Monday, March 10th 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Jon Wiley – Google
Why?
Why does Google have ~117 images for search?
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make is UNIVERSALLY available.
Does internationalization = translation?? NO
Internationalization is the design of the product for many different areas (i18n = internationalization).
Localization is the act of taking your product (which you have already internationalized) and turning it into something appropriate for your particular market.
Localization is more than translation. – involves local content for a particular area – legal compliance – marketing – keyboards – currency formats – date formats – cultural appropriateness
Character Encoding:
It was easy once when there was just ASCII – many others came around but eventually everything came into Unicode.
Specifically want to use UTF-8 (8bit unicode).
Why use?
It is compatible with legacy ASCII content – makes ASCII a subset of UTF-8
Modern OS’s support it (not all platforms/browsers support ALL unicode)
Has all the characters you need
You can present a mix of scripts at once
Smaller than UTF-16 for most content – uses smaller bytes and could take up less space.
Careful wen using markup characters (less than greater than)
when you need hard to see characters ( )
Tell the browser:
in your content type declaration in response header (browsers give higher priority to ct)
meta element
external CSS
Find content in the right language.
Be sure to serve content in the correct language.
lang and xml:lang attribute on html element to clarify language
meta element in the doc header
content language in response header
Text direction:
LTR = left to right text
RTL = right to left text
bidi = bi-directional text
How does this work? It is going to be in logical order.
Markup is LTR. Numbers are LTR. Spaces and punctuation are neutral – they take on the characteristics of the words around them.
Dir attribute in html – dir=”rtl” <p> – there is a CSS attribute but best not to use.
Text expansion:
English is a compact language (compared to other languages)
small words can expand 200-300% in other language. This is usually not good, especially in menus etc where they could break things in other languages. Rule of thumb is =40%.
Tools:
Google translation service (http://translate.google.com) – good for a quick check to test a site – don’t use for production output.
CSS Janus – script for flipping CSS-based layouts – table layouts don’t have this problem – not a total solution (http://cssjaus.commoner.com)