[Techtalk] Internationalization issues

[EevaJärvinen]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 12:37:42PM +0100, Dan Richter wrote:
> An O'Reilly interview[1] with the developers of Plone includes this quote:
> 
> > We've been very focused on internationalization from the outset -
> > it's not something you can easily retrofit into your application
> > afterward, as most US companies painfully discover when they try
> > to conquer the EU markets.
> 
> Does anyone have experience with internationalization? Besides the 
> obvious fact that you can't hard-code any text, what kinds of issues arise?

The whole locale-specific bunch...  

Alphabetization.  

Hyphenation works sometimes very differently in different languages;
some characters might split into two, and if joined, merge back into
one.

Case conversion had better be done with libraries.

Character sets: UTF-8, ISO-8859-x et cetera.  Your program might
encounter differently encoded text; it's generally not safe to assume
everything is ISO-8859-something, neither is it safe to assume UTF-8.
Emacs is generally quite proficient at this guesswork.

Bidi.  Some languages are written left-to-right, some right-to-left.

Input methods.  One key, one character doesn't usually apply.  I write
a acute by typing first ', then a.  Use libraries.  I've tinkered with
GTK2 input methods, and they are cool.  You can switch your keyboard
to produce unicode classical greek by just right-clicking+choosing
from menu in the editor window.  Back to Latin, right-click and choose
from menu.

Scripts.  Some languages are written in such a way that a character
can change the appearance of the preceding character (Arabic, AFAIK).
In some, vowels are written as little markings on top of, and in the
preceding letter (Hebrew, Arabic).

Sign language.  Best conveyed as videoclips.  Many deaf do not read or
write anything else fluently.


hope this, er, helps...
Eeva

-- 
Ei elämä ole vaikeaa,
se on mahdotonta.  Ja se tapahtuu.
                                         Lassi Nummi