We have been poring over the web traffic logs in the last couple of days, and one thing became apparent: We have lots of users from China. See the following chart for the Top 10 countries of origin for www.civilnetizen.com visitors:

Initially, we were a bit surprised by our popularity in China since we have not done any promotion there. Upon further investigation, we found out that a site called Witao (www.witao.com) picked up our Beta 1 release announcement and posted it. We would like to believe that people in China are using Civil Netizen because of our commitment to privacy, but that would just be wishful conjecture at this point.

Anyway, I decided to have a little fun with it. My mom and dad live in Hong Kong, so I asked them to help me translate our product name "Civil Netizen" into Chinese. This is tricky since literally translating the words "Civil" and "Net-citizen" would be lame. Some of the best Chinese translation of foreign words are simultaneously phonetic and semantic. After a few e-mails back and forth, we decided on this translation:

The first two characters literally means "four" and "direction". Phonetically, it sounds like "Civil", which is very cool. The last two characters mean "net" and "transfer". Combined, the name means a network transfer tool that allows for communications in all different directions. That's pretty descriptive. So there. Our first translation/internationalization effort of any kind.  Thanks, mom! Now, if only my mom can help me translate the rest of the strings used within the app...