IUC30: Pierre Cadieux - When Technology Meets Language
The following are my notes and summaries from sessions at the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC30) in Washington DC from Nov. 15th to 17th, 2006.
What is language? Language is not static. You can rebuild a history of language and get a history of humanity. Language is a live.
There are 6000 languages in the world today. Less then 25% are written. Languages are disappearing. There are the funds for the preservation of endangered languages.
New languages are being born all the time. There was a book that was published in Spanglish a few years ago. Hebrew was dead 100 years ago. It is an example of how languages can be revived.
English went from 45% to 35% of the web content. Some of the hardest languages are some of the most popular.
Language in a product is not just a feature it is an architectural dimension. Language affects the whole process - requirements, development, documentation, testing, and customer support.
You may translate into multiple languages but what happens when you get a call for support in another language.
Different words are different sizes in different languages. There are different grammars between languages. There are different characters in different languages. Some languages have more characters then others. The numbers are different. The punctuation is different. There is a Greek question mark that looks like a semi-colon.
Scripts (latin, greek, cyrillic) or writing systems control what things look like or how they are handled. The latin script is used by hundreds of languages. Some scripts have case some don’t. Latin has case. Chinese does not.
In CJK, there are Phonetic and Ideographic scripts.
Ruby in CJK is used for small phonetic annotation. Chinese has a phonetic and non-phonetic sections of the phone book.
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