School of Technology 1 P00471 Software Production Internationalisation David Lightfoot.

School of Technology

1

P00471 Software Production Internationalisation

David Lightfoot

2School of Technology

Spelling

• Internationalisation (United Kingdom)• Internationalization (America)• I18N – get it?


International Standards

• International Standards Organization (ISO)

• www.iso.org


National Standards bodies

• British Standards Institute – BSI

• Association française de normalisation – afnor

• Deutsches Institut für Normung e. V. – DIN

• American National Standards Institute – ANSI

• European Committee for Standardization / Europäisches Komitee für Normung / Comité Européen de Normalisation – CEN

• …


International standards in computing

Many programming languages have official standards:

• ANSI C (ISO C)

• BSI Pascal

• ISO Modula-2

• …

Very important for portability and for being sure of meaning of programs.

de facto standards – unofficial, but everybody uses them


Culturally Dependent Data

• Messages• Labels on GUI component• Online help• Sounds• Color (sic)• Graphics• Icons• Date• Times• Numbers• Currencies• Measurements• Phone numbers• Honorifics and personal titles• Postal addresses• Page layouts

From java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/


Messages, Labels on GUI components, Online help, sounds

6170 languages in world

375 million people speak English as second language

Second most spoken language in world

Countries in which English is spoken as first language by a majority of the population:

• Antigua, Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Canada, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, St Christopher and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, United States of America


English is officially spoken in:

• Anguilla, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belau, Bermuda, Botswana, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Antigua, Australia, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bhutan, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guyana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Jersey, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Micronesia, Midway Islands, Montserrat, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Niue, Norfolk Island, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Pitcairn, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sri Lanka, St Helena, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Swaziland, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, US Virgin Islands, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Vanuatu, Wake Island, Western Samoa, Zambia, Zambia, Zimbabwe


English – degree of use

• It is claimed that one out of every five people on earth can speak English to some level of competence. (English.com)

• More than 80% of home pages on the Web are in English, while the next greatest, German, has only 4.5% and Japanese 3.1%.

• Proportion of email in English: between 60% and 85%.


Languages: number of speakers

• Mandarin Chinese (837,000,000)

• English (370,000,000)

• Spanish (300,000,000)

• Bengali (189,000,000)

• Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)

• Arabic (174,950,000)

• Portuguese (170,000,000)

• Russian (170,000,000)

• Japanese (125,000,000)

• German (98,000,000)

• Javanese (79,000,000)

• French (75,000,000)

English.com


Not speak English

• English.com claims that about one fifth of population of planet can speak English.

• Generous estimate – probably fewer.

• So, more than 80% of world population do not speak English!

• Why should they?

• Moral: we'd better be able to internationalise our products!


Colour

• Colours do not have the same significance in all cultures:

• Example: in United Kingdom

• Black – death

• White – purity

• Red – danger

• …

• Japan

• White – death

• …


Icons

• Icon language standardised (ISO) to some extent, but check for cultural differences

ISO hazard symbols


Dates

Millennium (Y2K) problemLuckily world did not end! But it was a big problem – we did not use enough digits for year.

Dates are ambiguous:When was 9/11/2001?Leads to genuine confusion and error.

Problems with dates did not go away after millenniumGot worse!: when is (was) 4/5/6?

At least in the last millennium we knew which bit was the year (well after 1931 we did)


ISO Date

ISO date format:

yyyy–mm–dd

examples:

2006–11–23

2001–09–11

Advantages

• In right order: big unit first

• Can't be confused with other date format

• Sorts correctly as string

• Matches Chinese date order


Time

• 24-hour clock or 12-hour clock

12-hour clock used in:

• Albania

• United States, Canada (not Québec), South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Belize, Trinidad, Jamaica, Caribbean but not United Kingdom (official)

• Greece

• Mexico, parts of South America

• East Africa

24-hour clock used:

• almost everywhere else (for official purposes)


Time zones

• USA – 10 times zones

• China – one time zone

• Zulu time (or Z time, is UTC)

• UTC – Universal Time Coordinated, formerly called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

• British secret service always works on Zulu time (source: Agent Clocksin – Professor William Clocksin), as does diplomatic service

• Shipping uses Zulu time.


Problems with times (midnight, 12-hour clock)

• ‘Hand in time 12:00pm’ (midday, midnight?)

• US Greyhound long-distance bus timetables: boldface for pm; hard to distinguish on a photocopy or fax.

• So when does the bus from New York to Los Angeles arrive at Boulder Colorado? 10:15 or 10:15

• Television listings in UK require 'backtracking' (and day runs from 6am to 6am)

• USA uses 12-hour clock even for times of flights!• USA military uses 24-hour ('military') time.

• What day does midnight belong to?• 'Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight to-night'

Tuesday, May 8 1945 Winston Churchill


ISO Time

ISO time format: 24-hour clock

hh:ss

or

hh:ss:cc

examples:

09:30

23:59:59

Advantages

• Easy to do calculations

• No confusion over am or pm

• Sorts correctly as string


GetDate, GetTime: problem

What is wrong with:

…

GetDate(year, month, day);

GetTime(hour, minute);

…?


GetDate, GetTime: answer

What is wrong with:

…

GetDate(year, month, day);

GetTime(hour, minute);

…?

Answer: if used close to midnight can get out by one day!

GetDate called before midnight

GetTime called after midnight

Wrong day!


ISO Date and Time

yyyy–mm–dd hh:ss

or

yyyy–mm–ddThh:ss

Possibly with time zone appended:

2006–11–23T09:59UTC+00


Numbers

• Decimal (radix) separator

• Dot 123.45

• or

• Comma 123,45

• Grouping separator

• 1,000,000.99 (UK)

• 1'000'000,99 (Switzerland)

• 1.000.000,99

• 1 000 000,99 (

• ISO standard – no grouping character


Numbers: Dot countries

Countries where a dot is used to mark the radix point include:

• Australia, Brunei, Botswana, Canada (English-speaking), China, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong of the People's Republic of China, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea (both North and South), Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Peru, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States (including insular areas)


Numbers: Comma countries

Countries where a comma is used to mark the radix point include:

• Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Faeroes, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Indonesia, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both separators officially), Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe


Currencies

• Some countries use units of currency that lead to very big numbers:

• Pre-euro:

• 'Looks a million lire' (Lira was Italian unit of currency, symbol £)

• £1 = 1800 Lire, so about £500

• Consider conversion rate

• Check for currency symbols in typeface:

• £

• $

• ¥

• €

• ₧

• …


Measurements

• SI, Système International d'Unités (metric system)

• Used in all countries of world, apart from:

• United States

• United Kingdom (partial use: a right old mess)

the Bill for a compulsory change to the metric system (in United Kingdom) was approved on1st July 1863

• About 95% of people on the planet live in metric countries

• www.metric.org.uk


Problems with measurements

• In 1999 NASA lost a $125 million Mars Orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units for a key spacecraft operation. A computer program that was supposed to provide its output in newton seconds (N·s) but instead provided pound-force seconds (lbf·s).

• Aircraft altitudes are in feet throughout the world, except for China, Mongolia, and the CIS (former Soviet states), which use metres.


'System'


Phone numbers

• Americans use # sign

• Area code

• Local number

• There is an international format for phone numbers:

• Access code – 00 (or +)

• Country code – 44 (United Kingdom)

• Area code – 1865 (Oxford)

• Local number 484539

• So +44 1865 484539

• In France digits written in pairs and pronounced as two-digit number:

• 48 45 39 ('quarante-huit, quarante-cinq, trente-neuf')


Honorifics and personal titles

• Dr

• Prof

• Herr Dr

• Frau Dr

• Herr Professor DDr (Doppel Doktor)


Postal addresses

• British addresses are very long:

Room T223

Department of Computing

School of Technology

Oxford Brookes University

Wheatley Campus

Wheatley

Oxford

Oxfordshire

United Kingdom

OX33 1HX

• Can't put my post-code into an ÖAMTC (Austrian) computer.


Page layouts

• Writing direction – affects reading direction of web site

• Left-to-right …

• Paper sizes

• Apart from US only Canada uses US letter paper sizes

• ISO 216 Paper Sizes: A4 physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (University of Göttingen, Germany, 1742-1799)


Collation order (not on checklist)

• Different languages put same characters in different orders. For example

• In German, ö comes just after o• In Swedish, ö comes after z• In Swedish, v and w are sorted

as the same character.

From SAS web site: Swedish version


This program is not world-ready yet!

public class NotI18N { static public void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("Hello."); System.out.println("How are you?"); System.out.println("Goodbye.");

} }

You can't ask a translator to work with program text.

We need to internationalise it – to make it world-ready.

From java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/


References

.NET Internationalization

The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications

Guy Smith-Ferrier

Addison Wesley


Summary

• Can't require customers to use English (US/UK?)• Can't leave customers to localise software• Need to think about lots of issues• Need to internationalise software: to make it world

ready.• Modern systems (such as Java, Microsoft .NET) give

help on this.

School of Technology 1 P00471 Software Production Internationalisation David Lightfoot.

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