Marketing wizardry & handling of far-east languages.

[Richard Goerwitz]

In article <5508 at zyx.ZYX.SE> arndt at zyx.ZYX.SE (Arndt Jonasson) makes
a very important request for information - one that makes we here in
the US only to painfully aware of our almost pathological inability
to think internationally, at least on the linguistic level:

>This is a request for information. We are in the process of developing
>software which among other things will handle natural languages other
>than English in a useful manner. This software will mostly run in an
>environment using the X Window System. Among the languages that raise
>the most problems is Japanese, since the set of characters is so much
>larger than the Latin alphabet.

I have sent mail to several firms about this problem.  Most replies
have been of the ilk:

    We are aware of the problem of internationalization, and we are
    working on localizing the various versions of our software for
    various nationalities.

The fundamental misconception is, of course, that localization is com-
patible with internationalization.  Every time a system is hacked for
a new alphabet/font/wordwrap method, all the software needs to be hacked
with it.  Moreover, software written for a different situation in a
different country needs to be "ported" to run in another country and
another situation.

And what of bi- or multi-lingual environments?  Increasingly, English
is being used in conjunction with national languages (e.g. India, and
in the Far East, somewhat in Arabic-speaking countries, definitely in
Israel).  In places like Turkey, we have Arabic, Turkish, and then some
English and other W. European languages being used by international
firms.  If we sell them "Turkish" versions of a given os or windowing
package, it will not fit the real-life conditions of the market.

A truly international windowing environment must offer basic support
for:

   1) proportional spacing on screen, with overstrikes (particularly
      important for Arabic)
   2) various character sets used simultaneously in the same window
   3) various wordwrap methods used simultaneously in the same win-
      dow

Only in this manner can each country in which a product is marketed
really have the same product (see the problems with EBCDIC transla-
tion!), and likewise be able to run products easily that were devel-
oped in other countries (and, I might add, to do it all at the same
time).

In short, Arndt Johanssen will be hard-pressed to find what he is
looking for, at least in terms of some fundamentally international
solution.  He will probably have to settle for a short-sighted hack
that some independent firm, or else some national branch of a larger
firm, has developed to meet his particular sort of need.

                                       -Richard L. Goerwitz
                                       goer at sophist.uchicago.edu
                                       rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer