So this weekend I’ve been exploring the Chinese social web from here in Uganda. With the aid of translate.google.com, a few Firefox translation extensions and my knowledge of PHP and HTML, I’ve managed to do pretty good. How does knowing a little code help? Well often at the bottom of these sites, you’ll find that they are actually coded using common english terms like ’settings’, ‘login’ and ‘pass’. Just knowing how to look, where to look and when to look saved me hours.
My experiment was to prove that despite the fact that I know ZERO Chinese, good UI and basic knowledge would still allow me to create accounts on some of the biggest Chinese social networks and successfully communicate. Not entirely hard but none of these sites have translations into any other language at all and a few of them use code that couldn’t be parsed by Google because it was called with iframes or Ajax, this definitely made things tricky. Still, things went smoothly, here are the sites I visited.
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