Making it possible to write software that will work in any language in any country, in any culture in the world is an extremely laudable goal. A goal that I wholeheartedly sign up to. We should make sure that the software arts make it possible. It is simultaneously the commercially sensible thing to do and the right thing to do from many human perspectives. A rare alignment of drivers indeed.
At this point, a voice somewhere in the room (is that a pointy haired boss I see out of the corner of my eye?) proclaims the answer to be obvious. It goes like this : "Just use Unicode!".
Sigh.
Where to start? The trouble with explaining why this is not true - not even close to being true - is that it takes time and takes more knowledge of the technical ins-and-outs than most care to carry around in their heads.
Let us start by looking at four main variables in the space : language, country, culture and technology. Language. Let us take that one first. How hard
can that be? Well, what list of languages do you want to target? Please don't say "all of them". There is no such thing as a definitive list of languages and even if there was, the list of languages supported in Unicode changes across various incarnations of Unicode. Oh, and there are languages with unbounded sets of "characters" such as Chinese which literally cannot be fully described in Unicode.
Let us dig out a globe and do a quick tour to find suitable languages to target. Western Europe? Not too bad. Some variations on ASCII but nothing too worrying. Lets head further East. Oops! Greek. Those guys still write left to right but they have a different character for everything! Oops! What is that I see as I fly over the Urals? Cyrillic! Another entirely different set of symbols. Life is becoming more complicated the further we travel from the Western world.
Let us keep going...After all, sometimes problems get easier as you generalize them. Oh dear, when we hit the Middle East we hit languages that drive the wrong way on the page. Right to left! That changes essentially everything user-interface-related in most software. Further east we hit ideographics. The concept of a "letter" has just flew out of the occidental window. Not only that but the text is laid out top to bottom. What to do?
Let us back up the truck and start again. Let's look at the country variable this time. Maybe that is a better starting point? The British speak English right? Well yes and no. There is British English which is rather different from, say, US English and different again from, say, Hinglish. Hmmm. When does a language stop and a vernacular or a patois or a dialect start?
How do these relate to these locale things that computers are fond of setting? Hmmm. The boundaries are very fuzzy and the standards keep changing.
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Sounds like someone needs a nap!
Yes, it's really too bad that not everyone in the world speaks the same language, writes with the same script -- heck, it'd be nice if everyone just ate burgers and pizza too.It is pretty tedious to read someone whine about how difficult and complicated it is to write localized software. Yeah, it's harder to write localized software than non-localized. It's also harder to write software that has any sort of UI than software that doesn't. No matter how hard we try to change this, people tend to want software to work with them instead of vice versa.
Finally, there seems to be some implicit confusion here between "unicode" and localization. I'm assuming the author is actually aware that unicode doesn't govern all aspects of localization -- maybe that's the point of the article (in which case the the title could probably be a little less misleading).
Hans, "I'm assuming the
Hans,"I'm assuming the author is actually aware that unicode doesn't govern all aspects of localization -- maybe that's the point of the article..."
Exactly so. The core point of the article is that many who say "just use Unicode" do not know that, which is unfortunate.
regards,
Sean
Few points
1. Unicode is exactly the answer for many of the things you mention: it displays Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, etc characters just fine.2. Your GUI system should know about directions of text. Try to run Gnome in Arabic, and see how the entire user interface seemlessly works.
3. A lot of the cultural/language specific items you mention should be resolved by the translators. What would you like to do, use Google-translate to translate your whole app? You need to have your application strings translated by professionals. Read about how the gettext library works.
4. Read about iconv(), it makes switching between codesets much more straightforward.
5. Printing localized numbers should be easy. I know glibc has done that correctly for at least 3-4 years.
Yes, there are quirks that are hard to get right with localization. But, if you use the proper tools and libraries, not localizing your software is a sign of your lack of professionalism.
P.S. Being a native speaker of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, this is the first time I hear about "changing a string of text between uppercase and lowercase changes the length of the string". AFAIK, that's not true for Croatian, but might be true of German ß.