Hong Kong is a bilingual city: with virtually every piece of official signage having both English and Chinese text – street names, train timetables, safety messages – the list goes on.
On my last trip to Hong Kong I did the same thing as every local resident, and picked up an Octopus card so that I could travel around the city by public transport. Top the card up with credit before you travel, and every time you jump onto a train, tram, bus or ferry the appropriate fare gets deducted from the balance.
Thankfully for me, my 姑媽 (father’s elder sister) went to the trouble of picking up my father and I an Octopus cards each from the local MTR station, and added some money to it. (taking care of her little brother is something close families never grow out of).
For the rest of my trip I continued using my Octopus card around Hong Kong, checking the account balance on the ticket gates when I left stations, and adding another HK$100 to the balance when it started to run low.
One thing I did notice through my travels was that the travel history for my card was all in Chinese, along with the messages on the receipts I received after adding value to my card. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, given I could still work out what my account balance was.
Things changed later in my trip when I decided to buy an additional Octopus card for myself as a souvenir, over the counter at an MTR station from the customer service staff, who spoke the same language as me: English. The interesting difference was the langauge of the receipt: it was now in English.
The other difference with my newly purchased Octopus card was the account balance message displayed on exiting MTR stations: the small LCD screen showed English text that I understood. Amazing!
So why was one of my Octopus cards displaying English text, and the other one Chinese? Doing my usual Google search trick didn’t turn up anything relevant, so I unfortunately I had to guess.
My first line of enquiry was the serial number on the card, in the format of nnnn nnnn (n). Since the serial number of one card ended with a (1) and the other ended on (2), I thought this was an indicator of card language, but this turned out to be red herring: photos of other Octopus cards online showed any digit could appear inside the brackets, with the last digit possibly being a check digit.
My current theory is that the language of an Octopus card is set at the time of issue: my 姑媽 speaks Cantonese so she was given a card set to Chinese, while English speaking me was given one programmed to English.
However they do it, it is quite the nifty feature!
2019 update
There are now ‘Octopus Service Point’ machines at major MTR stations and shopping malls.
Which offer a wide variety of options to Octopus cardholders.
Including changing the language of their card from Chinese to English, and vice versa.
Easy!
Now I know why my 八達通 is always in 中文字… It was given to me by a Cantonese-speaking mate a looooooong time ago!
Glad to see someone else noticing the same thing as me – I was worried I was imagining things!
I noticed that too! I definitely think they set it when they sell it to you.
The number in parentheses is a check digit. Your HKID has one too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_digit
I did not pay any attention to the language problem but now you mentioned it my 表姐 (older female Cousin) Christina or one of my aunts would normally keep an eye on it when im not up there. But any way a good and handy article.
When you buy an Octopus, or sign up for a personalized Octopus, there’s an option to choose the language. As noted, the choices are Cantonese and English, it determines what language you see on the readers.
Thanks for that Alex – you can find the “ select your preferred language ” question on page one of this form:
http://www.octopus.com.hk/web09_include/_document/en/apply_pcard.pdf
With the form being in both languages, I also noticed this line in the terms and conditions:
Presumably lawyers would have a field day if they didn’t add that!
Language is just a flag set on the card. When you buy one, the staff member makes an educated guess what you want, but you can take the card to any MTR service counter and they will change it.
Thanks for that extra bit of info!
At some octopus card machines (yellow in color) there is an option to change the language of your card.
Would those machines be ‘Octopus Service Points’?
http://www.octopus.com.hk/cardreplacement/octopus-service-point/en/index.html
Or the MTR ‘Self Service Points’?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEXI0Dj1Hw8
It’s the former. The latter is completely useless as it’s really not self-service: a staff member has to stand there all day and educate the cattle.