Jeff Goff (DrForr) gave a sf.pm.org talk on internationalizing web apps at Six Apart in San Francisco.
(It was a long trip from San Jose on the Caltrain. I knew that I had arrived in San Francisco when I could smell the stench of urine upon leaving the station.)
Jeff mentioned working on ticketmaster.com before, and used S5 slides to illustrate a variety of localization issues with languages like Chinese, Japanese and Malaysian.
Some of his tips for identifying and preventing translation string corruption were:
- check for double-encoding of UTF-8 strings, perhaps with Test::utf8::is_sane_utf8()
- check complete toolchain for UTF-8 cleanliness
- can use Unicode script and block properties to identify language when possible, as documented in perldoc perlunicode
- use RCS pre-commit hook feature to inspect checkins, though can be slow with large input files.
- important to decide how much cleanup the translator is responsible for vs. internal.
- JavaScript string localization will likely require careful escaping of quotes.
Audience members also suggested:
- enable online web editing of translations as well as batch export
- consider locking columns if translators use excel worksheets.
As always, my comment is that it’s more important to focus on locale definition than charsets in i18n projects.
Several members were looking for perl jobs, so post your offers on the mailing list.
Thanks to Six Apart for hosting the meeting.
Juerd’s Perl Unicode Advice
Unicode.org
wikipedia: UTF-8
Jeff’s CPAN
