A rant about localization [modified]
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I know what you mean, but at least there is some support. Try designing embedded systems for sale worldwide. Cheap end LCD panels are available in English, Cyrilic, and Katakana, but what happens with Arabic? Sod all. You have to move to expensive displays (which aren't compatible at all with the cheap ones) and the cost of your product rises enormously. We used to get no end of complaints from our Arabic distributors about that - and they always ignored the bit when we explained the hardware was completely different, so the cost was higher.
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Enlighten me, why should an LCD panel care what language is being displayed? Unless you are talking about something I'm missing here.
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I worked for a company once that developed an application that had full support for localization including RTL languages. Out test team even used dummy languages to test it with on a rolling schedule that included one RTL one. In the two years I was there can you guess how many localizations were done for RTL languages? Zero.
Simon
That sounds more like a marketing issue. There is HUGE demand for Arabic applications, particularly in the Gulf area. Most government and similar software mega-contracts simply use English because that's all that is available. Or try to write their own with disastrous results.[Click me] :) Anyone supplier with proper Arabic can run rings around the others.
JustAStupidGurl
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It's not just me then :)
JustAStupidGurl
What really got me was trying to get the distributors to help you produce localized versions: "I don't know what shape your characters should be; I don't read Arabic / Russian / Chinese characters - please provide samples" "Can you translate this into your language" Always got the same response: "You do it, and I'll tell you what's wrong" ARGGHH! :mad: So, you do it as best you can guess, and they get angry becuase it makes no sense... :mad::mad: And eventually they go away, and come back with translations that don't even start to fit on the screen... :mad::mad::mad: Sorry. I feel better now...
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I don't. I save myself the pain and and keep the installer in English. Everything else (UI-wise) is in Arabic unless otherwise specified.
justastupidgurl wrote:
Divelements
Checking them out, thanks. I'm interested, where are your right to left customers from?
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Pretty much what we do too on the corporate stuff as most Arab sys admins speak pretty good English. For the home user stuff we use NSIS. Our RTL customers are from most places. Gulf is a big market, but we are seeing Afghan stuff from the NGOs and US forces. A lot of RS232 driven add-on UIs for things like security systems, manufacturing machinery etc.
JustAStupidGurl
modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 10:48 AM
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Enlighten me, why should an LCD panel care what language is being displayed? Unless you are talking about something I'm missing here.
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
Cheap LCD panels are not graphics, they are resticted to (for example) 2 rows of 16 columns of text. These cost a couple of quid - graphics capable panels start at £40 - £50 and need more complex RAM, controllers and software to support them. When the production cost of your complete electronics is £80 or less then this becomes a significant part of the unit cost.
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Have you noticed that when things are said to be localizable, it usually means localizable EXCEPT for right-to-left languages? Which is just great unless you are selling to the whole world. Joomla fully-supports right-to-left, but are any bidirectional templates available? No! Most commercial or free template designers get to the bit where they need to do the right-to-left bit and just leave a stub. Who needs it? Right? Most of my market is left-to-right speaking, so I just don't care. To heck with all those folks who slaved over the Joomla source to make it localizable. Same with Wix. It even has Arabic and Hebrew support files, but no right-to-left support (!?) Almost every component for .Net (with the exception of Sandbar). Almost every code, program or website authoring application or support tool you can think of. Right-to-left is just Arabic and Hebrew, right? Well no. There are Arabic, Azeri, Azerbaijani, Bakhtiari, Balochi, Farsi, Gilaki, Javanese, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish, Sorani, Malay, Malayalam, Pashto, Punjabi, Qashqai, Sindhi, Somali, Sulu, Takestani, Turkmen, Uighur, Western Cham Hebrew, Hebrew, Ladino, Judezmo, Yiddish, N'ko, Mandekan, Syriac, Assyrian, Modern Aramaic, Koine, Syriac, Thaana, Dhivehi, Maldivian, Tifinar, Tamashek, Urdu and I'll stop now, but those are just the common ones. Hey, but they all live in caves, right? So who cares. Anybody ever looked at that mysterious Flowdirection or RightToLeftLayout property? Remind me again, how long is it since somebody though of Unicode? And how come MSI (or Windows Installer as they like us to call it now) still uses code pages? At least now the French can have accents on letters in their software. I remember when people used to complain about that.
JustAStupidGurl
modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 10:08 AM
WTF? I am Indian and Punjabi and Malayalam are written LTR. Unless they are also written in some weird RTL script by small groups.
Cheers, Vikram. (Cracked not one CCC, but two!)
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WTF? I am Indian and Punjabi and Malayalam are written LTR. Unless they are also written in some weird RTL script by small groups.
Cheers, Vikram. (Cracked not one CCC, but two!)
In Pakistan Punjabi is written with a version of the Arabic script known as Shahmukhi.
JustAStupidGurl
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WTF? I am Indian and Punjabi and Malayalam are written LTR. Unless they are also written in some weird RTL script by small groups.
Cheers, Vikram. (Cracked not one CCC, but two!)
Forgot Malayalam . In Singapore and Malaysia, Malayalam is written with the Arabic script.
JustAStupidGurl
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Enlighten me, why should an LCD panel care what language is being displayed? Unless you are talking about something I'm missing here.
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
Complexity of the script used to display a language dictates the minimum resolution required to display characters in that script. The Roman alphabet is sufficiently simple that you can display it in a 5x7 pixel matrix. There are a number of alphabets that require much higher resolution in order to be displayed in a readable fashion.
Software Zen:
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Forgot Malayalam . In Singapore and Malaysia, Malayalam is written with the Arabic script.
JustAStupidGurl
Hi everyone I must thank you for picking up this subject. I myself develop for multi-directional solutions. i must state that microsft in the last couple of years has taken the .net framework very much forward, as far as localization is concerned. #1 the ide itself is totally unicode/bidirectional (though sometimes u need to save as...) #2 asp.net, being html based, can easily make sites that cater for rtl and ltr languages, i just change the dir of the main form at login/app start (i just didnt know there were so many rtl languages!!!) #3 you have calendars for jewish dates/muslim dates and more. very important, cause "next year" is different depending in which calendar youre referring to i do find though that adobe , even though incorporating full unicode support, does not, standardly, support bi-directional. that you get only with the more-expensive winsoft/me version. all in all, when considering the nightmares bi-directional gave us in the early 90's, i really do thing that ms (and probably other vendors as well) deserve kudos for being so culture-friendly. being that most apps developed today are web-based, i think youre really ppretty-much covered if you use asp.net. even though i found a bug when trying to add a "yi" resource file (for yiddish) to a asp.net solution. i hope the bug will be fixed asap.
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In Pakistan Punjabi is written with a version of the Arabic script known as Shahmukhi.
JustAStupidGurl
Yeah, I saw that on Wiki later. Weirdos. ;P
Cheers, Vikram. (Cracked not one CCC, but two!)
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That sounds more like a marketing issue. There is HUGE demand for Arabic applications, particularly in the Gulf area. Most government and similar software mega-contracts simply use English because that's all that is available. Or try to write their own with disastrous results.[Click me] :) Anyone supplier with proper Arabic can run rings around the others.
JustAStupidGurl
I worked on an Arabic word processor almost twenty years back. They lost their shorts because piracy was so rampant. Funny thing is that XP and later have excellent built in tools so you don't have to worry about the minutia of, for example, all the weird code pages (which is what I dealt with specifically.)
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Cheap LCD panels are not graphics, they are resticted to (for example) 2 rows of 16 columns of text. These cost a couple of quid - graphics capable panels start at £40 - £50 and need more complex RAM, controllers and software to support them. When the production cost of your complete electronics is £80 or less then this becomes a significant part of the unit cost.
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Totally forgot that LCDs also contain the Row & Column variety. Oh my eternal shame!
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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Hi everyone I must thank you for picking up this subject. I myself develop for multi-directional solutions. i must state that microsft in the last couple of years has taken the .net framework very much forward, as far as localization is concerned. #1 the ide itself is totally unicode/bidirectional (though sometimes u need to save as...) #2 asp.net, being html based, can easily make sites that cater for rtl and ltr languages, i just change the dir of the main form at login/app start (i just didnt know there were so many rtl languages!!!) #3 you have calendars for jewish dates/muslim dates and more. very important, cause "next year" is different depending in which calendar youre referring to i do find though that adobe , even though incorporating full unicode support, does not, standardly, support bi-directional. that you get only with the more-expensive winsoft/me version. all in all, when considering the nightmares bi-directional gave us in the early 90's, i really do thing that ms (and probably other vendors as well) deserve kudos for being so culture-friendly. being that most apps developed today are web-based, i think youre really ppretty-much covered if you use asp.net. even though i found a bug when trying to add a "yi" resource file (for yiddish) to a asp.net solution. i hope the bug will be fixed asap.
Hijri calendars is another whole rant on its own :) We've never managed to get something working with the OS built-in versions as it's not a straight fixed conversion from Gregorian. (Well actually it is, but the Saudis and others like to tinker with it depending on actual manual moon sightings etc.) For display and data entry purposes we have always ended up building our own conversion table that the user can tweak as required. The OS version can be used to generate the 'default' conversion, but there will always be some client who disagrees with it or wants to change it retrospectively. We've even had different departments in the same client company implementing different conversions.
JustAStupidGurl
