The flaws of thinking "Just use Unicode"

http://www.itworld.com/print/58558

by lucumo • 17 years ago

19 34 17 years ago

philfreo3• 17 years ago

There is no such thing as a definitive list of languages

This is true. But SIL has what is considered the "standard" for this list, and there are almost 7000 of them. Many of them are unwritten. See http://www.ethnologue.com/ and ISO 639-3.

tseabrooks3• 17 years ago

My companies product supports about 35 languages and 25 countries. I think 'just use Unicode' is fairly accurate. The problem may be how you go about doing it. I'm reminded of a professor that used to tell his students to use libraries and code written by people with an expertise in the relevant area whenever possible.

We use the IBM ICU library for our product and it handles the vast majority of the issues presented in the article. There is no reason for me to be writing the code to handle the thousands of permutations of language, country, and culture when someone else has already done the heavy lifting here. ICU solves problems such as: sorting, number representation, etc.

The other problems should be things unrelated to Unicode - things your product / business already need.

1)Pick a target market - If you haven't picked a target market worrying about using Unicode to support some languages is putting the cart before the horse.

2)Get a translator(s) that know what they are doing - You already needed a translator - now you need to pick one competent enough to know the difference between Mexican Spanish and the Spanish spoken in Spain.

3) Write software that can switch look and feel on the fly during run time - This has already be done and should be a good philosophy for companies writing GUI intensive applications anyway.

Really - The correct sentence should be, "Just use Unicode, with your pre-existing good business practices."

philfreo3• 17 years ago

This may work well for 35 languages. Not 350 or 3500.

tseabrooks3• 17 years ago

Why doesn't this scale to any number of languages? Assuming you are using the existing practice of not hard coding strings in your software but rather referring to them with some sort of IDs then I see no reason not to use 3000 languages with this approach.

Hoff• 17 years ago

As is typical in the software universe, you must target which subset of folks are central to the profits of your business.

How many customers will you have past your particular and local top 35 languages? Enough to warrant the translation and support and testing work inherent in adding another language?

And yes, the target market for and the list of languages used by your customer base(s) may or will differ from mine, too.

psranga2• 17 years ago

Great information; thanks!!! The ICU library looks very comprehensive, but I hope it's not too bureaucratic to use. :)

Nosferax• 17 years ago

I use three languages commonly : French, English and Russian. I can set the language for non-Unicode programs only once, which means I can't display all programs written with a different encoding properly.

Please just use Unicode.

lucumo7• 17 years ago

The article doesn't say you shouldn't use Unicode. But it explains that only using Unicode just isn't enough. You need more. You shouldn't stop thinking at Unicode. Don't JUST use Unicode, use Unicode and more.

aristus• 17 years ago

A small example: many programs do not fold accents. So when I start typing "lo" in the to: field of most email apps, it suggests "Lorena Foo" but not "Fulanito López".

tsuraan• 17 years ago

It's sort of interesting how unicode solved your problem, but totally ignored the exact same problem in east asia. It's still not possible to have a single unicode text file with japanese and chinese kanji in it. The official unicode answer is to not use plain text; use a rich text format that allows the specification of fonts instead. I sort of think unicode would be a much better global standard if it hadn't tried to merge the different kanji used by over a billion people.

theli0nheart3• 17 years ago

I stopped taking this post seriously after I read this:

> Further east we hit ideographics. The concept of a "letter" has just flew out of the occidental window. Not only that but the text is laid out top to bottom.

Chinese and Japanese are both read from left to right (although in the past characters were written top to bottom and right to left). The only language that I know of that is presently laid out from top to bottom is Mongolian. I'll be damned if I ever need to write software for people in Mongolia.

jws• 17 years ago

Is it too much to ask the Mongolians to turn their monitors 90 degrees clockwise and look at them in a mirror?

lucumo7• 17 years ago

Wikipedia doesn't entirely agree with you:

"Both horizontal and vertical writing are used in Japan, as well as in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan where the Traditional Chinese orthography is used. Traditional Chinese is also used in mainland China in a few limited contexts, such as some books on ancient literature, or as an aesthetic choice for some signs on shops, temples, etc. In those contexts, both horizontal and vertical writing are used as well.

Vertical writing is commonly used for novels, newspapers, comics, and many other forms of writing. Because it goes downwards, vertical writing is invariably used on the spines of books. Some newspapers combine the two forms, using the vertical format for most articles but including some written horizontally, especially for headlines. Musical notation for some Japanese instruments such as the shakuhachi is written vertically."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing...

But I agree that you don't really have to worry about that. Just as we're lucky not to have to worry about this monstrosity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

theli0nheart3• 17 years ago

That is horrific.

Yes, you pointed out some relevant points, notably that vertical writing is still used in some contexts. However, it's a fact that Mandarin and Japanese are predominantly left to right on the web and on computers, which is what the original post was referring to.

PS The vertical writing on book spines is a life saver.

xiaoma3• 17 years ago

The Chinese newspaper I usually read is top to bottom, left to right. So are the vast majority of the other newspapers and magazines on the rack, the last piece of fiction I bought and my book on go. I also encounter a good number of MS word documents, including contracts printed that way.

That said, top to bottom is just too much of a pain to deal with on the web until CSS supports it.

theli0nheart3• 17 years ago

Sure, there are some, but vast majority? That's stretching it, a lot, unless you're in the historical section of a bookstore. This is my experience in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai.

potatolicious• 17 years ago

For me it was:

> Oh, and there are languages with unbounded sets of "characters" such as Chinese which literally cannot be fully described in Unicode.

I read Chinese just fine in Unicode. Is there something I'm missing? You have 50,000 commonly used characters, 100,000 rare ones - this certainly doesn't bust any limitations within unicode. Makes fonts rather large, but that's another issue altogether.

The rest of the article seems to be confused about what unicode is - I don't think anybody seriously goes into unicode expecting it to practically translate for them. It's an encoding, that's it. It won't convert "," to "." depending on locale, it certainly won't rephrase your messages for you to be sensitive to local cultures. That's your responsibility, not the purview of a form of encoding.

I think the author's point at the end was: "Unicode" as a concept won't localize your programs for you. Well, duh?

lucumo7• 17 years ago

> I think the author's point at the end was: "Unicode" as a concept won't localize your programs for you. Well, duh?

That's his point as I understand it. But I disagree with the "duh" part. It's rare to see software that goes beyond simple translation.

awolf• 17 years ago

>>What would our software need to do to operate in, say, Europe? Well, apart from selecting a subset of the myriad of languages (France alone has 30+ )...

Who said that you need to support every language in a region to have your software operate there? If someone living in France speaks an obscure dialect then its a pretty safe bet they ALSO speak French. And if they only speak a single obscure language they probably aren't going to be your customer anyway.

If you hit the top 15-20 most used languages in the world then you'll be fine.

Just use unicode.

xiaoma3• 17 years ago

I really agree with just supporting the top 15-20 most used languages, but the problem with "just" using unicode is that #1 on that list of languages isn't well served by some unicode formats.

In fact, the PRC requires that all language-related products introduced into the Chinese marketplace must be able to function in GB 18030.

xtho• 17 years ago

Most people in France (or Europe) learn English in school, don't they? IMHO supporting anything but US ASCII is presumptuous.

ajross3• 17 years ago

The whole premise of the link is flawed. It's an article about "localization is hard". Well, duh.

I don't see anything in it, at all, about character set and encoding choice. And in that realm, yes: you should just be using UTF-8. Not even "unicode" -- you want to be in UTF-8, period. Convert at the edges of your system if you absolutely must handle other encodings. But wherever you can, you should just be using UTF-8.

lucumo7• 17 years ago

The premise of the article wasn't that you shouldn't use Unicode. It was that you need to care about more than just Unicode. Thinking that the answer to localisation is to "just use Unicode" is a flaw in people's thinking that this article points out and corrects.

I'm curious as to why you believe UTF-8 is the only encoding you should use? I know of at least one person that says you should use UTF-16, because then it's immediately obvious when a certain piece of data is in the wrong encoding, whereas with UTF-8 you need to look for non-Latin characters (or accents) to distinguish it from, for example, ISO-8859-1. That line of thinking holds some value to me. Why do you believe otherwise?

ajross3• 17 years ago

UTF-16 can't be used with traditional tools. No grepping, no strings, no scanning quickly with a text editor. It locks you into whatever oddball toolchain you cooked up in development. Old code that passes the string to a strcat() will fail in mysterious ways. And your old libraries probably expect 1-byte characters anyway, which means you're going to be constantly converting

The inability to distinguish between UTF-8 and ASCII is a feature, not a bug. If you want to know if it's a valid string, just validate it. UTF-8 has extraordinarily strong validation properties, it's almost impossible for strings in other encodings to parse successfully.

The flaws of thinking "Just use Unicode"

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