Luciano Arruda from viaLanguage, Inc. gave a talk titled, “Getting it Right The First Time: Streamlining your software localization and avoiding costly mistakes”, at the IMUG meeting tonite at Apple.
He is originally from Brazil and had some good Portuguese and i18n stories.
Some of his anecdotes were that:
- on a shrink-wrapped box, if the Portuguese is incorrect, then users will not buy it assuming the contents are also as bad
- a classic example of bad translation context was translating “Download” from English as “Flush the Toilet” in Portuguese
- Portuguese users often find Spanish mixed in with software localizations
- when he has dialect comprehension problems when speaking with other people, he will try Spanish as a lingua franca.
There was a lively discussion afterward on a variety of i18n topics.
My question involved Japanese formal names and UTF-8 browser issues, someone mentioned the bizarre early Oracle UTF-8 effort, Joe’s question was on UTC/GMT/London timezone selection problems on Blackberry and other platforms, which segued into discusson on spring and fall time changes (some countries use solstice, some like Russia peg it on the 1st).
Someone mentioned the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository Project (CLDR) and geonames.de as sources of already-translated strings. Another person asked if anybody was exploiting community translation efforts as a fee-for-service business model.
Regarding Taiwan, the consensus was that the least objectionable way to refer to Taiwan is just … “Taiwan.”
Chuck Soper had a question about standards for specifying regions and “statoids”, for example Northern Italy, where they may use a regional spelling of place names.
Chuck Soper from Vela Design Group talked a little about his Mac OS X applet, VelaClock. It’s $9.95 and can show multiple timezone times simultaneously, as well as phases of the moon. It seems like users, especially in Australia, have been doing strange things to overcome recent timezone changes, like disabling ntp and manually updating their system clocks, due to unavailability of some tz patches.
I had a grilled sirloin steak and side caesar at BJ’s next door to Apple. Quite good steak actually, all for $23.
Vela Design Group’s Velaclock Mac OS X Applet
