I wrote a blog post about programming on the AS/400 (IBM i).
It was about a subfile—a mechanism for displaying a list of records on a screen—and keeping the display on page two after filling in a product name.
Kimiko-chan had included links to the official manuals from IBM, the platform’s developer, so readers could check the details of the mechanism.
After publishing that post, I noticed something.
Click a reference link in the Japanese article, and an IBM manual opens in English.
Readers could follow the article in Japanese. But as soon as they wanted to look into a detail, the language changed.
So I pointed it out to Kimiko-chan, the name I gave my ChatGPT assistant.
“A bit tough for a Japanese-only Japanese person like me!”
At least for me, being able to read the reference material in Japanese makes things easier.
There were two things to consider: which document to point readers to, and which language version of it they would open.
Kimiko-chan changed the three reference links in the Japanese article to URLs for the Japanese documentation.
There was a qualification, though. It had not been possible to confirm that every destination page actually displayed in Japanese. I needed to distinguish changing a link from checking what appeared at the other end.
Then I added one more reminder.
Of course, the English blog should link to the English IBM manuals.
Sending readers of the English article to Japanese documentation for my own convenience would simply repeat the problem in the other direction.
It might be an unnecessary reminder, I said with a laugh. In Japanese, I used the expression about teaching the Buddha how to preach.
Still, I said it.
The reply came back: the English article’s links had been left in English.
Prepare the article in two languages. When readers move on to the references, give them an entrance in the language they have been reading, too.
I was the one who noticed the omission and asked for the change. Kimiko-chan revised the links. In that exchange, we also settled how we wanted to handle them from then on.
Japanese references from the Japanese version. English references from the English version.
Something can seem obvious and still become another request once I actually read the page.
First the article needed Japanese. Now I had put in an order for Japanese at the other end of its links, too.