And so English is the baseline for line width. All right so then if you look at in other languages like Japanese and Korean they're much more compact in terms of line length but they also have some very very specific challenges especially those that have phonetic components to their language as well. And so but you know that's what it will look like there. Then some languages compared to English like German, Polish and French... Are there any French people out here? Oh, we can make fun of them, good. Okay so because French is very very expensive and so you know what ends up is like you imagine that as they're translating the phrase they're like you know philosophizing at the same time.
It's like instead of just saying "find something to download" it's like "find something to download and waste your life you fool". Seriously it does expand so you can see in this example that you have to have two lines of text to be able to make it work. So yes the French can be and in fact often is difficult. Alright and so other languages as you may know like Arabic and Hebrew, they layout right-to-left and so that's its own kind of difficulty. One thing I did I want to point out in terms of details if you look at the typeface... we actually use a custom Arabic typeface because we want people to kind of when they look at the user experience it should feel like you know a luxury hotel in Dubai. And not you know a text of something else that may cause concern. And then there's Thai. The Thai is another interesting case because Thai has all these characters if you look up, they kind of these accent marks which make for insanely tall line links and that can cause you some heartache. And so knowing that these are the types of challenges that you come through regularly for the language we work on what I suggested when I got there and I said that the only way to have success with this stuff is to take all the engineering team and send them to 4 star luxury hotels around the world so we could have training in a country and to see that it works. It's like if you want us to make something good in French there's no nothing less than the hotel Crillon in Paris will do and tie with all the kind of long... the line links we need to be like have massages all the day so we can make our body long and lean to resemble the characters. And then you know for compactness and efficiency there's no substitute to going to the finest sushi restaurants. So that's what I asked for and I called our CEO and I said: "Reed, dude let me borrow the corporate jet for a couple of weeks" and he said "nyet". In fact I think he said "hell nyet!". So we had to go back to the drawing board and try find it a different technique. And so there is something called pseudo-localization. And so we have actually gone in all for pseudo-localization so what it is essentially it's a technique for taking a base language like English and making it behave as if it was other languages so you add additional characters so it goes about 30% wider and you add you know accent marks and other kind of things that extend the top line and the bottom line. And so the point of it is that we actually do it so that by default. When you run the app under debug you are always seeing a pseudo-localized English text and that's actually on all platforms. It was kind of a decision that we made as a group engineering organization across all platforms. And so what what's nice about it is that you can see kind of right away if there's a problem and so it's been really really helpful for it but because you know problems are caught early and in our first instance of it we did it just for the user interface on the app.
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