Digital Exhibit Spaces: A Multilingual Case Study of ōita Prefecture's Virtual Museum (3 Successes to Emulate and 3 Mistakes to Avoid)
Brendan Craine
Freelance Writer, Editor, Word Wizard | JP>EN Translator | Co-Founder, Watchwords LLC
The advent of virtual museums
It is no great secret that I love museums. To me, they have a sort of magic. I have always been the kind of learner who struggles with the sterility of textbooks; I prefer to wander through a topic, seeing and listening to and (if possible) touching the subjects of my study.?Much of my childhood was spent among the exhibits of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (when it was still the “Denver Museum of Natural History”), gawking at the insect collections and staring at the fossils, measuring my heart rate and admiring the taxidermied animals while listening to the soulful bugling of a caribou in rut.?
Back before Wikipedia deep-dives and Youtube link-jumping, museums were singular spaces for curiosity-driven, self-paced learning. And even today, they are more engaging than either website. I can always enjoy a museum, no matter if its focus is art, history, science, or even model trains.
Unfortunately, the COVID era has been hard on museums. According to Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, in 2020 approximately 90% of museums nationwide were forced to temporarily shutter themselves in response to the Declaration of Emergency, and ticket sales that year dropped by more than half. In response, the agency announced widespread support for museums, including a push toward the digitization of museum exhibits.
Two years later, we are beginning to see the results of that support in the form of “virtual museums.” And I must say, I’m excited about it. There is no replacement for physically visiting a museum, but being able to digitally wander the exhibits while sitting at home, eating raw cookie dough, would have been a dream to my nine-year-old self.
What makes a good virtual museum?
There are many aspects to a good virtual museum. Personally, I think that evoking a sense of the physical space is important. The virtual museums that lack this, such as the portals provided by the Tokyo National Museum or National Museum of Nature and Science, are perfectly navigable, but using them feels more like searching through an online database than visiting a brick-and-mortar building.
The tech used by the Ancient Orient Museum and Bridgestone Innovation Gallery creates a great sense of space. They are a big improvement over the National Museum of Ethnography (whose 2018 site kind of makes me dizzy). However, the somewhat cold and technical Matterport interface is clearly more for touring real estate than wandering through an educational space. The Edo-Tokyo Museum’s virtual counterpart does manage to capture the scale of the building, but it does this by making you virtually ascend three sets of escalators. All in all, there are very few virtual museums that are pleasant to navigate.
I am personally eager to see how museums will leverage VR technology to create even more immersive ways of interacting with their exhibits. The Hold the World exhibit presented by the London Natural History Museum, for example, is one fantastic step in this direction. (Plus, who doesn't love David Attenborough?)
One of the biggest advantages to virtual museums is the potential for international accessibility. For example, I spent a half-hour exploring the Deutches Museum in Germany without leaving my office in Saitama, Japan. Seeing the virtual museum made me want to plan a visit to Munich—the online interface is immersive, and the entire site (including the audio guide!) has been masterfully localized into English. These things made me feel comfortable and welcomed.
An in-depth look at the localization of a virtual museum
The ōita Prefectural Museum of History released their virtual museum at the end of March 2022. It is one of the most impressive sites I have seen so far. Before reading further, I highly recommend exploring it yourself.
I could easily write the rest of this blog about small design choices that make the virtual museum more enjoyable to use: there’s the fact that they use color-coded icons to indicate different types of information (3D model, video, text, etc.). There’s the inclusion of actual museum staff who introduce each major exhibit. There's the navigation, which is simple and intuitive: the exhibits are grouped into themes and instantly accessible from the “contents” tab.
There is a lot to appreciate about the museum’s design. However, my area of expertise is English interpretive text and localization. So instead, I will present three aspects of the English localization that made me say “well done!” and three more that probably needed a little more consideration.
Three successes to emulate
1) The layout and design of certain graphics have been altered to fit horizontal text
Vertical text is certainly not as common as it once was, and—speaking as a localizer—thank goodness. Vertical text is invariably irksome to localize. If the Japanese is translated into English without any change to the layout or design, it frequently forces visitors to turn their heads 90 degrees, like parakeets, in order to read the text.
For example, here’s the home page of the e-Museum from the National Institute for Cultural Heritage.
The ōita Museum not only redesigned their logo to reorient the text, they also flipped the positions of all the elements (buttons, etc.) on the landing page. English readers are used to tracking left to right, so this flipped layout is comfortable to use.
At first, I thought the ōita Museum only made this change to the landing page, but it turned out to be much more thorough than that. Well done!
2) Translations are “doubled up” for extra context where necessary
When localizing, it is important to always consider your audience’s point of reference. Some information that is obvious to readers in the base language will need extra explanation in the target language. For example, History.com introduces Santa Claus like this:
“Santa Claus—otherwise known as Saint Nicholas or Kris Kringle—has a long history steeped in Christmas traditions. Today, he is thought of mainly as the jolly man in red who brings toys to good girls and boys on Christmas Eve...”
That may seem straightforward, but imagine reading this sentence as someone who knows nothing about Christmas. From that perspective, the explanation is not very helpful. Those readers would need a little extra context. ("Santa Claus... has a long history steeped in the traditions of Christmas, a Western winter holiday that has been widely celebrated for hundreds of years.")
In the same way, certain Japanese nouns need a little extra context to be immediately understood by English-speaking audiences. For example, what is a biwa? Some Western visitors will not know this Eastern musical instrument, so the localized English title includes explicit clarification.
The Oita Museum site does this in several of the exhibit titles, as well as in the introductory texts themselves.?
领英推荐
True, it would be even better to refer to it as a “stringed instrument,” but this is still helpful to the reader. Well done!
3) The translation differs from the base language where necessary
Considering the reader’s point of reference is not only about understanding what information they do or do not have; it’s also important to write in a style that is appropriate to its context. Most languages have conventions about how phrasing changes from one situation to another, but those conventions are not the same in every language.
For example, take the subtitles of the museum’s short video about making plaster art:
?A more literal translation of the Japanese would be something like, “This video will introduce how to make plaster art using the kit provided by the museum.” But in addition to being too long for the subtitle, that English sounds stiff and unnatural.
It is clear that the translator and subtitler were thinking not just in terms of the Japanese meaning, but also in terms of what would be most natural for the reader. Well done!
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Three mistakes to avoid
1) Inconsistent translation of titles, proper nouns, etc.
Big projects like the localization of an entire website often require several different translators, project managers, subtitlers, and checkers to work as a team. In some cases, completely different companies may be working on different parts of the site. As a result, sometimes wires get crossed and the same term is translated in multiple ways. This isn’t always a problem, and it may actually be preferable in some cases. When it comes to proper nouns or frequently recurring terms, however, generally only one translation should ever be used. For example, the localized name of an exhibit or an area of the museum, like the 展望ロビー (tenbō robī). This name was translated in one place as "Observation Lobby," and in another as "Lookout Room."
This is the kind of mistake that users tend to notice, and it reflects poorly on the site. But issues like these can be easily avoided through good inter-team communication and diligent checking.
2) No guidance is given about the order in which to view the exhibits
If you tried exploring the ōita Museum yourself, you likely noticed that any exhibit can be accessed at any time from any other part of the museum. This creates a wonderful sense of individual exploration, but it comes at a cost.
When explaining something that is both relatively complex and largely foreign, it is important to start with very basic foundational information—the “when,” “what,” and “why” of the topic. This is particularly true for more esoteric subjects, like Buddhism and its presence in everyday life. Most Western visitors are unlikely to know much about Buddhism as a religion and even less about its influence on Japanese common culture.
Most Japanese visitors will already have a baseline understanding of things like monks, temples, sutras, mandalas, the Pure Land, and so on. They will also have a rough understanding of Japanese history. This leaves them free to wander from exhibit to exhibit without fear of being caught without a foothold.
In contrast, Western visitors to the site would benefit from a set route through the virtual museum. By structuring the order in which things are introduced, those foundational explanations can be given once, rather than over and over (or worse, not at all).
3) Despite the lack of physical restrictions on the text length, no space is taken to provide necessary background for foreign readers?
One of the greatest strengths of online content is that there is essentially no limit on its length. Unlike a museum panel or pamphlet, the internet does not exist in physical space. As a result, there is an infinite amount of extra room for giving extra explanations. A virtual museum should take advantage of this (within reason).
For example, one of the ōita Museum exhibits is a replica of a small statue of Prince Shōtoku. Its English explanation starts like this:
However, this explanation leaves many unanswered questions. Who was Prince Shōtoku? Why was he worshipped? If there was a revival, then why did his worship decline?
Without the answers to these questions, many Western visitors may not understand the significance of this object. Instead, the explanation will just be empty information. There is plenty of space to include the necessary context, but it goes unutilized.
The only real way to address this problem is to understand that translation will always have limitations. To ensure that foreign visitors properly understand the objects and concepts that appear in the museum, those explanations must be recreated by professionals, not translated.
More virtual museums to explore:
English
Japanese Only