Creating Interfaces: Localization

1
Creating Interfaces Localization

• Language other issues
• character codes
• Homework preparation for future topics

2
Finish presentations

• Everyone post constructive comments on at least 2
  other projects.
• (Note catch up on other postings.)

3
Many, interconnected issues

• Create web site for use in several specific
  'local' places.
• Create multiple web sites, each for use in
  specific place.
• in an efficient, effective manner so any
  underlying common content does not need to be
  duplicated (and commonality diluted).
• Develop tools (networking s/w, standards, etc.)
  that promote Web as "global, interoperable tool
  of communication"
• www.w3c.org

4
Localization

• not just language
• language is not just character code
• UCS (universal character set) and UNICODE, many,
  many related standards to address encoding
  issues.
• dates
• local date and also way to express 'western' date
• time
• money
• position on and flow across page
• acceptable images, photography, icons
• ?

5
Character code

• Note European languages plus several other
  'small' alphabets easily handled.
• We/I (typical monolingual American) can't hardly
  appreciate the challenge
• two Chinese (kanji) character sets modern
  (China) and traditional (Taiwan most of the
  Chinese diaspora)
• 'ruby' symbols 'over' ideographs

6

• http//www.cs.tut.fi/jkorpela/chars.htmlcode
• character repertoire A set of distinct
  characters.
• character code A mapping, often presented in
  tabular form, which defines a one-to-one
  correspondence between characters in a character
  repertoire and a set of nonnegative integers.
• character encoding A method (algorithm) for
  presenting characters in digital form by mapping
  sequences of code numbers of characters into
  sequences of octets. In the simplest case, each
  character is mapped to an integer in the range 0
  - 255 according to a character code and these are
  used as such as octets. Naturally, this only
  works for character repertoires with at most 256
  characters. For larger sets, more complicated
  encodings are needed. Encodings have names, which
  can be registered.

7
charset

• Using the terms just defined, the charset
  attribute in an HTML meta tag means encoding
• "text/htmlcharsetutf-8" /
• "text/htmlcharsetISO-8859-1" /

8
Language

• Attribute of html tag
• MAY be used by browsers (spell-check,
  hyphenation, speech synthesizers), search
  engines, other tools.
• See two-letter codes
• www.w3c.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm

9
more

• A glyph is a presentation of a particular shape
  which a character may have when rendered or
  displayed.
• speak of same glyph in italic, bold, etc.
• A repertoire of glyphs comprises a font. In a
  more technical sense, as the implementation of a
  font, a font is a numbered set of glyphs. The
  numbers correspond to code positions of the
  characters (presented by the glyphs). Thus, a
  font in that sense is character code dependent.
  An expression like "Unicode font" refers to such
  issues and does not imply that the font contains
  glyphs for all Unicode characters.

10
Examples

• ASCII is a character repertoire, code and
  encoding. Note confusion about 7 vs 8 bit ASCII
• ISO Latin 1 alias ISO 8859-1 standard defines a
  repertoire, code and encoding of which ASCII is a
  subset. ISO 8859 is a family of many encodings,
  indicated by the n. ISO 8859-5 handles
  Cyrillic.

11
Unicode

• provides a unique number for every character,
  no matter what the platform, no matter what the
  program, no matter what the language. This is
  the goal.
• The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such
  industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem,
  Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and
  many others. Unicode is required by modern
  standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript
  (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is
  the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646.
• It is supported in many operating systems, all
  modern browsers, and many other products. The
  emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the
  availability of tools supporting it, are among
  the most significant recent global software
  technology trends.

12
Note

• Unicode goal is universal coverage
• Unicode is product of a consortium of 'mostly US
  companies'.
• Some controversy in its treatment of things
• Combining certain kanji characters

13
Unicode consortium

• Go to http//www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/What
  IsUnicode.html
• Examine the Translations on the left. See what
  language characters do not appear on your
  computer.
• Select one and
• Go to Display Problems and see if you can fix it.

14
XML progress

• XML 1.0 to XML 1.1
• Issue complaint that new standard had features
  to suit IBM
• The IBM-specific problem that XML 1.1 aims to fix
  has to do with a special character that
  designates to IBM mainframe systems the end of a
  line of text. XML 1.0 chokes on that character,
  but version 1.1 would recognize it.
• ZDNet News http//zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-962392.
  html

15
Techniques

• One web site / screen provide options to go to
  different pages
• use symbols/icons that are meaningful to audience
• tricky. Flags may not be appropriate.
• use images containing text in the specific
  language
• risky choice hope that computer/platform/browser
  has character encoding and font to display
  language
• poor choice use English word for other language.
• http//www.lionbridge.com/ Example of
  company/site supporting 'global reach'.

16
quiz

• What is the word in that language for
• Spanish
• Chinese (Mandarin? Hainese?)
• Korean
• Japanese
• Hebrew
• Russian
• French
• Finnish
• Arabic (Classical?, ?)
• Hindi (Urdu?, ?)
• What is the direction of text? What is the
  format for dates? Time? Money?, relevant cultural
  issues?

17
Homework

• Next Accessibility discussion, exercises
• Prepare
• download Instant Saxon standalone translator for
  xml and xslt.
• Download simulators for small screen browsers
  (cell phones)
• Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit. Need to register
  (no costs).
• OpenWave.
• For (regular phone speech recognition/synthesis)
  register with studio.tellme.com