Leonardo Fontenelle

I’d like to quickly mention this article on internationalization of people names:

People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies in English-speaking countries are often unaware how different people’s names can be in other countries. They build their forms or databases in a way that assumes too much on the part of foreign users.

I’m going to explore some of the potential issues in a series of blog posts.

So far there are only two articles, but reading is already interesting enough. The first article, for example, demonstrates how the “first name, last name” doesn’t work in many countries. Brazilian Orkut users know that well: the lack of a middle name features makes it hard to find people.

Then the author list a series of Wikipedia articles on the structure of people names in many cultures. Have I ever said Wikipedia always surprises me? The article on Portuguese names (written in English) is great, for example.

Eric Sink, ex-developer of what today is Internet Explorer, has today a company which makes software development tools. He always felt guilty for not internationalizing his software, but that might have changed after a conference in Spain:

Even though our product is English-only, we currently get between 30 and 40 percent of our revenue from outside the U.S. [...] We’ve experimented with localization and received abysmal results. We’ve been to a trade show where most people’s first language is not English, and nobody even complained.

He acknowledged this wouldn’t happen with end-user software. But, do developers really want software in English?

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The GNOME 2.22 translation starts in two days! The Brazilian GNOME translation team is in a great phase, keeping GNOME’s interface completely translated and increasing the documentation translation. Furthermore, we are always enhancing old translations and improving our translation process. Know who’s who in this team which in the next months is going give GNOME 2.22 a translation as good as the amazing novelties in the RoadMap.

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The same expression may be translated in many ways, depending on the context. GNOME already had its hack to specify context for original messages, but in the future GNOME will use GNU Gettext’s msgctxt. This way it will be much easier to understand the context in original messages, and we’ll be adopting the same syntax as (I believe) KDE 4.

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