When Does the Font Become a Problem?
As a participant in the original group starting the initiative campaign Break the Silence: Ask
for Zarni working against sexual harassment in the bar scene of Yangon, I was able to see the
influence of Zawgyi. With time, as the campaign grew more prominent and gained followers
through Facebook, the group was forced to think about proper Burmese translations. The
campaign group had both local Burmese participants as well as foreign people like me. We
aimed to include everyone in the Yangon bar-scene, locals as well as foreign people. Our
local participants, working with the translations, spent a long time to get the text right, and
they would talk about Unicode and Zawgyi. At the time, I was unaware of the size of the
problem with these fonts and did not recognize it while listening to their discussion. I was,
however, about to learn something fundamental. It turned out that our post needed to be in
three parts/translations, one in Zawgyi, one in Unicode and one in English, as seen in figure
IV.
When we had the setup in our Facebook post in the following order: English – Unicode –
Zawgyi and Unicode – Zawgyi – English, we mainly got attention and participation from
foreign people. Aiming for more local participation, it was a challenge to figure out how we
could reach them. We did indeed have Burmese text on top, why was it not gaining any
momentum? The problem turned out to be that we started with the Burmese Unicode on top
and not Zawgyi. As it was the western participants that posted from their computers, it was
Figure IV – Screenshot from my Facebook feed, August 2018
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