传统与现代并存的地方，这一点在日本的建筑上尤为凸显，此间图书杂志设计更是被全世界的设计师们奉为圣地。出于某些原因，这些杰作却未能延续到电子产品上，一些网站的设计看上去很有 90 年代末的“遗风”。
Go on a safari around some of Japan’s most popular sites and here’s what you can expect to find (see Goo, Rakuten, Yomiuri, NicoNico, OKWave, @cosme, and more):
Dense tightly packed text
Tiny low-quality images
More columns than you can count
Bright clashing colours and flashing banners
Overuse of outdated technologies like Flash
逛一逛日本最流行的网站，你会发现：
排得满满当当的文字
篇幅小质量低的图画
多到数不清的分栏
鲜艳的撞色和闪眼的横幅
满目望去都是些老旧技术（比如 Flash）
A beautiful haiku or minimal wabi-sabi they not. The theories for why this is are numerous and I’ve tried to expand on some of the most prevalent below:
为什么会这样呢？我试着归纳出以下原因：
语言差异 Linguistic Differences
Character Comfort – Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese).
字符适应——日文属于意音文字，寥寥数个字符就能包含丰富含义。西方人眼中，这些字符杂乱而令人生惑，但熟悉日语的人就不会，他们还能从窄窄数行中迅速获取讯息（中文也是如此）。
Lacking Emphasis – Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets. This makes it more difficult to create the hierarchical contrasts required to organise information with type alone although many designers get around this by adding decoration or using graphic text.
缺少重点——日文中没有斜体或大写字母，不像拉丁字母那样能从视觉上突出重点。因此设计师只能通过添饰图形文字来弥补日文在信息层次表现力上的不足。
Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted.
语言障碍——网站和驱动网站的程序语言多是由英语使用者或西方公司设计的，因此，大多数的文件资料和教育资源都是用英语写成的，语言上的障碍造成了新技术和新趋势一定程度上的滞后。
文化差异 Cultural Differences
Risk Avoidance – In general Japanese culture does not encourage risk taking or standing out from the crowd. Once a precedent has been set for things looking or behaving a certain way then everybody follows it, regardless of whether there is a better solution. Even Japanese subcultures conform to their own fashions and rules.
风险规避——一般而言，日本文化不鼓励冒险，也“信奉”枪打出头鸟。一旦有了第一个吃螃蟹的人，其他人都会遵循它，而不考虑是否有更好的解决方案。即使是日本的亚文化，也都要遵循他们特有的样式和规则。
Consumer Behaviour – People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here.
消费者行为——做出购买决定前，人们都希望能有高保障性，而冗长的说明和技术规格数据能让他们感到安心。日本民众轻易不会为耸动吸睛的标题或是可爱的图像动摇。“少即是多”在这儿并不完全适用。
Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool.
广告——日本公司通常将网页视为另一个广告平台，以达到最大范围推送信息的目标而已。往往到到了最后，本该用来和用户交流互动的网页变得就像密密麻麻的小册子。
Urban Landscape - Walk around one of Tokyo’s main hubs like Shibuya and you’re constantly bombarded with bright neon advertisements, noisy pachinko parlours (game arcades), and crowds of rambunctious salary men or school kids. The same chaotic busyness of the streets seems to have spilled over to the web. Added to this, because physical space comes at a premium in Japan, none of it is wasted and the same goes for negative/white space on a webpage.
城市景观——漫步东京，中心商圈随处可见耀眼的霓虹，游戏厅的喧闹充盈耳际，身边尽是工薪族和学校的孩子们。混乱忙碌的街道似乎也影响到了网络上。寸土寸金的日本，空间利用做到极致，延伸到虚拟世界，网页上的一点空白也不肯浪费。
Job Roles - Look on any job site in Japan and you’ll still see adverts for roles like “Web Master” and “Web Admin” which hark back to the day when a company would employ a single IT guy to hand-code and run their entire website – many still do. On the other side of the equation, creative people want creative freedom which they’re not likely to find in a large Japanese corporation so they go elsewhere.
工作角色——日本的工作网站上总会有招募“网络能手”和“网络管理员”的广告，仿佛又回到了当年——公司雇一位 IT 人来手编程序，并由他来管理整个网站——现在仍有很多公司是这样做的。另一方面，有创意的人希望能有更多的创作自由，因此不太愿意去日本大公司供职。
技术差异 Technical Differences
Mobile Legacy - Japan was using their version of the mobile web on advanced flip phones long before the iPhone came along and in even larger numbers than had personal computers. Back then the screens were tiny and the way sites had to be designed to cram content into this small space has continued to influence the way things are now.
手机使用习惯——iPhone 尚未问世，日本人就已经在用着先进的长翻盖手机了，直到如今这个习惯仍然影响深远，长翻盖手机的持有量甚至比个人电脑还多。为了适应长翻盖手机的小屏幕，网站就得被设计成狭小的，并能填满小小的屏幕。这也对现在的网站设计造成了影响。
Web Fonts – There is a lack of web fonts for non-latin languages (Chinese, Japanese…). This is because each font requires thousands of characters to be individually designed which is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and would take longer to download. For these reasons designers tend to use graphics rather than plain text to display non-standard typefaces.
网页字体——日语、汉语都属于非拉丁语言，这一类语言的网页字体匮乏。每种字体需要分别设计上千个字符，成本高也耗时，下载速度也相应较长。出于以上原因，设计师更喜欢使用图形、符号辅助，避免单纯使用文字平铺直叙。
Windows XP & IE 6 – although the number of people using ancient Microsoft software is rapidly decreasing there are still a fair number of people using these dinosaurs, especially in corporate environments. Enough said.
Windows XP & IE 6 ——这些已经成为古董了，可仍然有很多人在使用，特别是在一些企业中。
Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980′s vision of the future and in many ways it’s this contradiction which characterises the design landscape in Japan. On one side we have enormous conglomerates churning out uninspiring mass-produced conformity while on the other side we see master craftspeople making things of incredible beauty and functionality.
漫步东京，常常会有走在 80 年代的错觉，现代与古旧在这儿融合。一边是集团巨头流水作业，复制生产出千篇一律的大众消费品，一边是大师巧匠精雕细琢，倾情打磨叹为观止的美感和功能。
On a more positive note, smaller design firms and companies like UNIQLO, MUJI, CookPad and Kinokuniya are proving that you can make aesthetically pleasing and functional websites in Japan. Let’s hope the rest learn from them and catch up soon.
乐观点看，优衣库、无印良品、CookPad 和纪伊国书屋等企业的网站还是功能完备，并能让你有愉悦的浏览感受的。希望其他的公司向他们看齐，奋起直追吧。
原文翻译：
http://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/
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