[Localization] How to make multiple writing character sets available?

[Y.Sonoda]

Hellow, everyone!


I'm translating XO-core into Japanses with a few other
Japanese reviewers, and faced one critical issue.

To make this issue simple, I separate contextual issues
in terms of the users age.

This difficulty comes from the range of the children which
we should cover. It might be roughly 6 years old (1st grade) to
12 years old (6th grade) in elementary school.

As some of you may know about Japanese, we uses 3 types
of writing character sets. Those are
  - Hiragana (most simple one)
  - Katakana(used mostly when we write foreign languages)
  - Kanji (Chinese characters)

We usully uses all of them at a one time.

For example,
    "今日は良い天気です。ジェット機が飛んでいるのが見えます。"
    "Today is fine. I see Jet airplane flying"

This is an ordinary expression for matured ages.

In this example,
    "今日","良","天気","機","飛","見"
are Chinese characters, and
    "ジェット"
is Katakana. And all remainings are Hiragana.

All chinese characters can be written in Hiragana, like,
   "今日" is "きょう", and "天気" is "てんき"

Generally, children start leaning writings from "Hiragana", then they
move to "Katakana" and "Chinese character" gradually.

So if the reader is 1st grade children, we should write above sentence
like this,

   "きょうはよいてんきです。じぇっときがとんでいるのがみえます。"

But this writings are looks slightly childish for 5 or 6th grade children.

So most of the books to cover from 1st to 6th grade children, or
just for the convenience for the people who may not be able to read
Chinese character, we put "rubi" (Hiraganas which explain how to read)
just above the Chinese characters.

So that, if we have "reboot" in English, we would like to write this for
younger children like this,
   "さいきどう" with Hiragana only,
while we also would like to write for elder children like this,
   "再起動" with Chinese characters only.

One solution for this issue, some of the compter games in Japanese
Market which target age is children, they ask children whether they can
read one simple example, indicating Chinese character sample.
If they reply or push [No], then they display all the texts in
Hiragana afterward.

And talking about XO, it seems there are no mechanisms to switch
writing character
sets depending on the age, or those allow us to attach "rubi" on the
just above of the
Chinese characters.

If we have to choose only one writing character set, we may have to choose
"Hiragana" as a safer side. But this quick solution cause 3 issues;

  (1) Writing only in Hiragana becomes longer text.

  (2) Elder children don'n like to use because it looks too childish.

  (3) It is slight difficult to know what is written when seeing each
        Hiragana text at a glance.

Eventually, we put "fuzzy" tags for almost all terms in Pootle projects.

I will appreciate if there's some nice way to switch character sets depending
on the children's age.

regards,
Spiky

PS.
We did not have such issues in past, because almost all computer were
designed for matured people. And this might be the first case for us to
think the best way of how to express menu words for children depending on
their age.