Jul 23, 2008

Japanese Lunar Exploration and the Google Lunar X PRIZE

How timely that I came across this Hyperbola blog post just after writing our own post on future government support for lunar exploration. It looks like the Japanese space agency JAXA shares many of the Google Lunar X PRIZE's visions for future use of the Moon.
But what a pity that the GLXP website has such a poor Japanese page. It appears that the site has little more than a translation of the main press releases and some information about the teams and key people. Furthermore, after exhaustive seraching we were unable to find a Japanese version of the GLXP promotional video - "Moon 2.0, Join the Revolution".
If the X PRIZE foundation and Google want to engage the large and affluent Japanese appetite for space-related issues they should really invest a bit more money in providing their content in the Japanese language.

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2 comments:

mike fabio said...

It's funny you mention that. In fact, translations have been a topic of discussion at the X PRIZE Foundation recently.

We are well aware of this lingering problem, and are working to correct it. You are right: if we want to engage the public at large (and all over the world), we must speak their languages.

If there are any expert translators out there willing to offer their services, don't hesitate to contact us through our webpage: http://www.googlelunarxprize.org

White Label Space said...

Thanks for the quick follow up post Mike. I'm glad to here the the issue is being addressed. Some of our team do have good contacts in Japan. We where in fact translating our old Tumblr to Japanese (http://thestor-jp.tumblr.com/)before we migrated to Blogger.

The plan was to be able to present our news in English, Japanese, Russian & Chinese simultaneously. THat may have been slightly over ambitious in hind sight, but definitely a goal for the future.

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