[Localization] Trying to get big picture

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > Hello,
>  >
>  > I'm trying to mentally work through mechanics of internationalization of
>  > textual content (or HTML content) and I have many questions.  I've read much
>  > of the wiki on the pootle, i18n,  l10n, translating, etec. topics, but they
>  > are all oriented towards code, not textual content, so much is still not
>  > clear to me.
>  >
>  > Let's assume that I have some great text in English, starting from
>  > plain-vanilla ASCII, but there may be some words that are going to be better
>  > if they are represented in italics or bold (for emphasis). Let's say I take
>  > care of that by using HTML mark-up, so I now have an English HTML text tha I
>  > want to internationalize for Pootle submission.
>  >
>  > Most of the HTML is doing stuff behind the scenes (links, font-size, etc.)
>  > which poses no special i18n issues, but some HTML mark up has the effect of
>  > modifying the presentation of text in a way that actually does have an
>  > impact on the text's meaning.
>  >
>  > (see pseudo-HTML below).
>  >
>  > sentence1 is phrase1a + phrase1b + phrase 1c
>  >
>  > sentence2 is phrase2a + <bold>phrase2b</bold> + phrase2c
>  >
>  > sentence3 is <italics>phrase3a</italics> + phrase3b + phrase3c
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  > sentence1 is no real challenge, it goes straight into a .pot file as a
>  > single string.
>  >
>  > But what about sentences 2 or 3?
>  >
>  > Do italics and/or bold tags translate into non-latin alphabets?  (especially
>  > say Nepali)
>
>  Not always.
>
>  It is possible to bold and slant type algorithmically in writing
>  systems for which Bold and Italic fonts are not available, but it is
>  not always culturally correct. I'm trying to visualize Italic Greek,
>  and failing, but it turns out that such fonts exist. Emphasis in
>  Japanese is often represented by changing hiragana to katakana. Italic
>  Arabic seems even more unlikely, and indeed a quick search fails to
>  turn up any, except for a pseudo-italic slanted LED font. (Bold is not
>  a problem to find.) I don't find any Indic italic either

Indic does use bold and italicized text, but I suspect that it is the
result of influence from the comparatively modern phenomenon of DTP,
computer aided typesetting and layout, etc. I don't remember seeing
much bold/italicized text in older Indic publications.
However, support for synthetic bold/italics (ie, generating bold and
italic typefaces on the fly algorithmically) for Indic fonts was one
of the most often request features in OpenOffice.org - I used to lead
the Bengali native language project for OOo, and I used to get a
request for the feature during almost each and every
discussion/presentation on Bengali OOo.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]