Planet Web I18n

IPA picker updated: labiodental flap & prosodic markers

2010-02-09T18:49:03+00:00

About the tool: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. Pickers are likely to be most useful if you don’t know a script well enough to use the native keyboard. The arrangement of characters also makes it much more useable than a regular character map utility

Latest changes: I recently added U+2C71 LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH RIGHT HOOK (labiodental tap or flap) to the IPA picker. This was in the IPA chart for a long time, but was only added to Unicode in version 5.1.

Today I also added, at the request of Dan McCloy, four prosodic markers: prosodic phrase, prosodic word, syllable and mora (see the second line of the picture).

Regular users will also notice that I recently upgraded the picker chrome to version 10, too.

>> Use it

Virtaal supports Haitian Creole through Machine Translation plugin

2010-02-09T13:35:12+00:00

Update: Originally published on 2006-01-26 but somehow I didn't get this pushed on to the RSS feed so I've published it with a newer date.

Virtaal, a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool, has been providing translators with Machine Translation suggestions through its plugin system. We've just committed a new Machine Translation plugin that allows Virtaal to use Microsoft Translator's new Haitian Creole translation engine.

The Microsoft Translator plugin has been waiting for the next major release as we didn't want to introduce any User Interface changes. But the usefulness of this tool in the current Haitian crisis means that we've released it so that people can use it and benefit from the feature.

How does this help?

Any software that needs to be localised into Haitian Creole can now be more easily translated in Virtaal with Haitian Machine Translation support.
Documents (OpenDocument Format and wiki texts) can be translated into Haitian Creole using Virtaal and the Translate Toolkit's txt2po and odf2xliff converters.

How do I use the plugin?

You have two options:

Windows: Download our special Virtaal .exe for Windows.
Linux: Copy the Microsoft Translator plugin into your plugin directory (on Linux this is /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/virtaal/plugins/tm/models/

How to use the plugin?

You'll need to define Haitian Creole as a language in Virtaal

Bottom Right > New Language Pair...

New Language Pair..." /> New Language Pair..." /> New Language Pair..." /> New Language Pair...">

Add Missing Language...

Name 'Haitian Creole' and language code 'ht'

Ensure that the plugin is enabled. Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins > Translation Memory > Configure... Ensure Microsoft Translator is checked.

Open your file and begin translating, I'm using the tutorial Help > Tutorial and as you can see I'm getting Machine Translation suggestions from Microsoft for Haitian Creole.

Article for review: Character encodings in HTML and CSS

2010-02-09T13:25:01+00:00

Read the article

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

This is an update, in a temporary location, of the tutorial Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS. (Please be careful about bookmarking the location, since it is only temporary.)

A lot of new material was added, eg. related to the UTF-8 BOM, normalization, etc., and the material was rearranged significantly. The rearrangement was to downplay slightly the XHTML 1.0 issues, given that that is now only relevant to IE6, but also to help readers more quickly find information they need for the format they are dealing with.

The explicit distinction between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 with regard to MIME types was removed, since the XHTML2 WG is hopefully very close to issuing a PER that enables XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html.

The update adds information about HTML5.

Where a section corresponds to an article that has been updated, those updates were also migrated to this document.

[search keys: tutorial-char-enc]

A12n: Re: Re : [Unicode-Afr] précisions sur les accents Unicode: ... Normal, tu te trompes de livre. Celui cité est « Un... http://bit.ly/cUaTX2

2010-02-09T08:03:18+00:00

A12n: Re: Re : [Unicode-Afr] précisions sur les accents Unicode: ... Normal, tu te trompes de livre. Celui cité est « Un... http://bit.ly/cUaTX2

UniView updated: Show age, context-sensitive help, highlighting, etc.

2010-02-08T09:33:10+00:00

About the tool: Look up and see characters (using graphics or fonts) and property information, view whole character blocks or custom ranges, select characters to paste into your document, paste in and discover unknown characters, search for characters, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc. Supports Unicode 5.2 and written with Web Standards to work on a variety of browsers. No need to install anything.

Latest changes: The major change in this update is the addition of a function, Show age, to show the version of Unicode where a character was added (after version 1.1). The same information is also listed in the details given for a character in the lower right panel.

The trigger for context-sensitive help was reduced to the first character of a command name, rather than the whole command name. This improves behaviour for commands under More actions by allowing you to click on the command name rather than just the icon alongside to activate the command.

Some ‘quick start’ instructions were also added to the initial display to orient people new to the tool, and this help text was updated in various areas.

The highlighting mechanism was changed. Rather than highlight characters using a coloured border (which is typically not very visible), highlighting now works by greying out characters that are not highlighted. This also makes it clearer when nothing is highlighted.

In the recent past, when you converted a matrix to a list in the lower left panel, greyed-out rows would be added for non-characters. These are no longer displayed. Consequently, the command to remove such rows from the list (previously under More actions) has been removed.

A lot of invisible work went into replacing style attributes in the code with class names. This produces better source code, but doesn’t affect the user experience.

>> Use it

Bengali script notes updated

2010-02-06T09:34:42+00:00

If you’re interested, I just did a major overhaul of my script notes on Bengali in Unicode. There’s a new section about which characters to use when there are multiple options (eg. RRA vs. DDA+nukta), and the page provides information about more characters from the Bengali block in Unicode (including those used in Bengali’s amazingly complicated currency notation prior to 1957).

In addition, this has all been squeezed into the latest look and feel for script notes pages.

The new page is at a new location. There is a redirect on the old page.

Hope it’s useful.

>> Read it

multilingualmag: RT @scottabel: International Search Summit will be co-located w/ Localization World in Berlin, June 6 (pre-conference) http://bit.ly/aUTymQ

2010-02-05T00:39:07+00:00

multilingualmag: RT @scottabel: International Search Summit will be co-located w/ Localization World in Berlin, June 6 (pre-conference) http://bit.ly/aUTymQ

Web Globalization Report Card Update: More Geolocation. More Languages

2010-02-04T20:54:55+00:00

After three weeks of analyzing Web sites for the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card, a number of interesting trends are coming together, and I thought I’d share a couple of them with you…

Geolocation is gaining momentum

PricewaterhouseCoopers is now using geolocation to improve global content delivery. So too is Audi. And we have yet to detect a company that has stopped using it. We’ve advocated geolocation for many years, but not before having a solid visual global gateway in place, which many companies do not yet have.

We still love the Caterpillar gateway:

Companies keep adding languages

It’s looking as if we’ll see an average increase in number of languages supported across all web sites studied so far. And this will be significant because a number of companies have actually reduced the number of languages they support, also a notable trend.

Hotels.com has more than doubled the number of languages it supports, to more than 30. Apple also boosted its global reach over the past 18 months, a sign of its global ambitions.

And now back to the web sites. Still more to analyze…stay tuned.

Translate Toolkit - a powerful localisation toolkit

2010-02-04T06:49:35+00:00

What did it take to allow Pootle, our web-based localisation platform to support Qt Linguist (.ts), TMX and TBX formats?

Three lines of code!

Pootle uses the Translate Toolkit which Translate.org.za has developed since 2002 to provide a powerful set of tools to manipulate localisation files. The Toolkit has evolved and grown as our needs have changed and as we began to localise other applications like Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

The toolkit has the concept of a localisation base class from which all our localisation file implementations derive. We use the base class within Pootle to access XLIFF and PO files. We were pretty sure we'd be able to support other bilingual files (localisation files with both the source and target language in one file) in Pootle but we didn't think it would be this easy.

Of course we'd like to make some further changes so that Pootle simply supports any bilingual file store from the Translate Toolkit and we'll need to test Pootle running with this new feature, expect a beta soon.

Now you might be wondering about monolingual files (localisation files with just one language stored in the file e.g. Java properties files). Well we're busy looking at those and hopefully with the next release of Pootle we'll be able to directly translate monolingual files. Have a look at our list of currently supported localisation files and start dreaming about what will be possible.

For software and content developers the exciting new is this. You want to localise your esoteric format in Pootle? Simply write a storage class for the Translate Toolkit and you will automatically have support within Pootle for your format.

Update: Just before publishing this blog post the Translate Toolkit development list got news of a new Gettext PO diffing tool that uses... the Translate Toolkit of course.

Tamil & Urdu pickers updated, and new notes pages

2010-02-03T09:30:48+00:00

About the tools: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. Pickers are likely to be most useful if you don’t know a script well enough to use the native keyboard. The arrangement of characters also makes it much more usable than a regular character map utility

Latest changes: The Urdu and Tamil pickers have been upgraded to version 10. This provides new views of the data, but also involved a thorough overhaul and redesign of the pickers. Transliteration functions have also been added for the Tamil picker.

In addition, the Urdu notes page was updated and a new Tamil notes page was created. Database entries were also updated or, in the case of Tamil, created to support the notes pages. These notes pages are the first to use a new look and feel, based on the analyse-string tool I produced earlier this year. This adds information about each character from the Unicode descriptions data to that from my own database.

A12n: Re: [Unicode-Afr] Unicode près de dépasser la somme de tous les au: ... une meilleure prise en charge, aussi bien ... http://bit.ly/99F6mC

2010-02-02T12:08:47+00:00

A12n: Re: [Unicode-Afr] Unicode près de dépasser la somme de tous les au: ... une meilleure prise en charge, aussi bien ... http://bit.ly/99F6mC

A12n: Unicode près de dépasser la somme de tous les autres codages sur i: Unicode près de dépasser la somme de tous les ... http://bit.ly/9FLSj8

2010-02-01T19:39:03+00:00

A12n: Unicode près de dépasser la somme de tous les autres codages sur i: Unicode près de dépasser la somme de tous les ... http://bit.ly/9FLSj8

Haitian Creole is now a machine translation staple

2010-01-31T18:03:39+00:00

In response to the earthquake in Haiti, Microsoft quickly expanded its machine translation engine to include Haitian Creole.

Today I noticed that Google has an alpha version of its Haitian Creole engine as well.

Though it’s sad that it took a natural disaster to spur attention to a particular language, I’m glad to see the language available.

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of readily accessible machine translation. Just as search engines help us better understand the world, machine translation engines help us better understand one another.

And, yes, they’re far from perfect. But they’re far better than nothing at all. And they are finding their way into countless applications and countless fixed and mobile devices, each additional language offering another glimpse into another world.

WaSP_ILG: Introducción a las codificaciones y a los sets de caracteres (Introducing Character Sets and Encodings) http://zi.ma/74279c

2010-01-31T13:58:30+00:00

WaSP_ILG: Introducción a las codificaciones y a los sets de caracteres (Introducing Character Sets and Encodings) http://zi.ma/74279c

WaSP_ILG: Consejos rápidos sobre internacionalización para la Web (Internationalization Quick Tips for the Web) http://zi.ma/8d5c8f

2010-01-31T13:57:11+00:00

WaSP_ILG: Consejos rápidos sobre internacionalización para la Web (Internationalization Quick Tips for the Web) http://zi.ma/8d5c8f

It seems my web browser is unique

2010-01-28T13:35:42+00:00

I read yesterday about Panopticlick which tries to determine how easily web users can be traced without the use of web cookies. It collects information sent by the browser in the HTTP protocol, and things that can be collected by means of JavaScript, Flash and Java. The website reports that my web browser is unique in the pool of browsers that visited Panopticlick.

The interesting/worrying thing is that most of the fields could identify uniquely me on their own. Nobody else uses the same language combination for HTTP's Accept-Lang (the list of languages that I prefer). Nobody else uses the same version of Firefox in Afrikaans on my Linux distribution.

I won't go into why this is good or bad, but it is interesting to know that if I had reason to not want to be identified, I can't use Firefox in Afrikaans any more, and I can't indicate my preferred language to web sites. I realise that plugins can probably improve the matter, but if this is seen as a danger, it is probably a danger for more people than the number of people who would know about NoScript or TorButton.

Should we perhaps think afresh about how much information is sent by web browsers? At least I now feel a little bit more special...

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: Ta réponse ne marche pas avec les combinaisons AltGr+Shift (ou même AltGr seul en tenant compte ... http://bit.ly/cBIzDl

2010-01-27T14:32:40+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: Ta réponse ne marche pas avec les combinaisons AltGr+Shift (ou même AltGr seul en tenant compte ... http://bit.ly/cBIzDl

US Hispanics love the Internet, but not localized web sites

2010-01-26T05:46:40+00:00

I came across an interesting presentation today via Carla Briceno. The survey, sponsored by AOL and conducted by Cheskin, was based on interviewing more than a thousand Hispanic households across the US about how they view and use the Internet.

First some data points. Looking ahead at the 2010 census:

50 Million Hispanics will be living in the US
Nearly one in six US residents will be Hispanis
Los Angeles County is expected to be home to the largest Hispanic population in the US – exceeding that of Costa Rica

Two slides jumped out at me. The first slide noted:

Only 3% of respondents found Spanish language sites more trustworthy and useful than those in English, leaving an important percentage of the Hispanic segment feeling underserved.

Why? Because all too often localized Hispanic sites are simply literal translations of the English sites. And these web users want much more than literal translation. After all, most of them can migrate easily between English and Spanish sites.

So what exactly do they want from the Spanish sites?

The following slide sums it up:

You can download the survey here.

multilingualmag: RT @localization: Follow MT Marathon this week, Dublin City University - http://www.mtmarathon2010.info/web/Program.html #MTMarathon

2010-01-25T20:15:46+00:00

multilingualmag: RT @localization: Follow MT Marathon this week, Dublin City University - http://www.mtmarathon2010.info/web/Program.html #MTMarathon

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... [Alain] Je n'ai pas beaucoup le temps de lire tout ce qui s'écrit ici ces jours-ci, mais da... http://bit.ly/5ZfKcL

2010-01-25T15:25:34+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... [Alain] Je n'ai pas beaucoup le temps de lire tout ce qui s'écrit ici ces jours-ci, mais da... http://bit.ly/5ZfKcL

Come check out fileslip.net

2010-01-25T08:08:17+00:00

Hi folks,

Long time no talk. Changes are afoot around here.

Come check out my new project at http://fileslip.net

Some of the content from this site will be migrated over there.

fileslip.net is a non-commercial project focused on linguistics, language revitalization, language documentation, and doing the same sort of geeky programmy stuff I’ve been doing around here.

There may be more to come about Amundo before too long, announcements will end up here if they do. But for now, blogging here will be well-nigh not.

Thanks for all the great comments and thoughts over the years (!), I hope to see lots of you over at the new digs.

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... guillemets ... postés en ... qui ... Non et tu aurais pu le voir. je n'ai jamais utilisé leu... http://bit.ly/4PffhR

2010-01-24T23:53:18+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... guillemets ... postés en ... qui ... Non et tu aurais pu le voir. je n'ai jamais utilisé leu... http://bit.ly/4PffhR

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Chez moi tes messages se présentent comme étant en HTML (et mon GMail demande à confirmer qu... http://bit.ly/4GSe7E

2010-01-24T21:52:00+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Chez moi tes messages se présentent comme étant en HTML (et mon GMail demande à confirmer qu... http://bit.ly/4GSe7E

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... les ... ce ... C'est à cause de tes options de souscriptions sur Yahoo Groupes. Tu peux en c... http://bit.ly/6LKUWv

2010-01-24T21:51:58+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... les ... ce ... C'est à cause de tes options de souscriptions sur Yahoo Groupes. Tu peux en c... http://bit.ly/6LKUWv

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Ta réponse dit que c'est une convention propre à Yahoo ; en gros un truc qu'ils ont décidé d... http://bit.ly/6iYMBh

2010-01-24T21:51:58+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Ta réponse dit que c'est une convention propre à Yahoo ; en gros un truc qu'ils ont décidé d... http://bit.ly/6iYMBh

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: Non ce n'est pas un troll. Cette annexe ne fait pas partie du standard lui-même, c'est juste une... http://bit.ly/7N8WZZ

2010-01-24T18:49:32+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: Non ce n'est pas un troll. Cette annexe ne fait pas partie du standard lui-même, c'est juste une... http://bit.ly/7N8WZZ

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Comme je le disais, il faut vérifier : l'installation est expliquée à l'adresse http://www.o... http://bit.ly/4wDTvK

2010-01-23T15:22:07+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Comme je le disais, il faut vérifier : l'installation est expliquée à l'adresse http://www.o... http://bit.ly/4wDTvK

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... C'est une habitude prise prise depuis des années avec l'utilisation de Usenet et c'est la pr... http://bit.ly/91ZPwH

2010-01-23T15:22:06+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... C'est une habitude prise prise depuis des années avec l'utilisation de Usenet et c'est la pr... http://bit.ly/91ZPwH

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Oui, ce Shift² fonctionne comme un sélecteur de groupe secondaire/africain... ... Par contre... http://bit.ly/7SZqMK

2010-01-22T19:35:20+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Oui, ce Shift² fonctionne comme un sélecteur de groupe secondaire/africain... ... Par contre... http://bit.ly/7SZqMK

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Concernant le confort du clavier mécanique, je suis tout a fait d'accord avec toi, et c'est ... http://bit.ly/6HnuC0

2010-01-22T19:35:18+00:00

A12n: Re: ISO/CEI 9995: ... Concernant le confort du clavier mécanique, je suis tout a fait d'accord avec toi, et c'est ... http://bit.ly/6HnuC0