Asian Absolute Newsletter, Spring 2007

Thailand has one of the largest populations in Asia and is also one of the biggest exporters in the region - its position as a hub of manufacturing and investment is often overlooked by westerners. It is the only East Asian nation never to have been colonised by foreign powers, but now has lively relations with the rest of the world through both tourism and manufacturing.

Thailand is one of the few East Asian nations retaining a constitutional monarchy and, although corruption and coups have long been features of party political life, the last decade has seen a large degree of modernisation and reform. This has provided the conditions in which business and industry have been able to flourish: Thailand has been ranked the fourth location in the world for size of FDI inflows between 2004 and 2007, after China, India and the USA. The country’s economic structure is now weighted 10% towards agriculture, 35% in manufacturing and over 50% in services.

Thailand welcomes thousands of visitors from around the world through tourism. In December 2004, the attention of the world was drawn to Southern Thailand when the Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed large parts of the country and killed thousands of Thais as well as foreign tourists. The Thai government initially rejected foreign aid in the spirit of channelling it towards more disadvantaged countries such as Indonesia, and the ongoing relief effort turned out to have an internationalising effect.

As Thailand engages at an increasingly high level with the rest of the world, there is a growing demand for localisation and marketing services. The following are a few facts and fallacies about localisation for Thailand:

FACT: Thai is a tonal language. All syllables are pronounced with one of five tones: low, middle, high, rising and falling.

FALLACY: There are no spaces in written Thai. There are indeed very few spaces and spaces are not placed between words. However spaces are used in Thai, and are placed between phrases instead of between words. It is imperative to set line breaks manually when typesetting Thai in order to avoid breaking lines in the middle of words.

FACT: Thai can be understood by neighbouring peoples. Although Thailand is the only country in which Thai is used as the official language and spoken by most people as their mother tongue, it is very similar to the languages of neighbouring countries Laos and Burma, and is comfortably understood by many speakers of these languages.

FALLACY: Thai script uses pictorial characters. To the untrained eye, written Thai can appear similar to pictorial scripts such as Chinese or Japanese. In reality, it bears more similarity to roman script as it is a regular script with a finite number of characters which have derived from Sanskrit and Indian languages, but not from pictograms. Thai is a single-byte language.

For more information on Thai translations, click here.

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