Japanese text on tiny buttons

I'm making a Japanese version of one of my products and I'm wondering how to handle the menu dialogs. The buttons only seem to fit five characters:

http://www.vengeancestudio.com/forumpics/japanese-menu.gif

What's the convention? English text? Ask the translator for shorter words? Is it even worth trying to fit it in five characters?

i don't know how to read japanese. but what i usually do if i need my menu selections to be longer, i just number the buttons, and then the text above the buttons is where i list the selections for each number. IE:

1. on
2. off
3. purple
4. orange

( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) ( 4 )

I hope I don't have to do that. Every menu has button text that is too long, so I'd have to keep track of which menu is up, and since there's no way to tell when a menu is "ignored" there's no way to ensure there's only one menu up. And there aren't enough lines of text available to do this without scrolling. What a mess.

Don't use Katakana. The only reason you should need it, is if you're phonetically spelling out foreign words. and Katakana spelling tends to be.. "longish-per-word" (Arcadia becomes アルカディア(A Ru Ka De I A).

Sadly, Google and other translaters, tend to just transliterate english into Katakana... which isn't the same as translating it into japanese. Of course, like German, Japanese often doesn't HAVE a word for something. So they just use the English word, transliterated into Katakana. The most well known, probably being "Ro Bo To".

For simple words like colour, number, open, close, on, off etc.. you should be able to use actual Japanese words. (which in theory, should be shorter.)

English users run into these limits as well. There's no way to make a button that says "Check for updates".. so we end up making buttons that just say "update". There's no way to make a button that says "Skin Color" so we just say "Color 1" or "Skin".

Scripting in LSL (and building in SL) is an excercise in compromises.

A simple key to explain your buttons is good. You can always add a "help" button that can spill out a more detailed explanation into local chat (ownersay, whisper, whatever). This doesn't mean you can't make unique button names.

Thanks, Winter. I've asked my translator for shorter words, and suggested two non-Katakana substitutions. Hopefully I'll get an okay on those, and receive a few more substitutions. I also have one german word I need a substitute for. For the "updates" button, no less

I'm also having my web pages translated. Here's a start...

http://www.vengeancestudio.com/sl/docs/FlightAssistJp.html

Many English words are translated into katakana because the Japanese word was actually borrowed from English.. ( - _ - )

This is the case for a lot of newer words, even things common things you wouldn't expect.